Open San Diego

San Diego needs one of these.

Fri, 18 May 2012 16:51:10 -0400

San Diego needs one of these.

Setting up ArtAround in San Diego

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 22:19:57 -0400

It’s been nearly a month since we hosted our Code Across America event at SDSU’s Viz Center, and I’m just now getting around to writing about it, and particularly, the excellent work done by the team who worked on the ArtAround App.

Overall the event was a great success. We got a great mix of developers, designers, and simply curious citizens to spend a beautiful Saturday inside talking about how to make San Diego better. We also got a visit from Bonnie Dumanis, our district attorney and mayoral candidate. Bonnie shared her thoughts on the importance of open government with the group, but spent most of her time listening in and learning from other participants. I also want to publicly thank her for donating $250 to Open San Diego. I’m proud that everything we’ve done so far is the result of 100% pure volunteerism, but Bonnie’s donation is going to help us cover the expenses of becoming a real non-profit.

But enough about the event. Dave Maass already wrote a blog post about the it at San Diego CityBeat, and Xavier Leonard has already written a recap of the work put into setting up Azavea’s excellent Open Data Catalog here in San Diego. This post is about our plans to set up a sustainable version of ArtAround here in San Diego.

ArtAround is a web and mobile-based application designed to create a “comprehensive, living map of all public [art] in DC.” Notably, it’s a public-private partnership between the DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities and the Washington DC Economic Partnership. The software that powers the app is open-source, so we installed it on an EC2 server the night before the event and the ArtAround team used the event to discuss how to make it work in San Diego.

They immediately noticed that it was built based on the concept of DC’s “wards” rather than what we just call “neighborhoods.” Not a big deal. It wouldn’t be too difficult to swap DC’s wards out for San Diego’s neighborhoods and even include neighborhoods in Tijuana, all the way down to Puerto Nuevo.

Beyond that, the team discussed what it would take to make the app acutally work. That is, can we set it up, keep it running, fill it with useful data, get people to use it, and support it? What would we need? We were particularly lucky to have Kinsee Morlan in attendance, who, as CityBeat’s arts editor, was able to point out a number of existing resources of data that we could include in the app. Here’s what the team came up with:

Task: Deploy the service. Update the look of the site. Deploy it and the iPhone and Android apps. NEED: Rails coder, web artist, iOS coder, Android coder.
Task: Gather existing data and put it into the app as a starter set of data. NEED: Web-friendly data volunteers with some art knowledge.
Task: Write the “about this” and FAQ sections. NEED: Copy writer and/or editor.
Task: Develop a PR campaign to get the app in front of people both in San Diego and tourists. Bring in Balboa Park, SD CVB, ArtWalk, South Park business association, universities. NEED: Public Relations and Marketing volunteer, and some represenative of the app.
Create a sticker or sign to add to public art, put it at the airport. NEED: Graphic artist volunteer.
Launch event/party/tour? NEED: event planning volunteer, some funding.
Ongoing: Ask groups like Urban Art Trail to contribute lists of their artwork. NEED: Point-of-contact coordinator.
Ongoing: Manage the data and keep track of flagged items. NEED: Data quality team volunteers and community manager.

(you can see more of the team’s notes in this Google Doc)

As you can see, it’s a lot of work. One thing that the list doesn’t explicitly mention, but hints at, is the need for a leader. This is why I think it’s notable that ArtAround is the work of two groups already working to make DC better. For this to work in San Diego, we’ll need someone to own the project and drive it forward. We proved that there are San Diegans willing to volunteer to support it, but we still need someone to drive the project. If you think you’re that person, let me know at jed@opensandiego.org.

I’m usually skeptical about the “let’s build an app!” approach to open government, but this exercise made me think twice. It was really useful because it showed how a piece of useful software can bring together various groups from the city – designers, coders, community managers, the media, and civic-minded citizens – to create a public good.

My usual grumble about building apps is that it’s easy to deploy a quick app, but very difficult to keep it alive. I don’t want people to believe that simply deploying an app is a solution per se. Rather, it’s just the beginning of much longer project. The great thing about apps, however, is that they’re great proofs of concept that we can use to start deeper conversations about how to make things better.

So, the conversation continues… Watch this space for updates on ArtAround San Diego as we proceed! And again, if you want to volunteer on this project, write me at jed@opensandiego.org.

Code Across America Hackathon at the SDSU Visualization...

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:32:41 -0400

Code Across America Hackathon at the SDSU Visualization Center

Code Across America Hackathon: Open Data San Diego Team Report

On Saturday, March 3rd, Open San Diego got in on the Code Across America action. Dr. Eric Frost graciously offered up his Visualization Center at San Diego State University for our workspace and we made good use of its panoramic wall projection capabilities throughout the day.

San Diego’s District Attorney (and current mayoral candidate) Bonnie Dumanis joined us and made some introductory remarks about the good she hopes Open Data/Gov can “do for San Diego.” Fellow hackathoner Dave Maass posted a video and further details about Dumanis’ participation in an SD CityBeat blog post.

We elected to build upon the code for Art Around, from TheArtAround.us, and the Open Data Catalog from OpenDataPhilly.org. We divided ourselves into two teams to get started. I was on the Open Data SD team, so this rest of this post only covers that portion the day’s activity.

We began by evaluating the tool as deployed by OpenDataPhilly.org. In addition to noting the need for some cosmetic customization, we decided to alter the interface so that there would be fewer steps between identifying/selecting a data set and actually using that set. That choice was made out of appreciation for the interface of Open San Diego’s current Flashlght resource (set up and maintained by Dave). The Open Data Catalog (ODC) and Flashlight have the same objective, and we already know that San Diegans have found Flashlight useful, so taking it as a starting point is an obvious choice. It also makes sense to begin by propagating our Open Data Catalog installation with all the information currently contained in Flashlight.

Our team spent the rest of our time together working out a “next steps” list and hashing out the the best ways to go about completing those tasks. Here’s the list:

Work out a way to export the notes and links data from Flashlight (powered by a Delicious.com tag collection on) into a spreadsheet using the Delicious API.

Recruit help by giving a presentation to SDSU’s Society of Professional Journalists student group.

Work with that student group to complete and update all of the current Flashlight content.

Use the updated spreadsheet to populate the ODC installation.

Complete the cosmetic design changes to the ODC interface.

Port the web app to iOS and Android.

-Xavier

"We have to be able to collect the data in the first place. We have a Chief Information Officer for..."

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:32:06 -0500

““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”

- Gov. Abercrombie on Open Data (via digiphile)

Open Architecture [i.e., The Internet Is a Human Right]

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 12:40:05 -0500

Open Architecture [i.e., The Internet Is a Human Right]:

civiccommons:

continuations:

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..."

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 18:25:25 -0500

““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”

- News from The Associated Press

Gov 2.0 goes mainstream in the AP.
(via digiphile)

Ryan X-13 Vertijet c. 1955 by San Diego Air & Space Museum...

Thu, 05 May 2011 15:17:00 -0400

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!

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 22:17:00 -0400

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!

sunfoundation: 85 open data portals around the world, map...

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 12:52:11 -0400

sunfoundation:

85 open data portals around the world, map assembled by BuzzData.

Working hard to put San Diego on this map!

lookhigh: Marcelino Alvarez was getting frustrated and a little...

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 14:23:18 -0400

lookhigh:

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...

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 17:09:07 -0500

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.

"Today, we’re opening the Public Data Explorer to your data. We’re making a new data format, the..."

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 16:43:49 -0500

“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)

—

This is great news!

Stanford's visualization group released a tool for cleaning and transforming data

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 02:12:17 -0500

Stanford's visualization group released a tool for cleaning and transforming data:

jimray:

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.

"Companies and civic agencies need to develop innovative partnerships with city leaders, partnerships..."

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:15:24 -0500

“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.”

- How To Save America’s Cities With Data Analytics - Forbes.com (via smartercities)

Explore Data with Us at Drumbeat San Diego

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 01:09:01 -0500

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.

Microsoft hires OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast and donates aerial imagery

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 15:11:18 -0500

Microsoft hires OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast and donates aerial imagery:

jimray:

Microsoft’s history with hiring high profile open source developers is pretty mixed, but I’m cautiously optimistic all the same. The aerial imagery is a pretty big deal.

This is good news for Open San Diego!

A Hundred Million 311 Calls

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 10:51:38 -0500

A Hundred Million 311 Calls:

designlanguage:

This Wired article charts the nature and location of calls.

(Via Infosthetics)

Let’s do this for San Diego.

"As a diverse city that supports countless industries and maverick interests, New York excels at..."

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 14:58:11 -0400

“

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.

”

- Steven Johnson writing in Financial Times about how cities produce ideas

—

Between the dynamics of our border with Mexico, our three major universities, our port, our huge scientific community, and our proximity to the creative engine that is LA, I have no doubt that San Diego is destined for (even more) everlasting greatness.

"The future belongs to the companies who figure out how to collect and use data successfully. Google,..."

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 11:05:00 -0400

“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.”

- What Is Data Science

"Our world is shaped by widespread statistical illiteracy. We fear things that probably won’t kill us..."

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 18:28:00 -0400

“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).”

- 7 Essential Skills You Didn’t Learn in College - Wired

One of Open San Diego’s goals is to provide more opportunities for San Diegans to learn about data, what it is, where to find it, how to understand it, and how to use it.