http://codeforamerica.org

1. APPROACH
The City of Detroit’s Mayor’s Office
applied to Code for America with a focus
on issues related to blight and vacant
properties. With an understanding that
Detroit has an active and effective base of
citizen groups, we approached our
engagement with the municipal
government to ultimately support and
better connect government with the work
of community-based organizations. In
February, we performed a wide-ranging
needs-finding assessment, meeting with
over 200 city government staff, community
leaders, nonprofits, technical assistance
providers, local foundations and
individuals. In doing so, we gathered
information to narrow our scope to focus
on access to information and increasing
community group capacity.
KEY FINDINGS
City in Crisis
The City of Detroit has experienced
massive budget cuts over the past decade,
concentrated most extremely in the past
few years. In our time working with the city
alone, the Mayor’s Office imposed a 10%
pay reduction and laid off 1,000 city
employees. We did not escape the impact
of these cuts — in fact, we had planned to
work with two alternate city contacts (laid
off the day before our arrival) prior to
finding our current champion, Karla
Henderson a Group Executive in the
Mayor’s Office. Beyond actual layoffs, we
encountered a cultural climate where
problems and fears were amplified: risk
aversion, scarcity of resources, and a
general attitude of skepticism toward three
newcomers who might be out to either
replace jobs, or re-design the system
without your job in it.
The budget crisis has had its greatest
negative impact outside City Hall. Reliable
garbage pickup and bus service is scarce,
recycling non-existent. Broken street lights,
60,000 city-owned vacant properties, roads
in extreme disrepair, and the elimination of
in-person police force at any police station
plague this city’s quality of life and
introduce new barriers to basic personal
safety. Dwindling city services combined
with a history of governmental corruption
have established extreme distrust in civic
institutions by most Detroiters, regardless
of background or race.
Civic Innovation
Despite the immense challenges Detroit
faces, no accurate summation of the City
should exclude the overwhelming energy,
commitment and value derived from
citizen-led groups and their actions. It is
critical to build upon and support the
existing efforts to improve the gaps where
government is not meeting citizens’ needs,
the connections between existing groups
doing good work, and to better facilitate
repairing a broken relationship Detroit has
with its citizens.
Vacancy and blight
At a basic level, many problems that
community groups and city employees face
are connected to vacancy. The City of
Detroit currently owns a massive surplus of
vacant or abandoned property which often
cause many of the public safety and quality
of life issues that affect Detroit. Currently,
it is not easy to understand how to buy
property or even know where city-owned
property is for sale online.

2. PROJECTS
Our defined project areas seek to directly
address our the three identified areas of
interest:
LocalData Increasing Capacity of Community
Groups with Data
We built a mobile data collection platform
that is expanding to cities across the
country. This tool has catalyzed and
supported the existing work of community-
based organizations and residents’ ability to
capture and visualize neighborhood-level
data, and to meaningfully engage with city
government.
We piloted LocalData with a partnership
between the City of Detroit’s Planning
Department and Wayne State University to
document and map commercial properties
in the city. A graduate planning class
quickly surveyed over 9,000 properties in
just six weeks. The group found the mobile
interface to significantly increased their
capacity to document information at a large
scale.
Our second pilot involved Vanguard CDC
-- a smaller non-profit community
development organization which
completed a survey of residential
properties. All told, volunteers collected
information on over 1,000 residential
parcels.
Thanks to support from the Knight News
Challenge, we will be bringing LocalData to
four other cities in addition to Detroit in
the coming year.
LocalData continues to be an open source
project. Our code is on GitHub. The
mobile app is built on HTML5, JavaScript,
and Leaflet, and the backend uses Node.js
and PostGIS.
http://golocaldata.org
TextMyBus Access to Transportation
Information
We partnered with the Department of
Transportation to create Detroit’s first
public transit API, and provide an easy-to-
use, text-message app to get accurate
information to riders.
When we started in January, there was no
way for citizens to track real-time bus
arrival and departure time in Detroit. This
is a critical need for residents who rely on
the bus in Detroit. Harsh winters, dark
streets and long waiting times in dangerous
areas create a serious public safety concern.
Missing hours or days of work due to spotty

3. bus service costs individuals their jobs.
Allowing citizens to have a heads-up on
when they need to leave their house to
catch the bus has the potential to impact
thousands of the most vulnerable citizens
in Detroit with simple technology.
The CfA Detroit team launched the Text
MyBus service in September 1st -- the first
day of school in the City of Detroit. In
conjunction with Mayor Bing’s support of
the federal Safe Routes to School initiative,
we launched the service with the White
House Strong Cities, Strong Communities
(SC2) representative Portia Roberson,
Detroit’s Chief of Police, CEO of Detroit
Department of Transportation and the
leadership of the Detroit Public Schools.
In addition to strong support across city
agencies, we were happy to deliver a
successful service. Since launch, we have
processed over 140,000 inbound messages
from 7,700 unique users. Approximately 550
people use the service daily, a number that
increases every week.
All told, TextMyBus received positive press,
in contrast to the typically neutral-to-
negative tone of Detroit transit-related
articles. We have begun to reshape public
opinion toward transportation networks in
Detroit and ultimately have nudged
DDOT toward thinking about city service
provision in terms of user experience. More
substantially, DDOT was previously the
2nd-largest agency in the US without open
transit data; now they have open transit
data that includes real-time data, putting
them ahead of many agencies.
Long-term Sustainability
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of this
project was to ensure that the service
would outlive our time in Detroit. The SC2
representative was particularly central to
our strategy to secure longer-term funding.
Though Detroit generally and DDOT
particularly are experiencing devastating
economic circumstances, we were
successful in partnering with leadership to
reallocate funds within an existing FTA
grant to dedicate necessary funds for the
next two years as part of $2 Million set
aside for regional transit that didn’t reach
development.
Our Strategy
Over the past six months we’ve worked
hand-in-hand with the Mayor’s Office and
DDOT to expose the internally-tracked
data. Although they have been regularly
publishing static schedule GTFS data, they
had no external interface for real-time
information. In a landmark move, the City
of Detroit opted to publish real-time
transit data, which is now available to
developers to build on top of. We decided
to build a demonstration app on this data:
the text messaging service riders use today.
We also co-hosted an apps challenge called
Apps for Detroit, calling on Detroit-based
web developers to build innovative tools on
top of the city’s newly-opened datasets. In
just two weeks we received 15 submissions,
three of which were transit-related apps.
One of the challenge winners, DDOTInfo,
developed a low-cost solar-powered screen
to display real-time arrival data at stops or
local businesses built with Raspberry Pi
computers.
Partners
This project was a success because we had a
broad set of partners in the city and at the
federal level. We worked most closely with
DDOT and the Mayor’s Office to open the
transit data. But this project would not
have happened without support from the
White House’s SC2 Initiative, which was
critical to negotiating a budget with the

4. Federal Transit Administration to make this
project and other transit improvements
possible at DDOT. We additionally
partnered with the Detroit Police
Department as well as the Detroit Public
School system around the launch to get the
word out. Detroit’s most vulnerable
populations are often those who rely most
on the bus system. In support of the Safe
Routes to School initiative, we distributed
information and hosted students to try out
the new service on their first day of school.
Technology
We’ve exposed the scheduled and live data
(routes, stops, arrivals, etc.) through the
OneBusAway interface. Developers can use
that to build phone apps, live maps, live
signage, or whatever else they think of. We
use the exact same interface to build the
text messaging service, which is our way of
quickly reaching a broad set of riders.
Providing the live data in a usable way helps
ensure that the experience can become
richer in the future without a reliance on
any one organization to develop new
technology. We successfully achieved
support from executive governance to
publish this data, and as a result, two
entries for the Apps for Detroit Challenge
made use of the underlying transit data API
that we set up! These innovative takes
leveraged previously unavailable data. The
use of existing, open source software also
garnered national attention for Detroit’s
civic technology movement.
http://textmybus.com
Side Lot Program City-owned Property
Sales & Information
The City of Detroit currently faces a
massive surplus of publicly-owned property.
Currently, it is not easy to understand how
to buy property or even know where city-
owned property is for sale online. By
exploring digital solutions with the City’s
Planning and Development Department,
we are working toward a more transparent,
streamlined and friendly customer
experience for city residents and city staff.
http://hampelm.github.com/sidelots/
Apps for Detroit Connecting web
development community to the City
We launched a two-week app challenge for
developers in the Detroit area. As part of
our mission to connect community groups
and technologists, we invited local
nonprofits to submit challenges. We paired
over two dozen challenges with five new
datasets from the city -- including real-time
bus tracking information. Judges from local
media institutions, nonprofits, and the City
are reviewing entries for their focus on
local issues and technical achievements.
Grand prize winners were flown to San
Francisco to represent the Detroit tech
scene to technology and civic leaders.
http://appsfordetroit.org

5. Brigade Engaging civic energy around
technology and open data
We’re supporting local civic hackers and
technologists. A leader of CfA Brigade in
Detroit has stepped forward and already
helping to bridge the gap between
community, technology, and cities.
http://brigade.codeforamerica.org/
)
PARTNERS
Acknowledging the existing channels of
trust and effectivity in Detroit’s social
landscape, we focused our efforts on
working with both public and private
partners to carry out project development.
Government
Mayor’s Office
Planning and Development Department
City Planning Commission
Detroit Department of Transportation
Buildings, Safety Engineering &
Environmental Division
Media & Technology
WDET
Detroit Free Press
Huffington Post
Omnicorp Detroit
Loveland Technology
Detroit Venture Partners / M@adison
Building
Techtown
Academic
Wayne State University
University of Michigan
Non-Profit
Michigan Community Resources
Data Driven Detroit
Vanguard CDC
Top:At the 2012A#ied Media Conference
Bottom: Karla Henderson, City of Detroit, and
Vince Keenan, publius.org

6. EVENTS
Our team has held several successful
community-building and information
sharing events with local partners. Here’s a
snapshot of each of the events:
Urban Geek Drinks Meetup
February 2012
As our first introduction to Detroit, we
held a very successful mixer to gather
employees from City Hall, local
technologists and anyone interested in
urbanism to learn about the mission of
Code for America, meet and greet the
Detroit fellows and ultimately meet each
other in an informal setting. Hosting this
event with Jerry Paffendorf (Loveland
Technologies) who is both an ex-Bay Area
technologist and a leader in community
organizing and the arts in Detroit allowed
us to interface with over 75 individuals,
including representatives from the Mayor’s
Office, the City Council President Charles
Pugh, Department of Planning and
Development, Ford Motors, the Detroit
Department of Transportation and many
others.
Property and Technology Workshop
February 2012
We invited dozens of experts on vacant
property, technology, community
organizing, and data to talk about the
intersection of property and information
technology. Representatives from local
nonprofits lead breakout discussions on
public data, housing speculation, and the
application of technology in Detroit to
solve these issues.
Prashant Singh, Code forAmerica, and Naomi
Patton, City of Detroit
Jim Xiao, of Detroit Venture Partners at
Property and Technology Workshop

7. Apps for Detroit Challenge Kickoff
June 2012
At the Apps for Detroit kickoff, we
presented challenges from nonprofit to
local developers, activists, and City
representatives. Over 75 community
members attended our event at Signal-
Return Press, a new storefront for
printmaking funded in part by the Knight
Foundation.
Allied Media Conference
June 2012
We attended the Allied Media Conference,
a gathering of hundreds of organizers, to
“share tools and tactics for transforming
our communities through media-based
organizing” hosted annually Detroit. We
presented on the Civic Hacking for Self
Governance panel, hosted a Code for
America table in the exhibition area, and
connected with civic media experts from
Detroit and around the nation. Web developers at Signal-Return Press for the
Apps for Detroit kick-off

8. Code forAmerica Team Detroit with Knight
Foundation’s Rishi Jaitly and Mayor Dave Bing