Welcome! My name is Abu Nayeem. I'm the lead programmer, co-founder of Prelease, and community organizer in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Also, I'm the founder of the Saint Paul Open Data Initiative, where I took public data to create interactive reports and create dialogue within the local community. For example, I used local crime data to create a petition to pressude local lawmakers to address catalytic converter thefts, among other community reports (view here).
Currently, we have a Minneapolis report, and, in the process, of creating a Saint Paul report. In general, see ActiveReports
Prelease is a service that validates the rental history between tenants and landlords. Prior to signing a lease, a tenant can determine if the housing provider is responsible, and the housing provider can determine if the tenant is responsible, which can make pre-screen barriers, such as credit checks and expensive deposits unnecessary. Our service is designed to intentionally benefit the responsible parties so they can negotiate a favorable lease agreement. Prelease intentionally seeks to partner with the general public, community organizations, and goverment agencies providing quality community reports, and providing data services.
- We take public open data from various sources and provide meaningful interative reports so community members, researchers, and lawmakers, can take local action. We seek to create a local housing dashboard
- We provide valuable public data services. We clean the data, test for quality assurance,and inform the local agencies of potential errors that are found. There is an error table for each city's folder.
- We want to survey tenants and housing providers, and provide in-house aggregate data to the public as part of our service.
- We are an Open-Source repository. All data, raw coding, and analysis are available and replicable. We encourage other programmers and developers to contribute to this project. Currently, we are just using Jupyter notebooks.
**If any graphs or reports are used in presentations, or any other professional settings, please credit, PreLease Open Housing Data **
- If you want to make a financial contribution, you can make one here (not set up yet)
- If you would like to collaborate on improving the reports, and/or program in another language, it is welcomed. Please email me.
- If you have comments and concerns, send me an email
Commissions
- If an organization, individual, and/or government agency would like similar reporting and other data services, please email us. We can negotiate prices. Any completed public projects will be added into the open-data repository.