We have to be able to collect the data in the first place. We have a Chief Information Officer for the first time. And I’ve made a proposal to the legislature that we make a capital investment, not just an operating cost investment, in the most modern capacity for technology transfer of every kind, hardware and software. But that’s going to take tens of millions of dollars in order to do that because we’re so far behind, because our technology capability is so primitive now in the state. But we’re assembling exactly what it will take in order to accomplish that. And I’m hopeful that the legislature will give us a start this year, and then when we come into the new legislative session and new biennium after the election, we’ll have a full across-the-board proposal for that. The questioner couldn’t be more right, we need to do that, but not just for the public as such, we need to do it internally across the state, so the public can have the best possible information.”-Hawaii Governor Abercrombie
Open Architecture [i.e., The Internet Is a Human Right] →
The Internet is not really a technology but rather a set of principles that have become embodied in a bunch of different technologies. I am going to quote at some length from a document that Cerf also co-authored about the history of the Internet:
The Internet as we now know it embodies a key underlying technical idea, namely that of open architecture networking. In this approach, the choice of any individual network technology was not dictated by a particular network architecture but rather could be selected freely by a provider and made to interwork with the other networks through a meta-level “Internetworking Architecture”
Albert Wenger discusses how the Open Architecture of the internet contributes fundamental rights and freedoms that it offers.
When we talk about “Government as a Platform”, we’re largely drawing a parallel between the architecture of government technology (and cities, more broadly) and the architecture of the Internet. The idea, described above, that an open architecture is not about any one technology, but rather about a set of principles that can be embodied by different technologies, is the key. By building around an open architecture, guided by open standards, new specific technologies can be inserted, replaced, and improved as necessary, without disrupting the overall structure. The freedom that this architecture embodies explicitly encourages innovation, by decreasing the cost of changing or improving any one component, or of adding something new on top of the system.
This all sounds a bit abstract, I’m sure, so for our part at Civic Commons, we’ll work on tying these concepts into more concrete examples.
The idea, advocates of open data say, is to transform government from a centralized provider of services into a platform on which citizens can build their own tools to make government work better.”—Marcus Wohlsen
Ryan X-13 Vertijet c. 1955 by San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives on Flickr.
The San Diego Air & Space Museum has added its photo archives to Flickr Commons.
Bravo!
Come Learn R with Us!
Our very own Brian Conner (who is great) has offered to provide a high speed introduction to R, a free software environment for statistical computing and data visualization. From installation to data manipulation to plots and maps in one hour.
We’ll be holding it at the San Diego Foundation (map) at 6:30pm on April 20th.
Here’s what you can expect:
15 min:
- What is R for? Outline a basic process of data analysis
- Installation & Packages
- Basic R Syntax (math, variables, loops, conditional logic, getting help, etc)
- Vectors (the most basic R data structure) and functions
15 min:
- Loading data
- More Data Structures (Data Frames, Factors)
- Manipulating & Exploring Loaded Data
25 min:
- Graphing & exploring data with ggplot2 (and some other packages)
- Writing a function (if time allows)
- Plotting data on a map (if time allows)
Hopefully we’ll have time for questions too!
Important! This class is designed to be suitable for programmers and non-programmers (excel-level users) alike. It’s easier for us to accomplish our goal of making data available for people to use if we can help more people use data! Please don’t be intimidated and come on out!
85 open data portals around the world, map assembled by BuzzData.
Working hard to put San Diego on this map!
Marcelino Alvarez was getting frustrated and a little paranoid last week as he watched news reports about radiation levels in Japan and plumes drifting across the Pacific….
Alvarez got an idea: Enlist an army of citizen scientists to buy Geiger counters — they’re advertised online for several hundred dollars — and send radiation measurements to a website for posting and continual updating.
‘Citizen Scientists’ Crowdsource Radiation Measurements In Japan : NPR
![smartercities:
IBM Unveils CityForward.org Data Site for Urban Planners
Source: Wall St. Journal
IBM on Wednesday introduced CityForward.org, a new free website intended to provide more complete data to city planners, as well as community groups and individuals. The site doesn’t actually create data, but aggregates data sets from various agencies in more than 50 cities around the world, with data from another 30 cities being added soon.
According to John Tolva, IBM’s director of citizenship and technology, city data such as traffic patterns, crime statistics, or consumer spending are already available to planners, but “fairly opaque” and difficult to access because it’s published in PDFs and spreadsheets, and often requires even government employees to navigate complex inter-agency bureaucracies. Tolva said that putting the data online makes it easier to read, chart, and correlate with data from other agencies or localities.
For example, he told Digits, a researcher in San Francisco was able to compare calls from a given neighborhood to the city’s 311 hot line with 911 calls from the same neighborhood, and then correlate vagrancy with a particular type of drug use. “It’s a more nuanced version of the broken window theory” (which posits that vandalism leads to additional criminal behavior), he said.
Tolva said he hopes that the site will contribute to a “renaissance in the profession of urban planning,” which has often had to rely more on anecdotes than data. He pointed to a chart evaluating the impact on traffic of increased tolls on bridges and tunnels in New York City as an example of how this kind of data could be used to influence public debate on topics like congestion pricing — a failed 2008 proposal to limit automobile traffic in Manhattan during the week. “The discussion [in 2008] wasn’t exactly data-driven,” Tolva noted.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lhjwxmLcLL1qzlda3o1_400.jpg)
IBM Unveils CityForward.org Data Site for Urban Planners
Source: Wall St. Journal
IBM on Wednesday introduced CityForward.org, a new free website intended to provide more complete data to city planners, as well as community groups and individuals. The site doesn’t actually create data, but aggregates data sets from various agencies in more than 50 cities around the world, with data from another 30 cities being added soon.
According to John Tolva, IBM’s director of citizenship and technology, city data such as traffic patterns, crime statistics, or consumer spending are already available to planners, but “fairly opaque” and difficult to access because it’s published in PDFs and spreadsheets, and often requires even government employees to navigate complex inter-agency bureaucracies. Tolva said that putting the data online makes it easier to read, chart, and correlate with data from other agencies or localities.
For example, he told Digits, a researcher in San Francisco was able to compare calls from a given neighborhood to the city’s 311 hot line with 911 calls from the same neighborhood, and then correlate vagrancy with a particular type of drug use. “It’s a more nuanced version of the broken window theory” (which posits that vandalism leads to additional criminal behavior), he said.
Tolva said he hopes that the site will contribute to a “renaissance in the profession of urban planning,” which has often had to rely more on anecdotes than data. He pointed to a chart evaluating the impact on traffic of increased tolls on bridges and tunnels in New York City as an example of how this kind of data could be used to influence public debate on topics like congestion pricing — a failed 2008 proposal to limit automobile traffic in Manhattan during the week. “The discussion [in 2008] wasn’t exactly data-driven,” Tolva noted.
Today, we’re opening the Public Data Explorer to your data. We’re making a new data format, the Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL), openly available, and providing an interface for anyone to upload their datasets. DSPL is an XML-based format designed from the ground up to support rich, interactive visualizations like those in the Public Data Explorer. The DSPL language and upload interface are available in Google Labs.
Official Google Blog: Visualize your own data in the Google Public Data Explorer (via harrisj)
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This is great news!
(via jimray)
Stanford's visualization group released a tool for cleaning and transforming data →
All web-based, it takes care of the hard part of data processing and gives you data in a clean format. The demo looks pretty magical.
