For the first time in Georgia, any organization, be it non-governmental, journalistic, public, or commercial can access election result information as well as voter list information online and in an easy way.

Thanks to Tbilisi City Hall and Tbilisi City Assembly for sharing Tbilisi’s 2012 draft budget. We wanted to show in a slightly more intuitive way than the format they gave us how City Hall is proposing to spend your money in 2012.

This graphic shows the budget from a functional perspective, describing the amount and how much is projected to increase or decrease from 2011 figures.

A spreadsheet of the data we received can be downloaded here.

We are still curious what your views about the budget are, especially now that you have access to the proposed spending amounts.

Feel free to share your thoughts by completing our open version of City Hall’s 2012 Budget Survey.

With all the dialog surrounding Tbilisi’s 2012 draft budget, we thought we’d try some new ways to show how the city has been spending your money.

Today we present the treemap.  This treemap shows Tbilisi’s 2010 budget summary.  The source of this data is City Hall’s website here.

In our example here, each rectangle represents a category of the 2010 budget expenditures, while the area represents the amount spent for that category.

There are two levels. The main or top level are the main ten categories. When you click on that category, you will see the components of that category, also rendered in rectangles of varying sizes corresponding to the amount of your money that was spent.

We would have liked to show you more levels, but unfortunately, City Hall has stated that they do not have the capacity to share that level of detail at this time.  Perhaps in the future there will be more information about how City Hall spends your money, but until then …

We want to give a big thanks today to the Tbilisi Transport Company (TTC) for sharing geo data with us and supporting our project TbiliCity. They have made large contribution of current bus routing and bus stop data, saving us, and potentially other organizations, the pain of reinventing this wheel – a wheel originally paid for with public tax payer money. This is what we are having to do with marshrutkas. Hey, if not us, who would do this?

As part of our project TbiliCity, we want to take a whack at making Tbilisi’s public transportation information usable and accessible to, well, everyone. One way of doing this is just mapping out routes. TTC, by making the data available, is opening up the playing field for the development of all kinds of applications.

Because the city invests public taxpayer money into public transportation, for these types of tools, the limiting factor should not be access to the information itself, but the creativity in responding to bus riders’ needs.

People want a tool to make their lives easier – to allow themselves to do something they couldn’t before. With public transportation, this can take many forms, but right now the tools are severely lacking.

As local residents see what other cities have and are doing via this new-fangled thing called the Internet, they are demanding more and improved localized web applications delivering services that simplify their lives.

We plan to post a cleaned up set of data on our site soon. While this data will be a snapshot of a complicated and changing set of processes, we think it will be valuable to the public. By knowing where the bus stops are, there is a lot developers can do. Who benefits? Everyone!

With data in hand, look forward to new tools for Tbilisi’s buses coming soon to a web application near you!

We are thrilled to announce that OMC (Open Maps Caucasus) will now be known as JumpStart Georgia!

Check out the new web site.  This new brand reflects of our evolution in Georgia.  In fall 2009, when we started as a pilot project to map the Shida Kartli region of Georgia, and in 2010 grew into a fully staffed Tbilisi organization with field offices to support creating the first complete, open, digital map of the country in partnership with 1,000 volunteers.

Now that the initial map data collection is complete, in 2011, we have evolved to a Tbilisi-based organization focused on building Georgia’s capacity through open information and technology.  In 2011, JumpStart Georgia, a JumpStart International initiative, engages people around open content and ways to use it to develop civil society, business, effective governance, and promotes use of maps and spatial thinking.

To learn more about our current projects, like TbiliCity and our project with CARE Africa’s Village Savings and Loans Associations, visit: JumpStart.Ge.

Over the last several years I have heard thousands of complaints and questions by disappointed Georgians and foreigners alike who, while researching Georgia online sooner or later stumble upon the question:  Why is Georgia not on Google Maps?  Where is Georgia on Google Maps?  These questions became increasingly pointed at Google representatives themselves following the Georgian-Russian conflict in 2008.  Google even went so far as to post a blog about it explaining why the map of Georgia on Google Maps is still blank.

Things have started to change, however, and several government agencies (especially NAPR) and JumpStart Georgia (formerly known as Open Maps Caucasus or OMC-J) began putting lots of effort to improving the state of the map of Georgia on Google Maps.

Beginning in October 2009, JumpStart Georgia began working to create an open-source digital map / geodatabase of Georgia. One of the goals of the project was to include as many volunteers as possible in the process to get Georgians excited about mapping! Ultimately, more than 40 community organizers and as many as 1000 volunteers participated in our project. These mapping enthusiasts spread out over the different regions of Georgia, walking with GPS machines and walking papers in-hand and the desire to mark their city, town or village on a map. They tracked paths from the largest highways to the smallest paths of small villages and points of interest including schools, pharmacies, kindergartens and playground. They had fun, learned and succeeded in mapping Georgia.

After nearly a year of cumbersome field work and meticulous office work JumpStart Georgia managed to collect this data into one large, open-source geodatabase. Several months ago, we submitted our geodatabase of roads and point to Google with the hope that, quality pending, they would begin to import it into Google’s Map Maker tool. The data, initially to be imported into Google Map Maker (a tool which allows communities and individuals to collaboratively map certain territories and thus improve Google Maps) would later, in its changed form, be incorporated in the the large body of data the comprises Google Maps.

Now, we can finally say that, yes, Jumpstart Georgia’s data is now LIVE on Google Map Maker! You can now see all the villages, highways, lakes and protected areas that until recently was something we could only dream of seeing on Google and there is still more to come!

In fall 2009, JumpStart International initiated a project to create the first digital, complete, open map of the Republic of Georgia, and we’re proud to say we finished the task.  Open Maps Caucasus-JumpStart, later known as OMC-J, is the group founded and funded by JumpStart International to complete the mapping work in Georgia.

OMC-J, powered by 39 paid staff and over 400 volunteers, mapped the entire country, over 3,000 settlements, collecting 56,000 “points of interest” throughout Georgia- the entire country except the conflict regions South Ossetia and Abkhazia.  All of this data was created for the public domain, is freely available on our web site and we encourage individuals and organizations to explore using it.

By the end of 2010 OMC also launched MapSpot to facilitate local interest in and use of the map.  In April 2011, Google Map Maker imported our map data, so our efforts get even more mileage as our data is disseminated through the massive Google system.  Our data is also featured in OpenStreetMap as well; follow that process here.

As we wrapped up the huge national mapping project, our organization evolved as well.  Staff condensed into a smaller group focused on ‘what to do with the data’ and how to leverage public information and open technologies in ways that build opportunity in the Republic of Georgia- opportunity for citizens to engage their elected representatives, opportunity for Georgians to work with leading-edge open-source technologies, opportunity for businesses to reach new heights through incorporating geo-data into their strategies, and more.

Our efforts are well-positioned to add new value to Georgia’s emerging NGO sector as well.  As an NGO ourselves, we relate to the challenges groups face, and the opportunities available by leveraging the latest technologies to carry out and communicate about mission-based work.  We’re able to improve data management and information-sharing in a way that widens access while meeting concrete goals, and through open technology tools, do so at modest cost.

In addition to gathering GIS data for all of Georgia and making it open source and usable online, we’ve created an open source political party database for NDI and a data importer and mapper of Village Savings and Loan Associations across three countries for CARE’s Access Africa program.

As our work in Georgia evolves, we’re refreshing our brand as well.  As of May, our Georgia-based organization will be known as JumpStart Georgia.  Look out for our new logo, and for more adventures in technology exploration to come!