Jeff Reichman
The City of Houston Open Challenge closed on December 1. It was a lightning-fast, 30 day challenge around three areas identified as “priorities” by Mayor Parker and Mayor Pro Tem Gonzalez. This is part one of a three part series profiling each of the three open challenges. (part two) (part three coming soon) Up first…
Read More
MobilityHouston is a website that crowdsources transportation policy ideas from Houstonians. The goal is to help lawmakers create smarter, more comprehensive transportation policies. They do it with a specific focus on mobility and a broad community engagement strategy. So Far, Policymaking is Offline Houston’s lawmakers have to get smart on a range of issues before they write the laws. They…
Read More
Last year, we announced a 10% open source discount for 2015. We’ll be honoring that open source discount throughout 2016 as well. We love open source software, and we seek opportunities to launch or work to improve open source projects. 2015 was an important year for milestones in the movement, too. I won’t go into…
Read More
This morning was the first debate of its kind, anywhere in the US. The six candidates for Houston City Controller gathered at the Houston Technology Center to discuss… technology. The City Controller is Houston’s Chief Financial Officer. They are responsible for communicating financial issues to the public, reporting on our finances, and auditing the city…
Read More
Last night, I attended the KPRC Houston mayoral debate between Bill King and Sylvester Turner. This has been a long, grueling campaign season, and it comes to an end next week. One of these men will be Houston’s next mayor. The League of Women Voters, KPRC, and Telemundo Houston produced this debate. They selected questions that address…
Read More
What does the Houston economy look like through the eyes of our credit and debit cards? A new study from the JP Morgan Chase Institute analyzed debit and credit card spending patterns in 15 US cities. There’s a lot that it can show us about how spending patterns differ with age, income bracket, and location throughout…
Read More
Last year, we helped the City of Houston launch a cost-savings crowdsourcing program called Bright Ideas. I was reading through some of the responses, and I got curious about terminologies, priorities, and the general language used by City of Houston employees. So on April 9, 2016, I grabbed a database dump of the Bright Ideas…
Read More
This is our monthly series Houston Maps and Data, where we provide a roundup of interesting Houston stories using maps and data that help us understand the region by the numbers. In mid-April, the Houston area saw unprecedented flooding. There are a lot of attempts to explain why, but before you go down that rabbit…
Read More
Every year, the City of Houston goes through a capital planning process where they allocate about $8 billion over five years. I wanted to know where these projects are, and how much we’re spending on them. I became curious about this process after last year’s discussion about equitable distribution. So I extracted a bunch of data from the…
Read More
Last week, I published an article outlining what the City of Houston can do to promote broadband competition. I was responding to a group of citizens who came to Houston’s city council public comment session and asked our elected officials to do something about net neutrality. While the City of Houston can’t do much about…
Read More