OPEN AUSTIN
Home > Blog > May Open Gov & Civic Tech Meetup Recap - Texas Water Planning App by TNRIS

May Open Gov & Civic Tech Meetup Recap - Texas Water Planning App by TNRIS

• • Edit this post

For Open Austin’s May Open Gov & Civic Tech Meetup, we hosted two presentations.

2017 Texas Water Plan Interactive App & API

The featured presentation was led by James Seppi (Maptime ATX) & Matt Nelson, Director of Water Planning at Texas Water Development Board.

Matt & James shared:

  • Basics of how Texas does its water planning, including important terminology
  • Short demo/how to navigate and interpret the 2017 State Water Plan application
  • Summary of API endpoints in the 2017 State Water Plan application
  • Technology behind the application

Here is a link to their presentation. Here is a link to the 2017 Water Plan App, the API, and their Github repo with the open-source code.

Ditching PDFs for Open Data at the City OPM

As a bonus presentation, Kimberly Springer-Olivares, Chief Performance Officer at the City of Austin’s newly created Office of Performance Management gave a quick introduction to the new office and previewed plans to ditch PDF reports and make it easier for Austin residents to see how the City is performing using open data and visualizations via new Socrata products offered within data.austintexas.gov.

Kim discussed how part of their goal is to ask the questions: Why do departments do the things that they do? How does their budget support those goals? One of the goals of her office is to transform the long Annual Budget Perform Report PDFs (like this one for 2013-14 that is 216 pages long), into more digestable and accessible “stories” like this one hosted on the city’s data portal.

Here is a link to the Office of Performance Management slides

Open Austin event intro slides with announcements

Continue the conversation by following us on Twitter and joining our community on Slack. RSVP for our next event on Meetup and like us on Facebook to stay up to date.