Open Data Portal Announced at Code for America Summit

We are wrapping up our participation in the Code for America accelerator program with a jam-packed Summit, where we announced the launch of our Open Data Portal.

Data – structured, digital, useable data, not just scans of PDFs with important information locked away – is one of the world’s most valuable resources. Often, however, data must be shared widely for its true power to be realized: catching a disease before it becomes an epidemic, uncovering corruption, or spreading best practices can’t be done with data locked away. Captricity has always helped organizations and corporations access data formerly trapped on paper. Now our Open Data Portal takes that one step further, giving users an easy way to share important data publicly.

Some of our first data sets come from the California Fair Political Practices Commission, showing the Form 700 (Statement of Economic Interest) filings of California judges. We also included an excerpt from the 1940 census for fun, featuring Martin Luther King Jr as a child, Elvis, Warren Buffet, Chuck Norris, Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Johnny Cash, Albert Einstein and even the then-President of the United States, FDR. Check it out here, and see if you can spot all the celebrities. Learn how much the President made in 1940, and how many siblings “The King” had. And do you know which of these celebrities grew up on a farm? Or what Warren Buffet’s father did for a living? Or what rents were in 1940 (hint – some are in the single digits!) ?

Do you have data you’d like to share publicly, or data you know is out there and would like to see shared publicly? Drop us a line with your ideas: datagallery@captricity.com