Open Metrics started the way most good things do, which is a few people getting annoyed in a cafe.
The annoyance: cities collect an enormous amount of data about the place you live. When the bus runs. Where the money goes. Which intersections quietly try to kill cyclists. Almost all of it is public, in the sense that it technically exists and you are technically allowed to have it, right after you file three requests and learn a file format invented in 1987.
So we started pulling it into the open and turning it into things a normal person can read. A map. A chart. A single honest number. We ran codefests, which is a generous word for ordering too much pizza and arguing about transit feeds until something works.
We are not a government office and we are not trying to become one. We do not have a mission statement with the word synergy in it. We have a spreadsheet, a strong opinion about bar charts, and the belief that data the public paid for should be data the public can use.
That is the whole thing. Welcome. The coffee is fine and the datasets are better.