[UPDATED] Friday Q&A: Robert Cheetham, President and CEO of Avencia

Cheetham asked to clarify several statements. Substantial edits are demarcated with cross-out text.

Robert Cheetham can’t quite speak Japanese anymore.

In the early 1990s, the founder and CEO of Callowhill-based geographic analysis and software development firm Avencia worked for three years as an international relations coordinator for a small municipality an hour train ride from Kyoto. It was a chance to return to the land of the rising sun after studying there during his undergraduate days at the University of Michigan in his home state.

He returned back to the United States for an Ivy League education, at the University of Pennsylvania’s graduate school of design. Unsure of his future in landscape architecture, his path led him to a class in geographic information systems, which gifted him a career in chasing data.

In 1997, fresh out of Penn, he and another landscape architecture graduate took the natural first step. They were asked to find a way to make sense of the crowd of data the Philadelphia Police Department was collecting.

“For about six months, we were tossed in a room and told to do whatever we wanted with the data so long as it came back looking interesting and allowed conclusions to be made,” Cheetham, 41, says now to Technically Philly.

By spring 1998, a new police commissioner came to town, John Timoney, high on the CompStat movement of a far wonk-ier New York City police department.

“He found our unit, and we were set,” Cheetham says. He helped lay the foundation of the city police department’s data analysis, crime-mapping and internal projection systems. By 2001, after a stop in what is now the city’s division of technology, Cheetham launched Avencia.

After the jump, we talk with Cheetham about the state of municipal government data, the company’s 10 percent time, and why they decided to base operations in Callowhill over the ‘burbs.

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Event highlights for the week of July 20 – July 26, 2009

Philadelphia, you’re a city of routine, and we like that about you.

Even when the sun is shining and thoughts are drifting toward lounging at the Jersey shore, you aren’t afraid to grab a few drinks and stick to your meetup schedule.

Every event on our calendar this week is part of a monthly series, and most involve beer.

On Tuesday, grab a brew with Philly.rb at their pub night. We hear that they specifically hit on people using Ruby puns. And by “hear” we mean “hope.” The next day, IdeaBlob hosts BlobLive, its monthly open mic for entrepreneurs. Step on up and give an elevator pitch to complete strangers.

To close out the week, Philly Mapping and GIS host “Mappy Hour.” Talk cartography and get in on the group’s open source map project at a local watering hole.

All events listed on the event calendar are free to attend. Be sure to check our complete calendar for more information, or follow us past the jump.
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Events highlights for the week of June 22 – June 28, 2009

I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking, “I wish I could design a map using Twitter that was a good user experience and utilized Google Book Search.”

Well Technically Philly reader, you’re in luck! Our fair city has a diverse slate of events this week that will make your strange hypothetical dream a reality in no time.

Get started after work on Tuesday and join the pun-loving OpenStreetMap enthusiasts over at the Prohibition Tap Room for “Mappy Hour.” Although, you shouldn’t have too much to drink, as it is awfully hard to chart the trails in Fairmount Park when you can’t walk straight.

PhillyCHI (which is not a box score for the upcoming Phillies-Cubs series) is getting together Wednesday to listen to Kyle Soucy, their former chair, talk usability testing. This is the first time in weeks that the group has held an event in city limits, so you best take El out to University City if you have been meaning to catch PhillyCHI in action.

On Thursday, you can either continue the usability theme with the UX Book Club meeting over at P’unk Ave, or you can head to Center City for the June Philly Tweetup.

Round out the week on Friday as University City continues its Google obsession with a meeting about how Google Books and Google Scholar affect librarians. Librarians, whatever you decide, please leave the card catalog alone. That thing is awesome.

All events listed on the event calendar are free to attend. Be sure to check our complete calendar for more information, or follow us past the jump.
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Software development firm Avencia releases Philly election data

The primary election for a host of local candidates is being held Tuesday — from district attorney to city controller, municipal judges and others.

On the heels of releasing a new version of a subscription-based district-matching and legislative data API, Callowhill geographic analysis and software development firm Avencia released yesterday a free Web-based tool to search and map Philadelphia’s election results from 1992 to 2008 (click at bottom right to proceed anonymously for preview).

The application runs on Avencia’s Kaleidocade Indicators Framework, which enables users to visualize, interpret, and map large data sets. The “Philadelphia Election Results, 1992-2008” application, the data set includes more than four million records, like the results of elections held in Philly for all state and national offices for those 16 years, along with the results of the 2007 elections for city offices, both at the precinct and the ward levels.

“This is a very important data set, one that doesn’t exist anywhere out there, so we’d like to expand it, by adding years further in the past and continuing to update it,” says spokeswoman Abby Fretz.

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