The*US National Day of Civic Hacking*is a day where thousands of developers, data scientists, government staff, civic hackers and citizens gather to create innovative solutions for communities to improve local services. It’s a unique opportunity to meet neighbors and use technology to improve your city. Starting tomorrow, June 6, 2015,*find a local event*and share your GIS skills.Take along your mapping hat, find good*open data*from your local government that are powered by an open API and combine with any of the hundreds of apps, StoryMaps and*open-source libraries.
You can also sign up for a*free developer account*that gives you access to spatial analysis, data hosting, and more tools to make your apps really powerful.
U.S. Census CitySDK
CitySDK*is a new initiative by the U.S. Census Bureau to provide developers easy and consistent access to their demographic data. With a few lines of Javascript you can geographically search for data such as age, income, and gender. Under the hood, it is using Esri’s*Terraformer library*to convert between GeoJSON and ArcGIS Server JSON. The U.S. Census is launching a*US Census Solutions Challenge*that starts tomorrow and closes on July 31.
Originally started in the European Union with a vision to make local data available via a consistent API, the intent was that apps from one city could work in any other city with minimal effort. This is exactly the vision and impact of the*GeoServices specification*- where information from*tens of thousands of government open datasets*are all available via a single API.
We’re supporting the CitySDK initiative and have developed the*CitySDK-ArcGIS*module so that web developers can combine*Census*data with any data from ArcGIS Server.
We also developed a*CitySDK-HUD*(Housing and Urban Development) module for developers to include housing loan data.
Share Your Data
If you’re a government agency with data to share,*ArcGIS Open Data*makes it easy for civic developers and businesses to access, explore, and use your data in their innovations. It’s already included, can be deployed in minutes, and is a launching point to put your data to work.