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Create a design for a color map / handout that shows Houston council districts and neighborhood associations. Blueprint Houston would distribute this map at neighborhood meetings.

Replicate Cycle Philly, a smartphone-based project to collect voluntary data on cyclists’ bike route preferences. The data generated will help the Houston Bike Plan committee understand from a network perspective how bicyclists move through the city and provide another data resource to help prioritize improvements.

The City of Houston has a lot of parking regulations. You could take a snapshot of a neighborhood today, then model what it would look like if parking regulations were lifted. What land would open up? What would go there?

Currently, city council member votes are recorded by hand with a pencil and an actual sheet of paper by the city secretary. Find the data source that details individual CM votes (NovusAgenda?) and build an app to track votes by issue and votes by CM.

This idea came out of a discussion at last month's health themed civic hack night:

A site which can be used to find community gardens near your home. Would utilize a community-submitted database of gardens (information including address, basic description, and who to contact in order to participate).

I also envision a social networking component which allows users to join a talk-page for each garden, in order to coordinate and share important information.

In order to win a local election, a candidate must win a majority of the votes. In contests with 3 or more candidates, this often leads to a runoff election. It would be a good project to estimate the cost of administering a runoff election versus the cost of implementing an alternative solution, such as instant runoff.

Use the data sources collected by food writers to create a map of restaurants with an open carry policy. Allow selections to show yes to open carry and no to open carry.

Take water leak info from 311 service requests and COH public works and plot it on a map.

Create an app that drivers can use during or after rain storms in order to avoid roads that are likely to flood. Users can report flooded roads. App should also alert drivers if there is a risk of flash flooding, or a risk of flooding where their car is parked.

Pick a question from the Houston Area Survey and develop a bot to pull daily/weekly tweets related to the topic, perform a sentiment analysis on the text, and tweet the results.

Using publicly accessible data (such as eviction dispositions), develop a model that the Salvation Army can use to reach out to people just before they become homeless.

Build an application matching youths and young adults with mentors. For counseling, target disenfranchised areas.

Using data from the Houston Sobering Center, create a time lapse, a map, or a business case for diversion from incarceration.

The State of Texas Comptroller has a program called Transparency Stars, where they give awards to local governments, ISDs, etc. for opening their books and publishing transaction, contracting, economic development, pension, and debt obligation data.

According to the website, only four governments in Texas have received an award. It would be awesome if we had a bunch of Houston-area governments on board with becoming more transparent. So this project is to create an awareness campaign and to build public support.

Study food desert data and come up with innovative ideas to address them (beyond attracting and investing in grocery stores).

What are the key performance indicators to determine whether an election was administered properly? When there is poor service, voters turned away, or voting machine malfunctions, who is held accountable and what measures are put in place to avoid repeating the same problem?

Develop an instance of Foodborne using Houston data.

Using Trees for Houston planting data, create a timelapse of trees planted on a map.

Build an app to map 311 reports of flooding and drainage issues (depth, timing, location) to help city planning folks and engineers identify improvement projects. Helps identify and implement the fix the “worst first” policy in the Rebuild Houston Program.

We have a community of 1,600+ awesome people. We'd like to tell their stories, what matters to them, and how technology and data can help. If you've got a background in marketing, we'd love your help developing a content strategy and volunteer plan.

Build an app to crowdsource the location and specs of EV charging stations around the City of Houston.

Create a website that explains “the pension issue” from all sides.

Build a map of all sidewalks in Houston and identify disconnects. Similarly, build a map of crosswalks and show which ones are protected vs. not protected.

Looking at parking citation data, create a map of where tickets occur. You could use this map to optimize the City of Houston Parking Enforcement operation, or simply just to avoid certain areas at specific times.

New Orleans has an neat game called Big Easy Budget Game. It's a great way to learn about municipal finance, and how tax dollars are allocated. What if we built something similar for Houston?

Research other cities with driverless car policies and create a series of best practices for the City of Houston to follow.

Create a map of things to do with your dog in Houston. Could include dog parks, regular parks, dog friendly beaches, and dog-friendly patios.

Translate the League of Women Voters guide to Vietnamese.

Develop a strategy and tech platform for citizens to record TIRZ meetings, use Youtube automatic transcription, and post the meeting transcripts for public review.

Create an app to report suspicious behavior of Uber and taxi drivers.

No coding required! This is an experiential project, meaning you'll have to get out of the building. Using the Knight Foundation's excellent StoryMap.js, document a walking tour through your Houston neighborhood.

Look at Harris County arrest data, determine when possession of up to 2 oz of marijuana is the charge that prompted the arrest, and calculate the costs of processing vs. the costs of not processing the arrest.

UPDATE: Assist with technical strategy for body camera policies and procedures. Background research and incremental policy changes since inception: http://www.khou.com/news/investigations/transparency/transparency/345006909

Research other cities with police body cameras, study their policies, and create a list of best practices for the City of Houston to follow.

Develop a way to identify potential homes with lead paint and develop neighborhood campaigns to help them remediate it. You could identify homes based on HCAD year built/renovated data.

Set up a version of Ushahidi and show what's possible with the platform.

Scrape council minutes to assemble a list of board nominations and appointments. Could be a weekly script, database, and twitter notification bot.

Assemble a dataset of administrative procedures, executive orders, and municipal ordinances, and use text mining to visualize (e.g. word cloud, frequency analysis, etc.).

Take HCAD lot data & location data (lat/long), query the Google Maps API, grab street view images, and associate with HCAD data.

This dataset could be fundamental for other datasets. For example, we could obtain a grant and use Mechanical Turk to analyze sidewalk conditions throughout the entire city.

Inspired by this guy's work.

Improve the design of the workflow contained in this report.

This project aims to highlight regional differences in voting machines across counties in Texas. It will help us better understand vulnerabilities by location, and the number of voters who could be affected by compromised equipment.

Plot Houston’s affordable housing neighborhoods on a map.

Using the Google Fiber checklist and available data sources from the City of Houston, build a map to navigate the gaps in Houston’s fiber backbone.

Piggyback on this project and help develop a comprehensive map of all the public basketball hoops in Houston.

The City of Houston publishes key performance indicators for each department, but are they measuring the right things? Create a platform for public engagement around these KPIs. Review data here.

Using craigslist and back page as sources, how can we measure human trafficking demand in Houston?
Another project would be to create a website to educate the public about human trafficking in Houston.

Research other cities with drones, study their policies, and create a list of best practices for the City of Houston to follow.

Create a game where you have to jump through various hoops to vote (ID, register, childcare, ballot research, etc.)

Using Wordpress or Drupal, create a multisite website and an instance for each of the Houston civic clubs. Could include a civic club lookup and registration function. Goal is to provide every civic club with the tools to create an RSS feed. Main site could aggregate all feeds.

I'd like to set up a project that:

1- identifies high value datasets currently in PDF form
2- converts them into a better format (csv, json, shapefile, etc.)
3- publishes them on the houston open data portal
4- publishes a methodology for repeating this process

There's so much valuable stuff in PDF form. The fun part would be rounding it all up and figuring out what's important.

Create an app with address lookup that tells whether the address falls within REEP boundaries.

REEP boundaries
REEP program info