[bouldercouncilhotline] Hotline: DRCOG Board Meeting--May 18, 2011

[kohls at bouldercolorado.gov]

Sender: Cowles, Macon

The packet for this meeting is only 86 pages.

New ten year data on the homeless will be released in Denver tomorrow by one of the regional organizations.

The most interesting thing to be presented and discussed at the DRCOG Board meeting was related to the Denver Regional Data Consortium (DRDC) project.

This is the third year that the project has been going on. It is a data sharing project for the region: to share the GIS data that is being collected by all the different DRCOG jurisdictions, as well as state and federal governments. They launched it with a data summit: over 100 people signed up. They had to turn people away. There is now an annual data summit: local governments, state, federal, etc.

The vision statement: to support informed decision making by organizing, developing, sharing, enhancing and distributing regional data.

Regional Data Achievements by the DRDC:

Aerial Photography
Mapping Street centerlines
Mapping Drainage
Common spaces (open space, schools, recreation areas, etc.)
Assembling and Mapping the built environment data, to support the new Land Use Model that DRCOG is putting together. This model will have such fine information that it will have building specific, address specific data.

The collaboration is providing economies of scale in using data to do good planning.

DRCOG is looking for funding opportunities to accelerate the effort.
The DRDC is sharing the data when feasible through DRCOG’s data catalog.
The DRDC has issued the First Annual Application Challenge in 2011—to inspire the development of appropriate apps that can will permit functional use of the data on iPad and smart phone platforms. The requirement in the Challenge is that it be open source.



Macon Cowles
Boulder City Councilor