Press

Since Caktus’ founding in 2007, we have dedicated ourselves to growing sharp web apps the right way. The tenets of our Success Model drive us to focus on strategic partnerships, prioritize the most valuable features, develop for scalability, and recruit a sharp team. We’re pleased and honored that this focus on doing things right has been recognized by leading review website Clutch.

During the past two presidential debates, moderators from ABC and Fox asked candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump voter-submitted questions from PresidentialOpenQuestions.com. The site, created by the bipartisan Open Debate Coalition (ODC) with the support of Caktus Group, is built on top of the open source Django web framework.

The Journal of Medical Internet Research recently published “Epic Allies: Development of a Gaming App to Improve Antiretroviral Therapy Adherence Among Young HIV-Positive Men Who Have Sex With Men”. Epic Allies, initially funded by a federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant, represents a partnership between Caktus, UNC’s Institute of Global Health and Infection Diseases, and Duke Global Health Institute.

Several national publications have featured the Florida Open Debate platform, including USA Today, Engadget, and The Atlantic. Caktus helped develop the Django-based platform on behalf of the Open Debate Coalition (ODC) in advance of the nation’s first-ever open Senate debate held in Florida on April 25th. The site enabled citizens to submit debate questions as well as vote on which questions mattered most to them. Moderators then used the thirty most popular questions from the site to structure the debate between Florida Senate candidates David Jolly (R) and Alan Grayson (D). According to *The Atlantic, *more than 400,000 votes were submitted by users on the site, including more than 84,000 from Florida voters.

Today, at Caktus headquarters, CTO and co-founder of Caktus Colin Copeland will stand at a press conference along with activists, police representatives, and elected officials to announce the launch of OpenDataPolicingNC.com. The first site of its kind, OpenDataPolicingNC.com draws on public records to publish up-to-date stop, search, and use-of-force data—broken down by race and ethnicity—for every police department and officer in the state of North Carolina. The volunteer effort, led by The Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ) and technical leadership by Colin, includes approximately 20 million anonymized data points from 15 years of NC traffic stop data.

Recently, Caktus co-founder Colin Copeland spoke about the creation of a web app that analyzes North Carolina traffic stop data to identify racial bias during the Code for America 2015 Summit. The website allows both police departments and community members to visualize a dataset of more than 18 million stops statewide. Colin spoke with Ian Mance, the originator of the app idea and staff attorney with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. Together with fellow community members, Andy Shapiro and Dylan Young, they used Django, an open source web framework, to make policing data more accessible.

This Thursday, Colin Copeland, CTO and Caktus Group Co-founder, will be co-presenting “Case Study from North Carolina: Identifying Racial Bias in Policing Practices” during the prestigious 2015 Code for America Summit in Oakland, CA. This invite-only event joins technologists, activists, and officials ranging from mayors to White House officials to discuss technology’s role in civic participation.

The Stanford Social Innovation Review recently featured Caktus in “Text the Vote” in Suzie Boss’ “What’s Next: New Approaches to Social Change” column. It describes how our team of developers built the world’s first SMS voter registration system in Libya using RapidSMS.

Recently, one of our projects, Service Info, received national attention thanks to a Marketplace interview. American Public Media’s Kai Ryssdal spoke with International Rescue Committee CEO David Miliband about how Service Info is helping 1.5 million refugees of the Syrian conflict in Lebanon. The Syrian conflict is one of the worst ongoing humanitarian crises, accounting for the majority of the world’s refugees.

Caktus co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Colin Copeland, is among an outstanding group of top business leaders to receive the Triangle Business Journal’s 2015 40 Under 40 Leadership Award. The award recognizes individuals for their remarkable contributions to their organizations and to the community.