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Lege Schedules Transparency Bills for Public Hearings
Since last month when we published an overview of open government bills in the state Legislature, one of the bills we’ve been watching has passed the House, one has passed the Senate, one has been rewritten, and seven have been scheduled for publi...
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Open Government Under Debate in TX Legislature
Now that more than 60 days have passed since the start of the Texas legislative session, we’re past the deadline for legislators to file non-emergency bills. Here’s a rundown of bills that could have an effect on transparency and open government t...
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Announcement: Budget Party Awarded Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund Grant
Austin Budget Party has been awarded a Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund grant to help design and develop a Digital Mock City Council experience with austinbudget.party. The goal of the grant is to create an online, open-source, digital budget debat...
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2017: Our next challenge
When Open Austin was founded in 2009, Obama’s open data initiative was just getting started. A few years later in 2012, Code for America announced it would send its Fellows to inject tech talent into local government, including Austin as a pilot c...
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Time to Back Up the Public's Climate Data
With the Obama administration in its last weeks, the Washington Post reported “Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump”. Especially if you have experience working with environmental data or policy,...
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Open Austin Honored with Pro Bono Leadership Award from Texas Appleseed
Many Texans see the evidence of the school-to-prison pipeline in their daily lives – sometimes because a video goes viral or because they are a parent, grandparent, or advocate for a child they love. Texas Appleseed has long been involved in worki...
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October Open Gov & Civic Tech Meetup Recap - Election Themed Lightning Talks
For our pre-election Open Gov & Civic Tech Meetup, we had five community members give 10 minute lightning talks on different topics under the theme of elections and voting. View the the slides from their talks: Matt Carey & Mateo Clar...
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September Open Gov & Civic Tech Meetup Recap-Data.World
This past Monday’s Open Government and Civic Technology meetup had 2 guest speakers present. Doug Matthews, Chief Communication Officer, covered the state of the community registry. Jonathan Ortiz, Data Scientist and Knowledge Engineer at Data.wor...
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August Open Gov & Civic Tech Meetup Recap-Transportation & Sensors
UT Center for Transportation Research For our August meeting we invited Jen Duthie (twitter) & Itamar Gal, from the UT Center for Transportation Research Network Modeling Center to speak about recent initiatives utilizing Austin Transportatio...
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July Open Gov & Civic Tech Meetup Recap-Hacking the Budget
Last month Open Austin had a unique lineup of speakers. Our topic was Hacking the budget and we had Grace Miller with GlassHouse policy explain how the city budget can be influenced by the community. We also had Brandon Latham-Jones the outreach D...
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