Lexington has two new web tools to access city information

"Both Citygram and the Housing Dashboard build on the City’s strong commitment to transparency and open data,” said Aldona Valicenti, the city’s Chief Information Officer. “Through innovative technology, we are able to more proactively communicate with citizens and solve problems.”

In 2014, Lexington was selected through a highly competitive process as one of 10 governments nationally to participate in Code for America’s fellowship program.  The goal of the program is to encourage experimentation, find ways to use data to improve quality of life and engage citizens in problem-solving. 

The Code for America fellows who were assigned to Lexington—Erik Schwartz, Lyzi Diamond and Livien Yin—spent several months gathering input from community stakeholders and city staff. Their mission was to develop web-based applications that improve citizen engagement with city hall and make local government more technologically responsive to the needs and expectations of the public.

“The City was a great partner, equipping us with a mountain of good information through existing open data sets,” Schwartz said. “Our team worked like an up-and-coming tech startup, and with each light bulb of an idea, we were able to quickly build programs and test them with real users.”

Citygram is an opt-in notification platform where citizens can receive information via text and email for topics they choose, such as code enforcement cases or building permits in their neighborhoods.

The Housing Dashboard is a tool for identifying and visualizing broad neighborhood housing trends.  The information is presented year-over-year at the neighborhood level and includes housing code complaints, nuisance complaints, building permits, foreclosures and property values.  For those interested in exploring the neighborhood-level information in more detail, the underlying data can be downloaded as a spreadsheet.

Citygram and the Housing Dashboard were both built to be expanded over time, with more information and other improvements. For example, Code for America has developed Citygram notifications for city leaf collection during the 2015 fall season.

These tools can be accessed from the City’s new webpage for applications and transparency tools at www.lexingtonky.gov/cityapps.  In addition to Citygram and the Housing Dashboard, the CityApps page includes existing tools, including the LexCall 311 app, Map It!, Raids Online and the City’s open data portal.  Because of the partnership with Code for America, Lexington has the ability to build more applications, which will be added to the CityApps page as they are developed.

Lexington’s 2014 Code for America Fellowship program was made possible by the generous financial support of:

Ben and Valerie Askren

Babbage Co-Founder

Bingham McCutchen, LLP

Blue Grass Community Foundation

Churchill McGee

John Cirigliano

Kip Cornett

Columbia Gas

Commerce Lexington

David Coomer

Debra Hensley’s Social Stimulus

DMD Data Systems

Florida Tile

Gray Construction

Mayor Jim Gray

John and Donna Hall

Phil and Marnie Holoubek

Miller Wells, PLLC

Kentucky Utilities

Patrick Madden

QX.net

Warren Rosenthal

Ben and Becca Self

Toyota

University of Kentucky

VisitLex

Xerox

Chris Young

City of Lexington