Welcome to InfoAlamedaCounty, a project developed by
Urban Strategies Council's Research & Technology program.
This site features detailed reports, powerful maps and charts and our interactive mapping platform where you can create your own maps with an incredible array of data for Alameda County and it's communities.
We're now live! Our powerful new web mapping and data visualization platform is now available after too long in development, hit the yellow below and explore our data!
If you're not sure where to start or just what you can do with our platform try this to start!
Open Data, meet Oakland.
If you're an Oakland based coder, developer, designer, journo, researcher and you want to help build the first Oakland OpenData portal then please join us next weekend (Feb 25th @10am). We are partnering with the alpha event of the Code for America Brigade for the first Code Across America day and will spend the day laying out the plans for this new resource for Oaktown.
We want your ideas, feedback, critique, concepts and creative spirit to help us make this work for everyone in Oakland. In mid/late March we will host a hack day in Oakland to do the dev work and get the site up and running, but the planning phase is just as important. We want to brainstorm with you on how we deal with the City/County split, which system we adopt- either the OpenDataPhily or the CKAN system, how it's hosted and who will contribute to maintaining it, branding and promotion and more. We don't want to do this in isolation so here's your chance to help make this happen and to make sure your voice is heard.
We're not about to reinvent the wheel, so we'll be Skyping in with some of the crew from Chattanooga who recently stood up the Phily platform in their town, we'll learn from their process and then work from there. We already have a huge data warehouse of Oakland and Alameda data and we will be publishing it aggressively to whatever site we launch. The city and county are both interested in this happening but have yet to take the lead, so we're doing a Phily and just doing it ourselves. With your help! So register now!
Keep in touch: follow @openoakland and @infoalameda for news and data releases!
Hashtag: #cfa2012 for the day's events.
Join us next weekend for the alpha event of the Code for America Brigade for the first Code Across America day!
We're going to start lifting up what Oakland is really about- great art and culture! Too much bad press gets a brother down, so let's put our heads together and build something dope for our town that will elevate our profile beyond crime and out-of control protests. Art. Art and tech. We are the creative town, so let's make it known.
The previous year's fellows at Code for America built a great little app called the Public Art Mapper- it lets you snap pics and upload locations of any public art in your town, then visitors, friends, tourists can find the great art in our town via a smartphone app, on twitter and even check in to the locations and discuss each spot using Foursquare. The app has already been rolled out in SF, Portland and Philadelphia.

First step to make this happen is for some code lovin Oaklanders to join us in SF (yes, yes, sorry) and work with the app developers to stand up a local instance for our city, then we can go wild collecting data on all the great public art here! Then we start to pass the word around and get people more aware and excited about the public art around town.
Please register if you wan take part, next Saturday 25th, starting at 11am sharp, not too early! No excuses.
Hashtag: #cfa2012
IRC: #codeforamerica
Forum: brigade-dev
The City of Oakland and Urban Strategies Council have developed a new Stressor model for the city using the latest available neighborhood data.
This model provides a rank for every Community Police Beat in Oakland that indicates the relatively high or low levels of 'stress' on a neighborhood. The new model has been adjusted to account for newly available data and also certain data such as poverty that are no longer available from the Census Bureau. The indicators of stress include arrests, crime reports, food stamp recipients, youth incarceration and probation, violent suspensions and chronic absence for OUSD students.
Each Community Police Beat is ranked from 1 through to 57 with 1 indicating the most stressed beat in the city. Beat 34X is the highest ranked beat in 2011.
2011 Top 5 Beats
1 34X
2 30X
3 29X
4 35X
5 06XWe would like to applaud and spread the word about Alameda County's increased offerings for geospatial data. For anyone who looked before, you remember the single layer of parcel outlines. The new offerings include layers from supervisor districts to sanitation districts. This is a small step towards open data and we look forward to seeing the county continue along this course.
The layers are static and can be downloaded as zipped shapefiles.
Go to the site and start downloading: http://acgov.org/gis.htm
Through the last two hackathons in Oakland, our connections to CodeforAmerica and the CityCamp events in SF we know there's a huge interest in opendata in the east bay. The good news? It's coming. The bad news? Well, it's not so bad. The City of Oakland and Alameda County are both working with us to help draft policies to make OpenData a default in our government, yes this is awesome. What can you as a developer, hacker, urbanist, student, researcher, policy analyst do to help? Well the agencies in both jurisdictions have a huge amount of data to work on releasing, but to make this easier a path and to be responsive to our East Bay folks we want to prioritize data that is eagerly wanted by our residents. So please send this around and give us your thoughts- what data would be helpful, powerful, valuable to you in your work, hobbies, development?
As a nonprofit we aren't promising that every single item we all want will get released fast, some may not exist, but we will document all your ideas and present this to the groups working with us inside government and also to our elected officials so they know what the people really want. Sound good? If it doesn't please let us know what you would like to see happen!
Newsletter Signup