Colorado open gov guru Gryth leaving state government
Open government pioneer Brian Gryth is leaving the Colorado state government after eight years to join Accela as a senior product manager, the company announced.
Gryth most recently served as program manager for the Business Intelligence Center, Business and Licensing Division for Colorado’s Department of State, where he improved access to state data relevant to businesses and implemented Go Code Colorado, a civic apps challenge to incentivize developers to leverage data to create useful tools for government.
Gryth was also the founder of OpenColorado, one of the first community-driven data catalogs in North America, where he grew the database to more than 750 datasets in just 10 months.
He also led the effort to create the opengovernmentinitiative.org, which creates and publishes open government policy templates to help governments adopt and institutionalize open government in their organizations along with organizing a number of unconferences throughout Colorado on open government.
Gryth also planned or advised the planning of several civic hackathons, including Colorado Code of Communities Civic Hackathon, Hack for Longmont and Hack4Colorado.
After 8 years, my ride with State of CO has come to a close. Now off to my new challenge of building http://t.co/HOaaBVqsZV.
— Brian Gryth (@briangryth) September 19, 2014
At Accela, Gryth will lead CivicData.com and engage with government agencies to improve the flow of data from their internal systems into the site, collaborate with open data industry leaders and civic tech developers to collaborate on new data standards and engage with civic tech startups to link their apps to custom datasets on the Accela Civic Platform.
“Brian comes to us with tremendous government agency, open data and policy experience. He understands the value that open data and an open platform approach can bring to government and developers and will define, drive and evangelize the vision for open data and the Accela Civic Platform,” said Maury Blackman, Accela president and CEO, said in a statement.
“Given the momentum around open government and open data, we look forward to Brian working alongside agencies, developers and citizens to address their unique data needs and define the standards that will foster civic engagement.”
