The mission of every state agency is intermediated by software, and much of that software is bespoke, untested, and brain-meltingly expensive. To report on state agencies without understanding and studying that software is to be doomed to confusion.

For the millionth time, owning a house is a never-ending legacy modernization project.

finishing my yearly self evaluation for work on a Sunday morning and trying to get through it listening to pure moods. cc @ashleyblewer.com

i can attest, if you're running a website & want to implement cloudflare to block hackers, web scrapers, & AI bots, these suggestions by Troy are a great start. On cloudflare's initial settings (esp. on free plan), a lot of bad traffic still comes through!

pretty stunning chart

oops, my map is unusable on Mobile 😔

new blog post on assessing #accessibility of markers & markers in web #maps skorasaur.us/2026/01/maps... #a11y #gischat - all web libraries have improvements to make; we should also listen to blind folks & their various perspectives. 1/?

He coulda been any number of things. He could have been unemployed and eaten goober grape straight from the jar off a shoehorn. He didn't deserve that. No one does. No one being harmed by ICE deserves what is happening to them. NO ONE.

Bill Kristol to the left of most Democrats in Congress. Incredible.

One court decision, two different headlines. Guardian on the left, NY Times on the right. Which one more directly conveys information and the stakes to the reader?

Nice workshop on georeferencing coming up Jan 31 w/ @oldinsurancemaps.net @openhistoricalmap.org & more as a part of the @osmus.bsky.social virtual conference - openstreetmap.us/events/mappi...

RTA will be cutting service next year, but hey the climate champion mayor will save us one backroom deal at a time.

The story of GTFS is so cool, it really captures the vibe and hope around tech in late 2000s/10s A public servant notices how hard it is to navigate transit in new cities, finds a couple peers who still get Fridays for side projects at Google, and they create a data standard that 100+ countries use

I'm excited that our library's new catalog allows staff & patrons to make lists! I've made: my fav. #map & cartography books search.cpl.org/MyAccount/My... ; essential Cleveland novels according to Cleveland magazine search.cpl.org/MyAccount/My... (cc @nickoloffoff.bsky.social ) 1/?

New from me! Chicago has far too many bus stops to provide efficient service for its riders—nearly twice the national standard. I reimagined what Chicago's bus network could do to make it look like its peers. citythatworks.substack.com/p/a-plan-for...

@theeferringer.bsky.social the city of Cleveland ( @courier429.bsky.social and i) asks that you use antirender next time you go in front of the city planning commission (& maybe throw in something if you do it w/o AI).

i appreciate a vendor's candor when they recall the last time they accidentally deleted another customer's database/setup in production.

I think about this a lot

extremely niche #NBA skeet, but I'm choosing to believe that this commenter on an athletic article is really the hall of fame former NBA coach del harris. (if not, that is a dedicated, niche troll)

Has anybody put together a list of best practices for openness in government software beyond open licensing? Like public uptime tracking, a public backlog, and a public release history? I have a loose collection of these things in my head, but I bet somebody's done better work on this.

Curious about using Python to make #maps but don’t know where to start? I wrote a tutorial that’s ostensibly about GDAL but is really a beginner’s guide to programming: medium.com/@robsimmon/a...

Transparently, I was pretty anxious about filling the politics section. Not because there isn't plenty to choose from, but because my anxious and thought-filled mind didn't know how I was going to summarize what's been going on in Cleveland. And then I got a text message. 1/🧵

found 1 thing that AI (google gemini) that has been really helpful with so far: take PDF files, even ones scanned (of campaign contributions), apply OCR, and put into a csv table (need to check data but it's a remarkable improvement of manually typing everything in;

someone on cleveland blusky recently (maybe @koolwhp.bsky.social or @terrymetterjr.bsky.social or @courier429.bsky.social or @hesterpangs.bsky.social skeeted about buying random cds at thrift stores and sharing them w/ friends; I do same and would be happy to swap

map folks, videos of presentations given at this year's @nacis.bsky.social conference are now online (for free thanks to NACIS members support!) ! if you want to learn from really knowledgeable people making maps, & brush up yr skills, >>> youtube.com/playlist?lis...

I dream of a day when corporations have to reapply for every tax break, contract, and grant every six months, with a requirement that it is the CEO who must complete the paperwork, and attest under penalty of law that they personally did so.

structure neutral/content radical here

ICYMI: urban planning/gov/policy/organizing folks in #cleveland ; Cleveland Public Library's PAL publishes a monthly list of new books related to govt administration or Cleveland- check out October's at search.cpl.org/MyAccount/My...

web scrapers activities on library (& archive) websites have increased tremendously in the last 12-24 months: to the point of taking down those services in some cases. it's been affecting academic libraries more (they tend to have more collections digitized, relative to public libraries) 1/?

ah damn, felt decreased their offerings on their free tier (no more data uploads - felt.com/pricing), alas. As time goes on, I didn't realize it then, but that mid 2010s was the peak for affordable or free web-based services for geospatial/ maps.. 1/2

Particularly, never report on a bill being considered in a legislature without providing the bill number and a link to it on the legislative website.

One of my more strongly-held beliefs: news articles about court filings, government records, and the like should link to the underlying document(s).

this is a great idea & execution, especially for @civictechallies.bsky.social groups! breaking it down to actionable steps that groups can use to improve their security/data mgmt.

Cleveland state (the Univ) suddenly transferred operations of its radio station WCSB, to the local NPR affiliate w/o telling station staff. funding for station wasn't issue (the univ spent 60k annually on it) signalcleveland.org/ideastream-c... & www.clevescene.com/news/clevela... 1/?

Researchers and journalists who want to experiment with using AI to analyze public records for the public good are dependent on private companies who have an incentive to gatekeep that information for their own profit.

Example: there's so much you could do with public meetings posted to YouTube, but anyone who wants to download videos en masse is totally dependent on YT's API -- whose terms of use can be rescinded or changed at any time.

“ABC7 spoke to Pertissue Fisher, a woman who lives in the building. She said ICE agents took everyone in the building, including her, and asked questions later….’They was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other.’” It can’t happen here, you say. But it is happening.

a clear example of the Cleveland double: 2 unit structure; 1 has the basement/1st floor & other resident has 2nd floor&attic; each w/ 1-2 bedroom, kitchen, bath, own private entrance; shares a driveway. relatively common w/in the city of Cleveland. #density

might write a blog post on the state of marker clusters (& spidering) in web #maps & their lack of #accessibility

does anyone in #gischat #geo #cartography remember a blog post from the mid 2010s (I think written by Brian Timoney?) that critiqued the use of multiple toggable layers, how most users ignore the additional map layers, & many web maps' UIs were too complicated? (& have a link to it?)

an important fact that i try to always keep in the back of my mind working for a public library

1020 BOLIVAR AVE, CLEVELAND, OH, NA

is this air monitor in Richmond heights broken or is there something anomalous causing that poor air quality? . map.purpleair.com/air-quality-.... cc @tkovach.bsky.social

I love @jasonkoebler.bsky.social take on AI in journalism discussed on the @404media.co podcast. "If AI is so transformative here, show me the reporters publishing more high quality pieces with AI that weren't doing it before." (paraphrasing) This is the right take. We need proof, not hype.

One thing I would like more people, and I mostly mean my fellow men, to understand is that no matter how smart you are, other people are also smart and some of them have tried to work on the same problems you’re working on. If a simple solution hasn’t been found yet, there probably isn’t one.

8203 GREENVIEW, DETROIT, MI, 48228

feel like charlie here about #cleveland public records requests or data on the city's data portal? share what you know at #datadayscle - & submit a propsal at datadayscle.org !!! (never presented before? we welcome that!)(your proposal is incomplete? that's ok! it can be refined later)

feel like charlie here about #cleveland public records requests or data on the city's data portal? share what you know at #datadayscle - & submit a propsal at datadayscle.org !!! (never presented before? we welcome that!)(your proposal is incomplete? that's ok! it can be refined later)

hey #cleveland share what you've learned about govt data or technology in local contexts; or maybe you made a great #map or #dataviz using govt data;