Jared Brey and I reproduce a Planning Commission analysis.

Published in collaboration with the Philadelphia City Paper. Update 4/10/2013: Isaiah’s story is a finalist in the 2012 IRE Awards “Multiplatform - Small” category!

A subset of this story was published in the Philadelphia Daily News.

This week, the City of Philadelphia Office of Innovation and Technology released the new City Council districts boundaries shapefile. The city charter mandates that within six months of new census data being released, City Council has to redraw the district boundaries to account for shifts in population (each district should contain roughly the same number of people). You might remember that Council nearly missed their deadline. In the end, they were able to come up with new boundaries based off 2010 census data, but kept the existing boundaries active until 2016.

Last week, the City of Philadelphia put out a Request For Proposals (RFP) soliciting bids to build the Board of Ethic’s lobbying registration and public disclosure website. This will be the City’s second attempt at the project. Earlier this year, the City paid $227,000 to the consulting firm Perficient, Inc. before totally scrapping their effort.

Thanks to the Center for Public Interest Journalism, I attended the Online News Association conference in San Francisco this past week. I was there on behalf of the Philadelphia Public Interest Information Network, where I work as an application developer and help journalist acquire, process, and visualize data. Being new to the field of journalism, as well as this being my first professional conference, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It turned out to be a really immersive and inspiring experience, with lots of networking, that was a little short on the data-journalism side of things.

A few months ago, I was invited to guest lecture about Python and ArcGIS for a class at the Community College of Philadelphia. The class itself is an intermediate GIS class open to students who took the introductory class the previous semester. Python isn’t in the prescribed ESRI curriculum for this class (though Model Builder is), but the instructor thought it was a good idea to expose students to Python and how it works within ArcMap. I happened to agree. Most students first exposure to GIS was in the intro course, and very few of them have ever programmed.

Created at the 2012 BarCamp News Innovation hackathon. Our team took second place. Read more about the hackathon and project at Technically Philly