Open San Diego

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.

Companies and civic agencies need to develop innovative partnerships with city leaders, partnerships that leverage a city’s data to make better decisions and address the greater good.

Explore Data with Us at Drumbeat San Diego

Our friends at New Media Rights are organizing Drumbeat San Diego, which they describe as a “new kind of gathering of technologists, artists, filmmakers, attorneys, community organizers, and creators of all types.”

Drumbeat is happening on February 5th, 2011 at Queen Bee’s Art & Cultural Center in North Park. Register for the event. It’s free, although you can donate if you want.

We’re excited to be participating in Drumbeat along with our friends from the Watchdog Institute. We’ll be there examining data gathered by the Watchdog Institute from over 35,000 911 calls from July of 2010.

We’re still working on the curriculum for our session, but expect the following:

• Insights into how journalists get access to data, and how you can too.
• A workshop on how to develop a meaningful and useful data visualization.
• A discussion on the best ways to make data more available and useful to people.

In anticipation of the event, we invite you to download the data and play with it. Click here to download a .zip including the 911 data in a .csv and a text file describing what the data mean.

Please, by all means, go nuts. Do whatever you want with the data. Think about practical questions that the data can answer and try to answer those questions. Tweet us about it or email us about it. Hopefully, we’ll see you at Drumbeat and you can tell us about what you came up with.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

As a diverse city that supports countless industries and maverick interests, New York excels at creating those eclectic networks. Subcultures and small businesses generate ideas and skills that inevitably diffuse through society, influencing other groups. As the sociologist Claude Fischer put it in an influential essay on subcultures published in 1975, “The larger the town, the more likely it is to contain, in meaningful numbers and unity, drug addicts, radicals, intellectuals, ‘swingers’, health-food faddists, or whatever; and the more likely they are to influence (as well as offend) the conventional center of the society.”

Those unusual influences leak out into the business world, and shape the ideas – and the personnel – of startups. The same pattern can be found in the last great flowering of high-tech scenius in Silicon Valley, which was shaped as much by the counterculture that thrived in the San Francisco Bay Area as it was by the engineering prowess of Stanford University.

The future belongs to the companies who figure out how to collect and use data successfully. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and LinkedIn have all tapped into their datastreams and made that the core of their success. They were the vanguard, but newer companies like bit.ly are following their path. Whether it’s mining your personal biology, building maps from the shared experience of millions of travellers, or studying the URLs that people pass to others, the next generation of successful businesses will be built around data.

Our world is shaped by widespread statistical illiteracy. We fear things that probably won’t kill us (terrorist attacks) and ignore things that probably will (texting while driving). We buy lottery tickets. We fall prey to misleading gut instincts, which lead to biases like loss aversion—an inability to gauge risk against potential gain. The effects play out in the grocery store, the office, and the voting booth (not to mention the bedroom: People who are more risk-averse are less successful in love).