National & Summit County Parks App by Code for America

I know we generally use this space to discuss physical, not virtual, development, but nevertheless, this is a project in development that I thought worth sharing:

I attended the Knight Community Engagement Breakfast this morning at the Akron Urban League.  The featured Knight grant recipient was an organization I'd never heard of before, <a href="http://codeforamerica.org/">Code for America</a>, which is perhaps distantly inspired by Teach for America in the sense of attracting young volunteers for a year of public service.  Summit County was one of a few municipalities nationwide to successfully apply for the services of Code for America fellows for 2013.

The specific project that they're working on is an <a href="http://codeforamerica.org/2013-partners/summit-county/">app for accessing the various park systems in Summit County</a>, including the MetroParks, the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, the Towpath system (which largely overlaps with the latter two) and any other regional park systems in the area.  As that Web site notes, their three key goal outcomes are:

• a sustainable, human-centered, web-based solution for comprehensive integration of regional hiking, bicycling, and water trail information
  
• increased collaboration and partnership between trail and greenway stakeholders including citizen end-users of the regional trail system
  
• increased population served by regional trail system
  

For the rest of this month, the three CfA fellows selected to work on the Summit County project are just living in Akron, meeting with local groups and leaders, and getting information about the parks--their features, amenities, history, public perception, etc.  Most of their actual coding work will be done in San Francisco.  However, at the breakfast today, they also said that they were interested in simply interacting with as many people as possible about the parks and learning as much as possible about what people think of them and how we use them.  I mentioned UrbanOhio to them (and I'll send them a link).  They have a global e-mail address for submitting thoughts.  (They don't need advice in proposed technical features so much as they want to understand the subject matter--the parks--as well as possible before they start heavy lifting.)  If you're interested in that e-mail, PM me.