The City of Philadelphia already publicly shares a considerable amount of data and information, but there has never been a reliable place to find what’s available, request more and learn what’s coming, says Robert Cheetham. That’s about to change.

As part of Philly Tech Week on April 25, Azavea, the GIS application development company Cheetham founded, will unveil OpenDataPhilly.org. The searchable site will aim to be the resource for all relevant, civic-orientated tools, applications, data and information in the region from both governmental and non-government groups. Technically Philly and WHYY are also partnering on the project, which has the support of the City of Philadelphia’s Division of Technology.

“Philadelphia has had many public data sources for more than 10 years, but there hasn’t been a place to bring it all together,” Cheetham says. “This is intended to do that, thereby making it easier for developers and other people to use that data in useful and inspiring ways.”

Dozens of initial data sets, APIs and data centric mobile and web-based applications will be initially included, with more to be added, Cheetham says.

One such example is GIS shape files of city property parcels that are generated and maintained when homes, buildings and land is sold, Cheetham says. These and other shape files have long been made available, through initiatives like the Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access clearinghouse, but never in one place. With property parcel shape files, developers could create tools that work with information from the city Board of Revision of Taxes and online zoning maps from the Planning Commission to track development opportunities, Cheetham says.

“This is a huge opportunity to show how many people are involved in making Philadelphia better with technology,” City of Philadelphia Division of Technology Chief of Staff Jeff Friedman recently told Technically Philly. In outlining his priorities, Friedman’s boss, City CTO Tommy Jones, has expressed concern that limited staff capacity would continue to slow data release projects.

“We are eager to work with others to get things done,” Friedman has said.

Azavea is leading the actual construction of the portal and its design pro bono, though the current OpenDataPhilly branding came from Indy Hall regular Johnny Bilotta and an existing @OpenDataPhilly Twitter account has been maintained by TEDx organizer Roz Duffy.

Technically Philly will help grow use of the data catalog, from hosting events (like this one), covering data usage and lobbying for new data. In addition to being the official headquarters for Philly Tech Week and hosting this unveiling, WHYY will partner in supporting and growing the catalog and its utility. Additionally, last summer, WHYY funded an Azavea survey of existing data in the region, a project aiding the OpenDataPhilly catalog launch.

On Saturday April 30 of Philly Tech Week, BarCamp NewsInnovation at Temple University will feature an Open Gov Hackathon presented by Tropo, relying prominently on the new data catalog. Register here for that FREE event.

Azavea is building the data catalog as a pro bono project, with the blessing — but no funding — from the City of Philadelphia and its Division of Technology. No previously unavailable city data will be included to start, though that may quickly change, Friedman has said. Future ownership and control of the data portal is still uncertain.

Despite heavy outside involvement, the OpenDataPhilly catalog may prove a major initiative of Open Access Philly, one of the three major components of the city’s Digital Philadelphia vision.

Cheetham says, OpenDataPhilly’s goals are to:

• Improve access to data about Philadelphia
• Increase government transparency and accountability
• Drive and encourage innovative uses of the data
• Inform citizens about our region’s trends

OpenDataPhilly is committed to seeing other public sector organizations release their data too, Cheetham says, but releasing data is only half the battle.

“Raw data often doesn’t tell anything until it has been presented in a meaningful way. We want to encourage citizens to transform rows of text, numbers and shapes into apps and visualizations that people find useful and meaningful,” Azavea said in a release.

The catalog will not be limited to city and other government data, but rather a clearinghouse for meaningful, relevant, actionable data and information. Cheetham says the following data categories will available to start:

• Arts and Culture
• Economy
• Education
• Elections and Politics
• Environment
• Food
• Human Services
• Parks and Recreation
• Public Safety
• Real Estate and Land Records
• Religion
• Transportation

“Over the last five years, there has been increasing attention to the availability of open and freely-accessible data sets about our communities,” Cheetham says. “Government is one of the most important sources, but nonprofits, universities and other organizations are increasingly also offering information that can help us to visualize phenomenon in our society and build tools to improve our lives.”

Philly Tech Week is starting to focus in on impact. Today we have four big announcements for the April 25-30 week of events.

HEADQUARTERS: WHYY, the region’s public media organization based in Old City, will be the official headquarters for Philly Tech Week, offering up its beautiful, modern Dorrance H. Hamilton Public Media Commons.

Working with TEDx, Barcamp Philly and Refresh Philly event planner and community builder Roz Duffy, WHYY will play host to a brown bag lunchtime speaker series that week, in addition to our Friday night signature event, which will serve as the week’s highlight. More details to come there.

CIVIC HACKING: In other exciting news, as part of the third annual national BarCamp NewsInnovation, held Saturday, April 30 at Temple University, we’ll also be hosting the Open Gov Hackathon organized by Tropo. Coders, designers and developers will be creating civic-minded tools, largely using newly shared government data. We want the hacker crew and journalists to work together to create projects that will be utilized and have the best chance to make impact. It’s a good fit with our Transparencity coverage. Find out more on the BCNI blog here, and expect more to be finalized soon.

GETTING THE WORD OUT: We’re also proud to announce that we’re working with Grid magazine publisher Red Flag Media to land the first Philly Tech Week print supplement on the streets that week, which will feature the week’s calendar, but also fresh content on our community and sponsor shout outs. That’s in addition to that hot Philly Tech Week website from the Jarv.us development team in Northern Liberties and the forthcoming Philly Tech Week app from Alkali Media.

NEW PARTNERS: New sponsors include the City of Philadelphia Commerce Department, Chariot Solutions, Reed Technology, the University City Science Center and Tropo, and new event organizers include Wharton, First Round Capital, the Philadelphia Science Festival from the Franklin Institute, Indy Hall, the African American Chamber of Commerce and more. Many, many more conversations are still alive.

Check out our Sponsorship one pager and Event organizer guide to become a part.

Expect lots more events, partners and details soon. Clear your calendar for April 25-30 and get involved!

As we tweeted:

It was followed the next day by our first piece of news, an item on free cell service for low income Pennsylvanians and since then every weekday since, we’ve offered a little bit of coverage and clarity on a still growing technology community of creatives, entrepreneurs, technologists and geek heads. This is our 1,232nd post here.

Last year for our birthday, we celebrated with a Philly Startup Leaders Fishbowl to move on our building a business.  Plenty has happened internally since, and we’re tried to keep you apprised so our community of readers was part of our growth as a startup vying for sustainability like many of you.

Of our three founders, two of us are now full-time, and last month featured about 17,000 unique visitors to the site, clicking through to nearly three pages per visit, despite our 1,800 RSS and 500 email subscribers receiving a full feed. We have also long curated a conversation with our more than 3,000 Twitter followers.

In addition to covering this community and its trends, with your support we are proud to say we’ve done the following in the past two years:

• We launched Technically Media, a parent publishing consultancy company.
• We’ve started a grant-funded research project on the open data movement in Philadelphia.
• We have started organizing the first ever Philly Tech Week, to be held April 25-30.
• We kicked off a tech startup demo event called Switch Philly to help show off our scene.
• We’ve grown a national journalism conference called BarCamp NewsInnovation.
• We pitched a News Inkubator concept that is informing major investment in Philadelphia journalism.

Now we hope to move from startup toward established business and bring all of these concepts together. Thank you for supporting us. We look forward to many more years growing together.

Based in Temple University Center City at 1515 Market Street, we’re still figuring out some logistical hurdles — like security, schedules and actually having functioning internet that visitors can use — but we have notions of using this great space as another way to get to know our community better.

Give us a heads up if you want to visit and co-work for a day. We accept one form of currency: you have you to teach us something interesting. …You know, or beer.

Sean Blanda gives you the quick tour below.

Even you binary code aficionados out there might miss that in the image above, a message is spelled out: Data Sets You Free.

It’s supposed to be clever, but whether or not it is, we hope our insistence is clear. The next great wave in government and journalism and citizen action, of course, will be data driven. The power of numbers — and the transparency, accuracy, efficiency and accountability that can come with them — has not even begun to be realized.

Since Technically Philly’s inception, we’ve held a strong editorial stance that Philadelphia should be again seen as a leader — not a follower — in the areas of sharing and using smart, usable data to better the lives of all of us who live here.

So, it’s with great excitement that we say Technically Philly will be leading, in conjunction with the Institute for Public Affairs at Temple University, a six-month William Penn Foundation-funded project “toward collaborative projects using technology and journalism to increase the availability and use of actionable government data.”

The coverage series is called Transparencity and will feature reporting from all three Technically Philly founders. This funding will allow for deeper coverage in areas already of interest in our editorial mission: city technology policy, the Division of Technology and pursuits of government and other institutions releasing relevant data sets and related APIs and other actionable formats.

It should also be noted that this is grant funding for a specific reporting project for Technically Philly with a limited scope and does not come in conflict with our continued mission of growing our business.

Find details of the grant below.

Because the mission of this grant and our own editorial interests is of transparency, with permission of the foundation, below find the explicit expectations for our work with the Transparencity project.

Planned Outputs:

• Advisory Group formed, including representatives from the Foundation, public interest journalism, technology community, city government and existing local online databases, to provide insight and oversee development of entrepreneurial data projects to engage public in civic issues.
• Communications plan for engagement of stakeholders developed and implemented, including web presence and original reporting, providing information on project status, access to available city data, identification and status of unavailable data, and news and information about data availability.
• Research conducted into comparable city best practices for increasing availability and use of actionable government data.
• Inventory completed assessing opportunities for city data management and information sharing in the public interest.
• Convenings held to facilitate collaboration between journalism and technology community, demonstrate potential projects and establish priorities for collaboration.

Anticipated Grant Period Outcomes:

• Best practices research, reporting and data inventory informs stakeholders of priority collaboration opportunities.
• Processes modeled for increasing accessibility and use of data to improve government transparency and effectiveness.
• Engagement between key journalism and technology stakeholders around civic issues increased and actions taken towards pilot collaboration around open data development, as approved by the Foundation.
• Government and public interest data more open and accessible.
• Network of users for public interest data increased.

Anticipated Post Grant Outcomes:

• Increased understanding among city officials of the potential economic benefits of making city data more easily accessible as evidenced by new data accessibility policies and systems change.
• Progress made toward alignment of city policies on data collection and availability.
• Increased market demand and community interest in accessibility of public data.
• City use of data to inform policy, planning and decision making increased.

While featured Transparencity content will run on Technically Philly, staff will also curate a conversation on a broader, national movement around releasing municipal data and information on the grant project’s landing page here. Find other information about this grant on the William Penn Foundation website here.

Just a quick update for those of you who have long requested we keep you apprised on the startup business side of things.

Earlier this month, we more formally introduced Technically Media Inc., the media services company that publishes this rag you’re reading right now. Just so we’re clear, don’t be impressed. That isn’t some multinational corporation. It’s still a startup from three schlubs in Philly, but now we just are a little more legally sound.

In addition to squandering late night hours tracking venture deals, startups and the technology community in Philadelphia, we like building audiences online.

So, in the catering business to this retail shop, we will be helping nonprofits, businesses and other media organizations grow an audience online through meaningful content, in addition to keeping TP alive.

Any potential conflicts of interest, as always, will be disclosed, as noted in our ethics policy.

If you want more, founders Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and Christopher Wink have all written about the move.

Allow us to do something that is long overdue: share our rules and policies that are core to Technically Philly:

• Above all else, we value transparency. If we make any significant changes to a story, we’ll tell you. If there is a potential conflict of interest, we will disclose it.
• News should be a conversation. If a reader emails, comments, tweets or writes a blog post criticizing, seeking clarification or commenting on our coverage, we will do our best to respond.
• We correct factually incorrect information. If we get something wrong in a post, we will correct it as soon as humanly possible.
• We do our best to avoid editorial and advertising conflicts at all costs. If a TP staff member oversees the sale of an advertisement, he or she will be relieved of all future coverage of that company or person, within reasonable possibility. We will never withhold coverage or comment due to an advertising relationship. Again, any potential conflicts of interest will be disclosed.
• If it’s on the record, it’s on the record. We will not remove content and quotes of a conversation that happened during an on-the-record conversation. That said, like any other journalist, we regularly speak with sources ‘off the record for background,’ as that perspective can help us report our beats more exactly. A source on the record, though, is always the most transparent and something for which we strive.
• Sources do not read stories before they are posted. Please do not ask to see the story before we post, we will not honor any such requests. We may ask for clarification of a quotation or figure, reference or number. We often follow up to do our job more precisely.
• We give credit. We will always link to the sources of a tip or story and expect others to do the same when writing about a topic first reported by TP.
• Sponsored content and advertorial is clearly marked. From time to time we publish pieces written by advertisers. This is no different than an advertorial in a magazine, a traditional revenue stream in publishing. We clearly label all content with full writing credit and advertising disclosure.

We hope that sheds some light on how Technically Philly operates and we welcome your thoughts and criticisms and now back to your regularly scheduled technology news.

Great for barbecue, fireworks and your backyard pool, but bad for your neighborhood technology event calendar. Nearly every event this week is jam-packed on Tuesday and Wednesday so picking your agenda this week will be tough, but we’re here for you, dear reader.

On Monday, brushup on your Drupal modules and themes at the Zivtech’s Drupal meetup (can you tell we’re WordPress guys at heart?). On Wednesday, you have your pick between Social Media Day and Technically Philly’s very own meetup with Silver Marketing Group at Octo.

Monday, June 28th: The good folks at Zivtech know Drupal better than you know your own mother. Gather at their Strawberry Street offices to chat about the open source CMS which seems to be taking the world by storm of late. 6:00 p.m. Old City. RSVP [view more events]

Wednesday, June 30th: We always enjoy when our friends at Mashable come to town. Here, the 67th Ward-based superblog is sponsoring a slew of social media days around the globe. As of now Philly has the seventh largest social media day in the world, so head on over to Field House and join in on the fun, complete with Twitter quizzo. 7:00 p.m. Center City West. RSVP. [view more events]

Wednesday, June 30th: The best part of working on Technically Philly is the conversations with our readers. We love hearing what you guys like, what you don’t and what you think we should be improving on. Come grab a beer with us and keep us honest at Octo before packing up the car and driving to the Jersey Shore for the weekend. Insert Snooki joke here. 6:00 p.m. Columbus Blvd. RSVP. [view more events]

It’s been too long, Philadelphia. Let’s hang out.

True, we held a meetup last month at the venerable Dark Horse Pub just off South Street, but we just can’t get enough of you folks.

Wednesday, June 30, we’re partnering again with Silver Marketing Group to host a technology professionals meetup at Octo Waterfront Grille along the Delaware River.

We worked with Silver in January and we were thrilled with the turnout. When several established technology community folks stopped by and mentioned that it was a more diverse crowd of people than they were used to—including members of the city’s many technology silos—we were thrilled. And we’re sure this one will cross as broad a spectrum of techies in Philadelphia.

As always, we hope you’ll come and chat about our editorial and what’s happening with Philly tech. It’s of course a great networking opportunity, as well. The gig is free, and oh yes, and there’s a free drink in it for anyone who shows up. Make sure you RSVP. And gosh, with all the movement around waterfront development going on, where better than Octo.

Let’s drink one to this great city and to our vibrant technology scene. See you there!

We want to be available.

Next Wednesday, May 19, starting at 6:30 p.m. at the Dark Horse Pub in Society Hill, we’ll be there and hope you will too.

It’s a good Irish pub, but $3 Yuengling and Blue Moon drafts will allow you to go easy on the wallet. If you remember, last year’s Open Chefame was held there.

Technically Philly May Meetup
Wednesday, May 19 @ 6:30 p.m.
Dark Horse Pub
421 South 2nd Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147
(215) 928-9307