Denver's KKK Members

This is a map of Ku Klux Klan members living in Denver in the 1920s. The home addresses of these racists comes from two Ku Klux Klan membership books owned by History Colorado.

Around one third of white U.S. born men in Denver were members of the KKK During the 1920s. During that decade the party successfully infiltrated and took over Denver's power structures. In fact the Colorado governor, the mayor of Denver, the police chief, many judges and many state senators were all KKK members in the 1920s.

You can view the complete map of the addresses of Denver's KKK members on History Colorado's Ku Klux Klan Ledgers. The ledgers and the map of the members' home addresses reveal how much of Denver's white population was seduced by the racism of the KKK. The map makes clear that it wasn't just the city's power structures that were taken over by the KKK. The people that the KKK targeted and intimidated would encounter KKK members in just about every street, store, bank and local business.

Get Outta My Bike Lane

Last year Nathan Rosenquist released an interactive map which allowed cyclists in New York to submit photographs of cars parked illegally in bike lanes. Cars in Bike Lanes NYC no longer appears to exist but Nathan's code lives on at GitHub.

Nathan's code has been used to create Cars in Bike Lanes Boston and Things in Bike Lanes Denver. The new Things in Bike Lanes Denver map is a joint project from Bicycle Colorado and BikeDenver. They want cyclists in Denver to report obstructions on bike lanes to the interactive map. Adding photos and details of bike lane obstructions to the Things in Bike Lanes map will help Denver Public Works identify areas which are often obstructed. It could also help the city keep bike lanes open for cyclists.

Cars in Bike Lanes (CIBL) is "a browsable geographic database for crowd-sourcing traffic violation reports ... (and) ... can be adapted to document any sort of observable traffic violations within a defined geographic area." So far CIBL seems to have been exclusively used to report obstructions to bike lanes. It obviously could be used in many other contexts as well. I'm sure there are many different ways it could be used to crowd-source citizen concerns to local government.