Howardcounty

I explore the design of the Chrysalis and the work of Marc Fornes, its designer.

I discuss the various institutional activities related to implementation of the Inner Arbor plan

I explore the vision for a new park in Symphony Woods and the strategy to implement it

I recap the history of Symphony Woods and the various attempts over the years to develop it as a park.

In this series I explore the conception and construction of the Chrysalis amphitheater and Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods.

Merriweather Post Pavilion gets ready for the 21st century, and the Howard County Design Advisory Panel offers its advice.

As construction of the Chrysalis amphitheater begins, I look again at the structure and its architect.

tl;dr: My blog is moving to civilityandtruth.com. Update your bookmarks and news readers! After a fair amount of fiddling about I’m renaming my personal blog and moving to a new domain. From now on you can access the blog at https://civilityandtruth.com (note the “https” rather than “http”). You can read more about the changes in my first post at the new blog. Briefly, I wanted to separate the blog from my personal domain frankhecker.com and have more control over the technology behind the blog, including eliminating the user tracking done by WordPress.com and providing better support for posts that include programming code and mathematical notation. ...

Update 2021/06/19: This post is now obsolete.

tl;dr: Howard County government ups its game in providing data with a new web site opendata.howardcountymd.gov. Next stop, HoCoStat? I’ve previously written about Howard County’s initial foray into publishing government data, the data.howardcountymd.gov web site created by the Howard County GIS division. As announced by the county and reported by Amanda Yeager at the Baltimore Sun, Howard County has launched a new site opendata.howardcountymd.gov to provide access to government data. This new site, also known as the OpenHoward portal,1 can be considered as a concrete implementation of open data practices mandated by the Howard County Council (see Council Bill 32-2014) and as a down payment on County Executive Allan Kittleman’s campaign promise to create an automated system (“HoCoStat”) to “help government increase responsiveness, improve efficiency and heighten accountability.” ...