City of Austin Open Data Initiative April Meetup Recap
On Wednesday, April 6th, the City of Austin Open Data Initiative Team hosted an educational meetup and update at the City Council Chambers of City Hall.
The Open Data Initiative (ODI) is moving progress forward internally through a “sprint” model, where each sprint represents a 90-day time frame. The current sprint, ODI sprint 2.1 began on February 16th and will end on May 16th, 2016.
For an overview of objectives of the current ODI sprint, visit http://sprint.opendata.rocks.
Open Data Initiative Sprint 2.1 Updates
Four of the six captains that serve as leads on the sprint objectives presented updates on the progress towards their goals.
Brad McCarty, captain of inventory team shared that they are trying to create a process for maintaining the city wide inventory of datasets. They are looking at examples from New York and San Francisco of how they manage their data inventories.
Marbenn Cayetano, captains the team working to update the documentation of Austin’s open data assets on the US Open Data Census website. The team is currently breaking up the census into sections and assigning out tasks. So far, they have submitted one update.
Hailey Pate, gave an update that the sprint definition document is available to the public at http://sprint.opendata.rocks. She also gave an update on the “Request a Dataset” Workflow. Her team is deciding what do they want the experience for requesting, voting, and filtering dataset request to be like. They met with CoA Enterprise Architect Rob Byrd to design a workflow that is software platform agnostic. By the end of the project, the team hopes to have to built a solution in Github, or at least have requirements to give to a vendor.
Janette Milan leads the team working on Open Data Portal Homepage redesign. They recently opened an alpha preview of the new landing page design (warning: this demo link is liable to break in the near future). Janette’s team also published a user survey to collect feedback from the community. They will be providing a report to the Open Government Governing Board.
At the end of May, there will be another ODI Meetup with presentations on the outcomes of the sprint.
Guest Speakers
In addition to the City of Austin team updates, the majority of the meetup was dedicated to two separate presentations.
First, Stuart Gano, a solutions architect at Socrata spoke about open data trends he’s seeing across the country. The key insight I took away from Stuart’s presentation is that open government data started with uncontroversial topics, like building permits, or service requests by district. Governments would avoid more touchy topics like police data incident responses and officer involved shootings.
But within the last year, police data has been a driving force behind open data publication across the country. This data is what citizens are asking for. Additionally, these topics are receiving national attention, for example the White House Police Data Initiative.
Here is a link to the Austin Police Departments’s Office Involved Shootings dataset, which only went live towards the end of last year.
Then, Professor Unmil Karadkar from UT’s School of Information gave a presentation on basics of data visualization, what is the difference between dynamic dashboards and curated infographics, and what types of visualizations are most effective for different datasets.
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