http://codeforamerica.org

1. Year-End Report
from
Team New Orleans
Code for America, 2012

2. OUR APPROACH IN NEW ORLEANS
Unlike some 2012 partner cities, The City of New Orleans had a very specific focus
for its partnership with Code for America on the issue of urban blight and chronically
vacant property. Community organizations and local residents were already actively
working to monitor and contribute to the revitalization of their own neighborhoods,
but communication between these active community members and the local
government was not as effective as it could be.
During our 5-week residency in New Orleans in February, we met with hundreds of
individuals to gain a multi-faceted understanding of this complex issue, including
active residents and neighborhood leaders, city staff and elected representatives, local
non-profit organizations, and the local tech community.
From these diverse needs-finding discussions, we identified two main objectives for
the year. First, we needed to find a way to bridge the information gap, and improve the
conversation between citizens and City Hall about blight. Second, we wanted to try
to connect groups who were all working independently to make New Orleans a better
place, so that they could begin collaborating and sharing resources, knowledge, and
best practices.
And in our pursuit of these two main objectives, we made a concerted effort to take
any opportunity we saw to make our City partners — and by extension, City Hall
itself — look good.
Code for America, Team New Orleans
Team Members: Alex Pandel, Amir Reavis-Bey, Eddie Tejeda, Serena Wales

3. Blighted and abandoned properties are more than just
eyesores - they attract crime and decrease neighboring
property values, and citizens are motivated to play an
active role in improving their neighborhoods. However, to
be most effective, citizens need to know what the city is
alread doing to reduce blight in their neighborhoods so
they can coordinate and target their efforts.
As we discovered during our February residency in New
Orleans, if a citizen wants to know what’s happening
with an abandoned property in their area, they currently
have two choices: either spend hours on the phone with
multiple City departments, or wade through numerous
dense and confusing websites to try to track down the
information they need. Both options are frustrating,
time-consuming, and often create more confusion and
work for all parties involved.
In an effort to close this information gap, we spent most
of our fellowship year working closely with the City
of New Orleans to create BlightStatus - a simple and
publicly-accessible website that provides quick and easy
answers to residents’ questions about the City’s efforts
to reduce blight in their neighborhoods.
With BlightStatus, anyone can:
• search for any property to view its case history
in a clear and simple format;
• create a Watchlist to track the progress of
multiple properties;
• receive email alerts whenever a property on your
Watchlist moves forward in the blight process;
• analyze blight citywide or down to the block
level using interactive maps and charts; and
• learn more about the blight process itself with
our FAQs and glossary
Since its launch last month, over 360 users have created
Watchlists, the application has gained widespread buy-in
from all levels within New Orleans City Hall and the local
community, and 15 cities across the US have expressed
interest in redeploying BlightStatus in their cities thus far.
Three of our original four team members are creating a
business around BlightStatus to continue development
and begin implementing the application in additional
cities.
BlightStatus
blightstatus.nola.gov
Accurate and up-to-date information about blighted properties in New Orleans
PROJECTS: focus on BlightStatus
BlightSTATUS
Update:
1614 Monroe St
received ajudgment of
GUILTY on9/18/12
Learn more >

4. PROJECTS: BlightStatus screenshots
Screenshots of the BlightStatus homepage (top), and a sample property detail page (bottom)

5. PROJECTS: BlightStatus screenshots (continued)
Screenshots of the map-browsing interface (top), and the Help Center (bottom)

6. To support the City of New Orleans’ emerging open data policy, we wanted to help
make it as easy as possible for the City’s data stewards to publish the data they
manage to the City’s open data portal, data.nola.gov. Any data published to
data.nola.gov needs to meet a certain standard of quality and accuracy to be eligible
for public release, which usually means the steward of each dataset has to spend time
manually cleaning up the data, which creates a major obstacle to new datasets being
added to the data portal. Doc2Soc automates this process using macros, making it
significantly faster and less labor-intensive. After the initial, one-time configuration of
the macro for a given dataset, the application will automatically clean the data and
push it to Socrata, the platform that supports data.nola.gov, with just the click of a
button.
IMPACT: Doc2Soc makes it much easier for information to make it onto
data.nola.gov as well as stay up to date once it is there, which is a huge step
for the City’s open data initiative.
Doc2Soc
github.com/amirbey/DocToSoc
Automated publishing of datasets to New Orleans’ open data portal
PROJECTS (continued)
In preparation for the 2012 hurricane season in New
Orleans beginning June 1, the City of New Orleans was
launching a new preparedness campaign, and needed
a compelling, iconic logo to anchor the campaign.
Unhappy with the designs presented by their hired
design contractor, CfA produced several alternative
designs, and worked with the Office of Homeland
Security and Emergency Preparedness to finalize the
chosen design. During Hurricane Isaac in August 2012,
the NOLA Ready logo served as the hero image on the
City’s homepage, and as the Mayor’s Twitter avatar,
where hundreds of thousands of residents received
emergency information during the storm.
IMPACT: CfA’s work saved the City thousands
of dollars in contractor fees and resulted in a
graphic campaign that will help keep residents of
New Orleans prepared for hurricanes and other
emergencies for years to come.
NOLA Ready Branding Campaign
ready.nola.gov
Logo design for new emergency preparedness campaign, NOLA Ready

7. Presentation at February Net2NO Meetup
At the beginning of our residency, local tech meetup
Net2NO featured Code for America at their monthly
meetup. The fellows gave a short presentation about our
partnership with the City of New Orleans, and set the stage
for the City to announce several new relevant positions
opening up inside City Hall. Several attendees from the
event expressed interest in the software developer and
web content positions, and indicated that hearing about
the CfA engagement definitely changed their opinion
about what working for City Hall could mean.
IMPACT: Changed the way the local tech community
views City Hall, and sparked newfound interest among
this group in several relevant roles within City Hall.
Code: NOLA Hackathon
We hosted a two-day hackathon called Code: NOLA during
our residency in February. 52 people attended our kickoff
happy hour on Friday, where we released a new dataset
to the City’s open data portal. Eight city staffers attended,
including CIO Allen Square. At the Saturday hackathon,
25 attendees split up into six teams, which yielded four
distinct deliverables after only eight hours of work.
Several projects initiated during the event include:
• OpenTreeMap
New Orleans’ Department of Parks and Parkways
has been working to restore the 100,000 trees that
were killed during Hurricane Katrina, but an outdated
map of the city’s existing trees has made the effort
very difficult. One team worked to implement
OpenTreeMap to allow citizens to help update the
City’s map.
• My504HealthNet (read more in “Stories,” below)
Another team worked to create a mobile website
for a local public health non-profit.
• Doc2Soc (read more in “Projects,” above)
Another team worked to make it easier for City data
stewards to clean up and post their datasets onto the
City’s open data portal.
• NOLA Ready logo (read more in “Projects,” above)
Another team brainstormed a series of logo designs
for the City’s new emergency preparedness campaign,
NOLA Ready.
IMPACT: Created a space for groups who don’t
ordinarily interact with each other (city staff,
technologists, and local non-profits) to work together
on civic projects to make their city a better place.
EVENTS

8. Post-Launch Community Gathering
Throughout the year, the team attended and hosted dozens
of meetings with individual community members for needs-
finding research, user testing, and general feedback. Once
the site was live, we wanted to bring together all of these
individuals into a group setting, both to gather feedback
about the site, but also to provide an opportunity to share
ideas and best practices in the fight against blight.
Many individuals who had never actually met before began
collaborating and sharing strategies, and exchanged contact
information to keep working together in the future. We
gathered lots of valuable feedback about how to make
the application even more useful to their work, and plan
to incoporate that feedback into future iterations of the
application.
IMPACT: Gained insight into the needs of local residents,
as well as connected people working towards a common
goal to share best practices and strategies.
Unexpected Connections at Code: NOLA
At our hackathon in February, one team worked to create
a mobile website for a local public health non-profit,
504HealthNet. The organization’s executive director,
Lindsay Ordower, made a plea to the tech community at our
kickoff to help her make information about free and low-
cost health clinics more readily available to citizens from
their mobile phones, and a determined team of 5 quickly
assembled around her.
Lindsay explained that while many NOLA citizens without
health insurance do not have reliable access to the internet
via a computer, a large percentage do have web-enabled
mobile phones, which would allow for much quicker and
more widespread distribution of this valuable information
than her current paper booklets can provide. The team
got straight to work and made great headway, presenting
a working MVP at the end of the day, which allows users
to search for health clinics in their area by location and
insurance accepted.
IMPACT: Before this event, the local tech community
didn’t think to volunteer their skills to local nonprofits,
and local nonprofits weren’t aware that the tech
community in New Orleans was interested in helping
out. This event shed light on a new way that these two
groups could work together to make New Orleans a
better place.
EVENTS (continued)
STORIES

9. Changing the Conversation at BlightSTAT
On our launch day in New Orleans, we debuted BlightStatus at the City’s monthly
public meeting about this issue, called BlightSTAT, where City administrators from
every relevant department report on that month’s progress, and citizens ask questions
and help hold the City accountable.
A community member from a particularly low-capacity neighborhood, Zion City, had
been attending the BlightSTAT meetings for months, but never raised a question or
engaged in the dialogue. While we were doing a demo of how BlightStatus works, she
suddenly interrupted us and began asking specific questions about the property on the
screen - why was there so much time between the inspection and the hearing? Why
wasn’t it judged guilty of blight?
Before this meeting, she had never engaged in a productive dialogue with City
representatives or administrators. But once she had specific information about her
neighborhood at her fingertips, she began a specific and productive conversation with
her government.
IMPACT: Not only does BlightStatus equip active citizens with the information
they need to be most effective in the fight against blight, but it activates citizens
who had never previously felt empowered to take an active role in shaping their
communities.
Thanks to our successful launch and widespread buy-in throughout New Orleans, the
City of New Orleans is planning to extend our contract into 2013 to allow us to futher
tighten integration with the City’s internal data systems, as well as build out additional
features to make BlightStatus even more robust, such as integration with 311, the ability
for users to upload photos and comments, and a more optimized mobile interface.
Additionally, many additional cities across the US have expressed interest in bringing
BlightStatus to their communities, so three of our original four team members
are planning to move forward as a civic startup. With initial support from the CfA
Incubator, we will continue development on BlightStatus, begin contracting with
additional cities to redeploy BlightStatus, and even explore the potential to expand
the application beyond the topic of blight.
STORIES (continued)
MOVING FORWARD