Colin Copeland

Colin co-founded Caktus in 2007. As Chief Technical Officer, he helps ensure that Caktus remains at the forefront of the open source community. He regularly implements services and products to better serve clients. He loves coding and still actively works on client projects, often as lead developer.

A proponent of automated testing and continuous integration, Colin is always researching best practices and creating efficiencies to improve deployment processes and provide outstanding support for Caktus clients. He particularly enjoys working on social innovation projects, some of which he’s become involved with through Code For Durham, a civic hacking brigade, which he helped to found around 2013.

One of Colin’s favorite, long-term projects was building the Open Data Policing NC website for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which displayed North Carolina police stop data. As a result of the project, Colin was invited to the White House Police Data Initiative in 2016 to share his ideas on how to ensure law enforcement transparency and accountability. In 2020-2021, Colin worked to relaunch the Open Data Policing NC website as NC Cop Watch. It draws on public records to publish up-to-date stop, search, and use-of-force data — broken down by race and ethnicity.