Interview with Developer Randall Leeds
Randall Leeds is an independent developer from San Francisco, CA with a passion for open sourcing. See what he had to say as he prepared to code away at the OGW Cross-Gov Apps Contest.
How do you like being in Portland?
I’m pretty happy with it. Culturally its very similar [to San Francisco], but it’s smaller so you see more of it without going as far. Just walking around I’ve seen all kinds of things going on.
What are you hoping to get out of the code-a-thon today?
I’m hoping to make something that can usefully substitute for the 211 social services directory, something that will allow organizations providing social services to collaborate to keep it up to date. I’m focused on trying to shift the burden to the people who are providing the services and the public rather than the government or private companies. To have a good directory like this, the people who are incentivized to have the services should be in charge of maintaining it.
What gets you excited about coding?
I like the mental space of thinking about abstract problems, in the code itself thinking about organizing it, structuring it … It’s just a fun puzzle all the time.
And then a separate fun part of it is the absurd power of manipulating all this data with your hands. It’s fun to have a vocabulary for talking about complex data. And I just love the communities, particularly open source communities—that’s what really inspires me to keep doing it. Open source software creates a world where I can see inspiring projects from people all over the place.
What did you enjoy about the conference yesterday?
I liked the session Opening Government Data Sites on how to apply formats that people can work with in a useful way. One woman speaking said something that really resonated with me as a developer. She said that as an agency you shouldn’t be as concerned with the programming. Raw data is the best possible thing you can release, and that’s a really important thing to remember. A developer will clean your data up, you just need to get it to them.
Anything else you’d like to add?
I’d like to see a lot more encouragement from different people to stop thinking about disseminating data and collecting it as separate things, but to think about data as collaborative project.
Wishing you luck in the contest, Randall!
