A blog probably about FOIA and civic hacking.
Intro Hi there! In this post, I want to show off a fun little web app I made for visualizing parking tickets in Chicago, but because I've spent so much time on the overall project, I figured I'd share the story that got me to this point. In many ways, this work is the foundation for my interest in public records and transparency, so it has a very special place in my heart. If you're here just to…
Background In my last post, I wrote about my adventure of requesting metadata for both phone calls and emails from the City of Chicago Office of the Mayor. The work there - and its associated frustration - sent me down a path of sending requests throughout the US to both learn whether these sorts of problems are systemic (megaspoiler: they are) and to also start mapping communication across the…
Intro This'll be my first blog post on the internet, ever. Hopefully it's interesting and accurate. Please point out any mistakes if you see any! In 2016, I did some work in trying to find some hotspot areas for parking tickets to see if a bit of data munging could reduce those area's parking tickets. In the end, I only really got one cleaned up, but it was one of the most-ticketed spots in all of…
Intro Back in 2014, I had the naive goal of finding evidence of collusion between mayoral candidates. The reasoning is longwinded and boring, so I won't go into it. My plan was to find some sort of evidence through a FOIA request or two for the mayor's phone records, find zero evidence of collusion, then move onto a different project like I normally do. What came instead was a painful year and a…