About Us

A familiar story…

Ever had a frustrating experience with local bureaucracy? It’s no secret that cities are rarely first in line to adopt new technologies. This means that locating important information can be a frustrating process involving outdated systems and multiple departments that don’t always communicate well with each other, much less with outsiders such as yourself.

Open data projects can help alleviate this problem. Through a combination of community effort, city support, and philanthropy, we are proud to bring you Open Denton.

What is Open Denton?

Open Denton is a grassroots open data initiative to promote public datasets, improve government transparency, expand awareness, and increase civic engagement in Denton, Texas. We are a diverse group of people with a wide variety of technical and non-technical skills. This project is supported by a larger nationwide initiative called What Works Cities.

What is What Works Cities?

What Works Cities was launched by Bloomberg Philanthropies in April 2015 to increase government transparency and citizen engagement in mid-sized cities through the use of open data. Denton is proud to be among the first cities chosen for this project. For more information about What Works Cities, check out the What Works Cities website.

What kind of open data projects are out there?

Here are a few examples of open data projects from other cities:

  • Philadelphia - visual explanation of the city budget

  • Chicago - comprehensive crime information database

  • Oakland - working with the school district to create a record request app

Denton has its own works in progress, too! Check out these resources:

Sounds great! How can I help?

You can help any of the following ways:
  1. Submitting project ideas

  2. Coming to our meetups (details posted on TechMill Denton)

  3. Contributing relevant material to our website

  4. Joining us on Open Data Day

  5. Rescuing or formatting public data in machine-readable formats

  6. Analyzing and visualizing the data

If you’re interested in working with the data on your own, we’ll provide full access to our datasets.