I'm looking for other people who are interested in data mining the city. Folks who'd like graphs and maps and seeing information about our wonderful town displayed in ways that can help us better understand the community in which we live.

I'm not totally sure what this means yet, I'd love, for instance, to be told when there's work on my street, to see graphs of how the city budgets change over the years, to watch for building projects which may impact my neighborhood.

There's a heck of a lot of data (like this) published on the city of Petaluma web site that nobody's using. There's probably a lot more information lying around that could be made available if there were a reason for that effort to be made.

Anyone else out there interested in hacking a little code and seeing what sort of interesting stuff we can pull out of Petaluma to help educate citizens and make our town better? Or just to see what we can do with the data?

I'm not sure what it's good for, but here's some recent building permits laid out on a Google Maps page to get the creative juices flowing. There's already a good system in place to tell us about upcoming council or advisory council meetings, but what else that's going on in the town would people like to be kept abreast of, and how can we build those systems?

If you're interested in this kind of stuff, I'd love to get a meeting going, see what other people are playing with. Even if you don't code, I'd love to see what sort of data and applications you'd be interested in.