Hacking Small Town America

I can't bring myself to take this person seriously. As someone who grew up in a real small town, hearing some guy worry about having to make sacrifices in a small city of 100,000 people just seems so silly. Things like "There might not be a Subway within walking distance from my house".<p>Proximity to other cities is also a big factor. I line in a city of 28k people, and the closest real city is 2 hours away. This place he's moving to is a mere 40 miles from Ft. Worth, TX, a city of over 700k people.<p>Ultimately it just sounds like a guy who thinks he's "roughing it" by driving his motor home to campground with electricity and running water.

Sure, maybe the polling place info may not be online, but I'll bet that the polling places haven't moved for years and that folks don't have problems finding them.<p>as to "), but no one seems to have done any analysis of it (disappointing since the town has four colleges)." - what is the benefit of said analysis?<p>&#62;I expect to spend a great deal of time actively disagreeing with people. ... &#62; The list goes on. Tyler has information that could be freed. Tyler has government that could be opened. ... &#62; Instead I'm going to hack Tyler to be what I need it to be.<p>Ah yes, the big city kid is going to teach the yokels how to do things.<p>If Tyler is at all typical, it's about 100x as open as Chicago.<p>If the author wants Chicago, he should stay there.

"I'm going to do my best to live without being a consumer of gasoline, just as I did in Chicago."<p>Good luck with this. I don't think he realizes how pedestrian unfriendly cities in the Southwest are. He'll quickly realize a trip to pick up groceries will take 2 hours via bus, and he'll be forced to walk without sidewalks in 105 degree heat to the bus stop while everyone else drives by in airconditioned cars looking upon him like he is homeless.

@all I'm the author of the post (@onyxfish). I'm not even remotely interested in debating its merits here. You all seem well-equipped to form your own judgements. However, for the sake of clarity, I wrote a __blog__ post that got __aggregated__ by The Atlantic. The original post is at <a href="http://hacktyler.com" rel="nofollow">http://hacktyler.com</a>. It wasn't written for anyone but those who know me, but people liked it so its become public. Think what you will.

All his assumptions from the blog posts seems to be based on what he found online. Wait till he goes there!

I know Tyler, Texas only as the home of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, where all the patent trolls take their cases. I always just assumed it was because the jury pool were morons. Which isn't fair, kind of like this article.

Offtopic, but for some reason I wanted to take a closer look at Tyler, Texas. Loaded it up in Google Earth's streetview and "drove" around a bit.<p>Where is the city centre of Tyler?<p>I started around where Google placed the "Tyler, Texas" sign but the area looked like some rundown neighbourhoods that you could expect to find at the far edges of a big city.

What ever happened to The Atlantic’s attention to detail? Articles don’t use balanced quotes, have ‘--’ rather than ‘–’ emdashes, and now sound like a teenager's angry blog with opening lines such as “things are fucked up” referring to one’s private life.

Looking forward to seeing what he accomplishes. What are some of the better "hack gov data" orgs or apps?<p>I know of the Sunlight Foundation and OpenSecrets -- what else?