Open Gov & Civic Tech Meetup, Jul 21

Date: Mon, Jul 21, 2014
Time: 6:45 - 8:45 pm
Location: Terrazas Branch Library, 1105 E. Cesar Chavez St, Austin, TX, 78702 (map)
Calendar: link

Topic: The "No Topic" Summer Meetup
Invited Guests: none

We don't have an invited speaker this month ... but we've got a lot of interesting material to cover.

First, the Open Austin Hack Team has been busy advancing two projects that came out of the ATX Hackathon for Change. One is an information site for the November city council election. This election will be significant -- both in scope and scale. The city is moving to single member districts, and every seat is up for grabs. There's a lot for the community to learn about the new council plan, and a lot of candidates to consider. We hope the election website will be a great resource to voters.

Another project is the pet alerts website, which allows you to register for a notification whenever a stray pet is recovered. The team is close to ready to deploying a test site. We've also got the attention of the city, and they are interested in supporting our efforts to provide tools and open data to assist with shelter pet adoptions.

We'll get updates on both these projects, what's been done and what's planned next.

Speaking of elections, Open Austin has been participating in city elections since 2011. Our candidate questionnaires have been a key tool to bring open data and civic technology issues into the city hall discussion. We're planning to do it again this year -- and it will be our biggest, most significant survey yet. We'll tell you what's planned, and ask for your feedback on what we should ask the candidates.

(Note: we work on elections as an independent, non-endorsing organization. We try to educate all the candidates on our issues, and work with everybody elected to advance open government policies.)

After the meetup, we'll move across the street to Cenote cafe.

The meetup location is easily accessed by public transportation and has plentiful parking. If you park, however, be sure to move your car if you plan to come to Cenote. The lot is locked when the library closes.

The Open Austin Hack Team will have a check-in from 6:00 - 6:30 pm, in advance of the meetup. If you are a developer or designer who wants to work on hacking projects, please come for the check-in to find out what's going on.

Open Austin hosts a monthly meet-up, to discuss local open government and civic technology issues. Our meet-ups are free and open to the public.