ZoningCheck puts computable municipal codes to good use - TechRepublic

" ... Today, I'll focus on ZoningCheck, which launched on July 17, 2014. The new effort is focused upon making it easier for entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and small business owners to find properties in a given city that are zoned for commercial use ... The beautifully designed, responsive web application is mobile-friendly and elegant, in stark contrast to far too much government software. A user chooses a city (currently limited to about a dozen municipalities in California), a kind of business, and then a specific location or, crucially, potential locations. The result is a personalized map that displays where that type of business is permitted, conditionally permitted, or prohibited in a given municipality ... "A lot of cities have an interactive zoning map that you can zoom around in, but it's not responsive to you. If you're trying to open up a bakery, it doesn't show you where a bakery is allowed."  If you visit an online zoning map of Philadelphia, Baltimore, or DC, you can see the truth of that statement. ZoningCheck makes this process easier and is much more friendly to people using mobile devices.  It isn't the first citizen-created app to attack this problem: Zonability, another civic startup that grew out of winning the Apps for California contest in 2010, enables people to input a given property address and see what's allowed there. The difference is the approach: instead of starting with an address, a user starts with an intent and can see where it might be allowed. (That kind of personalization, incidentally, is a best practice for data journalism andnews apps.)  Both civic apps are a significant improvement over the way the process usually works for entrepreneurs, if they can get traction outside of California. The need and the demand is there ..."