The Open Commons Project begins with a simple conviction:
the data that shapes our cities — from parcels to tracts, water lines to subway traffic, property assessments to pollution — belongs in the commons.
Current Projects Under Development:
At the launch of the Open Commons Project, we will focus on our first research project: *open.co*. Open.co will be our first attempts incubate a viable social enterprise & data vending product through the focus on open civic data.
The central thesis of Every city holds a quiet archive of the built world. Parcel maps, permit filings, utility layers, zoning overlays, ownership chains, tax rolls. Environmental reports, policy disclosures, budget spreadsheets, ESG signals & corporate data. Most of it is public. Some of it is open. It’s outrageously expensive everywhere. But nearly all of it lives in vendor paywalls, or decentralized mess — disconnected by format, language, scale, and system. These despite the many years of open data advocacy.
Open.co: Open Commons First Venture
Open Commons Project has a deep passion for GIS Mapping and Civic Data. The thesis behind Open.co is that there is much more to be done to bring the true vast amount of civic data available. But not just as data vendor & exploring platform, Open.co will be about granularity of data (getting down to parcel level & property assessment data), but combining that with city, county, state, and federal open data sets, public tools, and eventually leading to original data aggregation methods.
Inspired by the depreciated Open Knowledge Foundation Open Data Census, Open Commons Project is currently auditing 22 cities within the United States to explore their common data, currently researching over 330,000 datasets based upon municipalities that use specific open data tools.
Open.co will initial be a based on a private instance of Google’s datacommons.org vendor & analytics platform while developing a more bespoke SaaS GIS mapping technology based upon Deck.GL to begin handling large datasets.
The Open Commons Project Is By:
Founder & Executive Director
Open Commons Project Focus:
Complex Systems
#OpenData #OpenSource #OpenAccess
#OpenGov
#OpenESG
#OPEN🎉
Just like we love maps, we love #open. All of Open Common’s projects benefit from publishers of open data, software, and research methodologies. It’s how we are learning, building, and developing. So while we launch social ventures from our R&D Labs, all of our products will be done #open and contribute to projects we actively utilize for our work and impact.
GIS Mapping
It’s pretty simple — we love maps. We love civic data and we want to make public information central & more usable. Our commitment is to bring to life the common data local, regional, state, and federal state into a central hub, while advancing GIS SaaS exploration tool, Open.co.
Specialties: Deck.GL, Three.JS, Mapbox GL JS, ArcGIS Pro
Network Sciences
Open Commons Project centers itself around developing new means of searching, exploring, visualizing the deep relationships between data. We aim to contribute and collaborate with other open source developers.
Specialties: Neo4j, sigma.js, Nomic Deepscatter, Cosmograph, Openmappr
Civic Tech
The gaps over in open data feel growing while the need to be hyper-local in our research capacities. Open Commons first project is researching over 22 municipalities to audit public data availability, as well begin a process of aggregating data from our methodology. We currently are researching over 333,000 public U.S. city datasets! Contact Open Commons to learn more.
Specialties: Data research, aggregation, scripting; local large language models for cleaning & classification.
Keep up with the Open Commons Project.
Let us know how we can help bring your data, tech, and research the commons.
Also follow along as Open Commons Project develops open source tools, data platforms, and our first launch of our first SMLLC subsidiary to incubate and launch as a social venture.