Meeting Titans of Open Data

The recent Association of Public Data Users (APDU) Conference gave me the opportunity to meet some people who have made tremendous contributions to the world of Open Data. One of the most popular R packages I've published is choroplethrZip. This package contains the US Census Bureau's Zip Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) map, as well as metadata and visualization functions. It literally never occurred to me to think about who created the first ZCTA map, the methodology for creating it, and so on. It turns out that one of the people who created the ZCTA map – Jon Sperling – was at the conference.