By Juliana Reyes
Technical.ly
Before Tim Wisniewski became Philadelphia’s Chief Data Officer, he was a fledgling civic hacker.
It was in the spring of 2011, at a hackathon organized by Technical.ly Philly, that he helped build his first civic app: the Office of Property Assessment (OPA) Data Liberator. It let users search city property records by owner name, something you couldn’t do on Phila.gov, the city’s then much maligned website. The big selling point? You could find slumlords with it, by seeing if a crummy landlord had properties elsewhere in the city.
These were the very early data days of the city’s open data movement, right after Mayor Michael Nutter signed an open data executive order. Case in point: the data behind the OPA Data Liberator — property records — wasn’t readily available. If you wanted to use that data, you had to buy a snapshot of it on a CD from the city for $100 or scrape it from the city’s website.
Wisniewski, at the time a fresh-faced 23-year-old running a neighborhood improvement organization in Frankford, chose the latter. (His struggle to get the data was chronicled by Holly Otterbein in the Philadelphia Daily News in 2011.) The OPA Data Liberator later turned into a web app called Philly Address.
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