How We’re Building on the President’s Call to Leverage Open Data to Increase Trust between Police and Citizens

In the fall of 2014, we began our time in the Administration as Presidential Innovation Fellows. Our service took place against the backdrop of a national conversation on police reform and how to increase trust between police departments and the communities they were sworn to protect and serve.

Emerging from that conversation, The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing highlighted the opportunity for technology and data to play a central role in building trust between law enforcement and communities while enhancing public safety.

As civic technologists, we had an idea to build on that opportunity:

What if we could help enable a new culture of open data in law enforcement agencies where police collaborate with their tech counterparts in local government and the community to publicly release incident-level, structured, machine-readable data on policing?

Today, the White House is welcoming 39 law enforcement agencies from across the country who are leading the way toward developing a culture of open data in policing through the President’s Police Data Initiative. Joining these agencies are community stakeholders, civic technologists and data scientists, researchers, and local officials.

Read the rest of this article by Clarence Wardell and Denice Ross on the White House Medium channel…

The path to open data (structured, machine-readable, and incident-level) in policing isn’t yet well-charted, and as a result, the privacy, technology, and political considerations can initially seem daunting. Often, the best way to begin an open data initiative is by delivering quick, low-risk wins to your stakeholders. Here are five ways jumpstart your police open data initiative…

Read this guest Code for America blogpost by Denice Ross and Jim Burch/Police Foundation

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, seemingly simple tasks such as refueling your car, were incredibly difficult. Few tools existed to determine which gas stations had fuel and the power to pump that fuel.

To help address this problem, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announces the launch of Lantern Live – a mobile app that allows users in disaster-affected areas to report on the status of local gas stations, find fuel, and easily look up power outage maps from local utilities. Lantern Live is part of the White House Innovation for Disaster Response and Recovery Initiative, and represents the ingenuity and ethos found across Initiative projects.

Read the White House OSTP blog post by Brian Forde, Denice Ross and Derek Frempong

Gov 2.0 Expo 2010 Plenary Session

How many people have returned to New Orleans? What is the current population of neighborhoods? Businesses, city planners, and neighborhood advocates need these answers to determine where grocery stores should be reopened, where schools should be placed, and where volunteers should be deployed. This presentation outlines five generalizable lessons from this work about building a web app that people can trust.