We 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!

What data do you want?