Kyle
By day Scott Resnick is the Vice President and partner in Hardin Design & Development in Madison Wisconsin. The company is a creative app powerhouse with a client roster that includes Mercedes, Toyota,Coleman Campers and Fedex. Hardin Design & Development continues on a trajectory of explosive growth and is currently expanding to Chicago.
After that Resnick is also an influencer in Madison’s thriving tech startup scene. There are a great bunch of people that seem to know everything going on in Madison, and that’s not because it’s a small town. They have a lot of centralized startup events and even shoulder groups that meet every month who are focused on things like health tech and hacking.
The list of resources for Madison startups would be reminiscent of a city with a million people. Madison has just a quarter of that. On our two days of office hours in Madison we learned about Capital Entrepreneurs, Madison Startup Weekend, Build Madison, Forward Technology Festival and some shoulder groups. Resnick is involved with almost all of these.
If that’s not enough to keep one man busy he’s married and he’s also a Madison Alderperson or CityCouncilman (depending on what PC hat you’re wearing today).
There are a lot of causes that Resnick supports and ran on including keeping the safety, alcohol, landlord tenant laws and open data.
The first three platforms are pretty self explanatory. As for open data, Resnick wrote the legislation for Madison to open up their public data so that developers could develop apps around it. Resnick said that any record that can be requested by open record requests can be available via open data.
Once he was able to get the data opened Madison went to work holding a Startup Weekend event to develop startups and apps surrounded by the data.
He gave us a couple examples of projects that came out of the open data hackathon. One was a startup that wanted to do pet health records. The entrepreneur went to work using pet license data available from the city to start developing the pet health records product.
Resnick told us that vendor carts are a big part of downtown Madison. Most recently the vendor cart licensing data and location for where they’re allowed to vend is kept on note cards. They have someone interested in producing an app to locate vendor carts and if this data goes electronic they can.
Madison was the second city in the nation to have their public data opened like this. New York as the first. Resnick told us there are many municipalities who have started toying with the idea but haven’t fully adopted it yet so they don’t have to necessarily give access to all the records.
Resnick is hoping the next step for Madison is to allow city API’s to go from “pushing the data to pulling the data”. When that’s available entrepreneurs will be able to create apps and startups for things like reporting a problem to a city. Resnick says many municipalities do this wrong. Most city’s use some kind of form emailed to a city manager or engineer and then the city manager or engineer uses their internal system to communicate job tickets and distribute projects.
When Resnick’s next vision for data is set in motion developers could develop an app that would allow resident’s to add their job to the queue, all of this done of course, by third party applications.
Linkage:
Check out Resnicks Day Job Here
Article from Capital Entrepreneur’s on the open data initiative
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