Overview
Two bodies of work for the Saint Louis Regional Data Alliance, a civic initiative making regional open data clean and usable for researchers, policymakers, and the public.
The first was infrastructure. The Alliance needed its public-facing DKAN open-data platform served reliably rather than maintained by hand, so I built the AWS environment for it from scratch — EC2, ECS, Docker, ECR, and EFS — coordinating with UMSL IT, whose AWS account funded and hosted the effort. The design goal was ordinary and important: a platform a small civic organization can keep running after the person who built it steps back.
The second was analysis. Saint Louis City’s parcel records — roughly 250,000 parcels, about 25,000 of them vacant — lived in an old, inconsistent, largely undocumented Microsoft Access database. I helped extract and reshape that data with Alteryx, engineer a proximity feature scoring how close every parcel sat to nearby vacant ones, and publish the result as an interactive Tableau map. The proof of concept came together in a weekend; it fed policy discussion around prioritizing the razing of abandoned buildings and grew into a multi-year effort for the city, visible today in the Alliance’s vacancy portal.
The practical point: making public data genuinely usable is mostly an infrastructure and data-modeling problem, not a policy one. It is the same platform work as the commercial engagements, pointed at civic problems.