About

My name is Matt MacDonald, I moved to Watertown, MA in the spring of 2010. I blog here and I can be reached at matt.macdonald@gmail.com or on Twitter @neocMatt.

I like building real world, useful experiments and hacks to demonstrate to local government employees, elected officials and citizens the benefits to be gained from having access to civic data in programmatic, structured formats. Having existing, working examples should help guide government employees and more importantly encourage citizens to require their local communities provide this level of service and information.

I have developed a number of hacks since the spring of 2011 to poke at the municipal system, understand the types of data available and look for opportunities.

I’m very cost conscious, always looking for ways to improve processes and reduce costs but I also probably would be identified as a liberal or progressive. I love to think about small, efficient, highly distributed local governments, run by people in the community.

Long term I have a desire to further refine my ideas, methods and tools so that technology can be used to create a new hybrid form of local government with increased community engagement. This hybrid might resemble the Town meeting system, with direct democratic rule done at larger scale but focuses on encouraging citizen participation to augment and improve city and town services.

Generally I’m interested in learning more about how our world works. I love data, and I like to write software and tools to help explain and visualize that data and I enjoy sharing what I find with others. If a picture can speak a 1,000 words data visualization can speak 1,000,000. I think visualizations of data can help explain very complex topics and data does not lie.

By day I work for a public radio startup called PRX, http://www.prx.org where I am a Director of Project Management. I also write software and hack on data.

If you have feedback on any of the tools or services that I’ve built or suggestions for how I can improve them please let me know.

Thanks,
Matt