“Imagine you’re blind. You have a smartphone, and you’re trying to find your own way to a spot downtown. To get there you’ll need precise voice directions to specific building numbers, but you can’t find an app that meets the challenge.

Next, imagine you’re an app-maker who wants to provide the most accurate navigation at the lowest cost ?to seeing-impaired customers. To do that you’ll need access to an accurate database of street addresses. While cities routinely collect this information, it isn’t necessarily publicly available.

Now a pioneering open data project in Louisville, Kentucky is lighting a torch to show cities, civic tech enthusiasts, and local businesses how to make sure assistive technology like this is easily and cheaply available. And its methods are so simple that they can applied to many more problems where open public data can make a difference….”