Projects

We worked with Code for the Carolinas to create the Open Meetings Toolkit, a set of resources that help community-based teams, such as Code for America Brigades, to evaluate and improve the openness of local public meetings while engaging civic technology volunteers.

Council Data Project is a search engine for local government that empowers transparency by combining and simplifying sources of information on municipal council meetings and actions. We’ve directly contributed to this open source project and are working to launch an instance of the Council Data Project for Asheville.

The Open Meetings Policy was built on our belief that local government should commit to take all reasonable measures to increase public participation and eliminate barriers to access for all members of our community. With over 200 signatures on our petition, multiple presentations given, and local politicians beginning to take notice, we hope that this policy will one day go into effect in Asheville and other cities around the country.

We worked with Code for Asheville to advocate for Buncombe County to adopt an open data policy. We helped draft a policy template that provides best practice recommendations and a clear governance structure. While our advocacy efforts were disrupted by the pandemic, we will continue to advocate for transparent and accessible government in Buncombe County.

Community Playback aims to improve accessibility for community members who may not be able to physically attend meetings, ensuring that they have access to make informed decisions on matters of public interest. Using an iPhone, tripod, and microphones we’ve live-streamed or shared over 230 meetings in our community.

We created AVLPark to help motorists find a parking spot at one of Asheville’s downtown parking decks. The City and County provide a real-time data feed that is updated every minute. AVLPark pulls this information at regular intervals, and sends it to our custom data endpoint for storage in a SQL database. This allows us to view historical trends and visualize the data in different ways.

A deceptively low-tech solution to a big problem, the NC Megaphone makes it easy to write a personal email to all NC House and Senate members with one click. Since we created the megaphone, we’ve seen 30,000 people use the site to send millions of emails.

Our goal with Asheville Music Guide was to make a hyper-local resource for Asheville’s thriving music scene. We automated our listing collection process so we could focus on delivering a great service, without the legwork of data entry. What started out as a little project quickly turned into Asheville’s largest and most loved live local music calendar.