Dan MeltonChief Geek

Dan a public-minded, generation-net coder passionate about cities, urban affairs and civic action. Dan’s past projects include Urbata, an urban data mapping tool for mid-sized cities; and the Kansas City DrillDown, a multi-layered urban data mashup of utility, credit and city records that recounts the population and challenges the US Census. A Ruby enthusiast, Dan has contributed to multiple open source projects and spends his off hours diving into USA spending data. Hailing from the midwest, he received his bachelor’s degree in Economics and Political Science, his masters in Public Administration and doctorate in Public Affairs and Economics from the Henry Bloch School of Business and Public Administration at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Posts by Dan

Thank You CfA!

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Dan Melton

I’m stepping out of Code for America at the end of the year. It’s time for some new leadership to continue building the CfA network effect. It’s been a little over a year and half since I got involved in …

GitHub Hits 1 Million – Thanks for Hosting Our Movement

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Dan Melton

Last night, Github held a thank you party to celebrate a huge milestone, 1 million users. To put that in perspective, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the US employs around 1.3 million software developers. Even factoring in international and …

311: An Example of What’s Right with Government

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Dan Melton

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I spent the day meeting government officials who staff and manage 311 services in the city of Chicago. This is a great example of what’s right in government service delivery in local governments. 

A Google Summer of Code: Civic Developer Tools

Posted on August 24, 2011 by Dan Melton

Last fall, Luigi Montanez and I were sitting in the auditorium at the International Open Data Conference brainstorming about ways to get developers more interested in civic coding.  He had just completed a whirlwind tour of ruby meetups, conferences and …

Scaling Our Movement

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Dan Melton

This week, we select finalists for 2012. Over 550 applications came in for just 26 spots in next year’s class.  For me, the response is such a mix of excitement, humility, hopefulness, a little bit of daunting and frankly, a …

ShortStack: The Top Twittering Cities & Counties

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Dan Melton

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This past cycle, we took a stab at collecting all the Twitter handles for cities and counties in ShortStack, our knowledge base of local governments. Out of 1293 accounts across 810 cities and counties (that we found), here’s the top …

ShortStack: City and County Subdomains

Posted on March 30, 2011 by Dan Melton

I’ve been working lately on a labs product called ShortStack (code). The idea behind it is simple. Can we aggregate information about a city’s technology stack?  For instance, if we know a city website, can we scrape it for data …

Fellows Take Top Prize at Work 2.0

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Dan Melton

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On Sunday, Joel Mahoney and Talin Salway competed and won in the Work 2.0 challenge hosted by API teams from Cotweet, Yammer, Podio, Jexy, Cohuman, and Mashery. Their concept HubBuds is a mashup of the Github and Yammer APIs.  It …

Diving Into Cities: 440+ interviews

Posted on March 9, 2011 by Dan Melton

During the month of February, our fellows literally hit the streets interviewing block watch captains, neighborhood leaders, mayors, IT staff, stakeholders, city department heads, community organization leaders and developers. Over 28 days, 20 fellows interviewed 440 people in 279 interview sessions, which equated to about 10 a day.

CfA Training: Selling to the Government

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Dan Melton

As part of our continued push to understand city governments, we invited Charles Blanchet, VP of Sales at Granicus to present the geek’s guide to selling to government. Founded nearly 10 years ago, Granicus enables web streaming and related transparency …