Langley is a small rural community on Whidbey Island in Washington State. Like so many other small rural communities, Langley is faced with limited resources but a great need to better understand the geospatial context of the local environment. Through the use of open source tools, including QGIS, GDAL/OGR, PostGIS, GRASS, and others, as well as free open data hosting at GitHub, Langley has started to better leverage existing data and attract community members to participate in gathering new and useful data. Small scale "civic hacking" is alive and well... and provides opportunities and challenges that are both similar and different than that of the larger urban counterparts engaged in large scale civic hacking.
This talk with go over the technical aspects of the workflows that have proven fruitful for engaging local community members of small rural communities in both data creation and curation. We will also look at the social aspects of getting local governments engaged in the process of leveraging community resources for open access to data and tools.
github.com/langleywa
