News (9)
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
This past Saturday a group of East Bay and San Francisco hackers, coders, researchers and press got together for a hastily organized opendata hackathon as part of the worldwide OpenData Day hackathon. Once again the commitment and enthusiasm shown by a great bunch of software engineers and developers impressed me: when so much media attention is directed at deriding the younger generations as lazy and entitled and selfish it's such a telling thing to have twenty people give up their entire Saturday to discuss local civic issues and build software applications to address common needs across our communities.
In true CityCamp format the attendees broke into two groups, one focused on a software app that was conceptualized on the day and the other group to learn and scheme around how technology can improve public accountability, political transparency and encourage both innovation and business development in the City of Oakland and Alameda County. These unconference events are always an incredibly rich time of learning, sharing and connecting- it is far too rare an occasion that sees journalists, coders and social researchers collaborating and building on each other's knowledge and experience. We also had a video presentation from Jeanne Holm with the US Government's Data.gov team to share the work that s being led nationally to open up the enormous federal datasets for public use. The only component missing from this event was any representation from the city itself which was disappointing.
The developer team leaped onto a project formulated by a few of the attendees; the need to find fee-free ATMS for Credit Union members. The team was able to pull down data on all the local ATMS available to credit union members and build a HTML5 app that will work on any smart phone or newer browser. The service is online now at 99atms.com.
Into Action
It's great to see how an unmet need can be plugged by agile developers so fast and simply, and to see then how this work can be connected to the communities who need the access to information like this. Our own ACCAN collaboration (Alameda County Community Asset Network) is a perfect nexus for this great new resource- the group consists of 35 organizations in the county who are involved in serving low income families through credit repair, budgeting training, foreclosure prevention and a variety of other essential services to help low income families make better use of their limited resources and move along the pathway out of poverty. This is the perfect audience for a great new idea like 99atms.com, and by helping to connect innovative new ideas like this one that Max Ogden, Hoke and the rest of the team built to an audience that can put it to good use is one of the roles we relish here. Seeing great new tech and finding where to plug it in and have it make a real impact on our communities, that's a core part of our Research & Tech team's focus.
We need to thank Adriel Hampton for his quick support in getting this event launched and all the incredible crew who participated on the day. Oakland has so many unmet needs and we have a very exciting set of challenges to find sponsors for at our next big CityCamp Oakland in 2012. Follow us @infoalameda to keep up on progress for this next big event in the East Bay!
Press coverage on our event here.
National Institute of Justice Innovation in Crime Mapping Award
Written by Spike
Large PDF Version (Right Click and download only, 22MB file will hang many browsers)
East Oakland has faced multiple crisis over the past decades from heavy disinvestment in the mid century to spiraling crime and unemployment and failing public school systems in the 80's through to today. On top of this long term stress for this part of our city, the predatory lending of the early 2000's has resulted in massive foreclosures across an area with historically stable home ownership.
The Oakland Community Land Trust was formed to stabilize these communities and our model has combined very detailed neighborhood level data on crime, assets, foreclosure and housing condition to ensure our work is data-driven and proactive.
This map illustrates the growing burden of the foreclosure crisis on this part of Oakland over time and the changes in stability in serious crime in this neighborhood that makes any form of neighborhood stabilization that much harder.
Last night under the watch of the news media and police helicopters, the first ever Oakland Innovators awards were given out by the InOak hosts on the rooftop garden at the Kaiser Center by the lake. Urban Strategies Council's Research team, OaklandLocal and a few great local businesses were awarded the first ever OpenSource Innovators Award by InOak for our team effort in putting together the first ever Code For Oakland hackathon and datacamp in the east bay. We're excited about the prospects for more open government and opendata in our city and are close to announcing the first ever CityCamp in Oakland too!
More details at InOak
We have all heard people in government and the nonprofit sector talk up the idea of data driven decision making, but the truth is this is more often than not just talk and not backed up by real action. So when local government really takes this seriously and does actively use data for planning, decision making and the like we're really excited about it. In Oakland we helped the city develop this thing called a Stressor index many years ago for just these purposes. People wanted to know some relative measure of stress or distress on a neighborhood compared to others in the city, and as this was largely related to public safety we chose police beats as the areas for this model. We took readily available census data on populations, poverty, crime, arrests, public assistance, school issues and more and built a simple but useful model of the stressors a neighborhood can face. it's been very useful for both the city, the Oakland Police Dept (OPD) and many nonprofits involved in violence prevention and community development.
With the arrival of the new census 2010 data for our cities and neighborhoods this year the City asked us to update this useful model so as to be making decisions based on the latest numbers- an important move given the massive changes in Oaktown as a result of violence, foreclosures, massive unemployment, school problems and the rest- our city has changed and so must our data right! Cue disaster. Of the federal kind. Our all-knowing government has totally revamped our census process, and the first of the measurable impacts of their decisions are just hitting home in Oakland. The Stressor model, considered very important to many agencies is dead. With the limited information collected in the 2010 Census, the bureau is unable to produce most of what was published using the 2000 census, including the all important measures of poverty, population on public assistance and unemployment. Pretty important measures for this model. There is always the American Community Survey (ACS) to consider as a data source- unfortunately because of poor/small sampling the data are only being released at the census tract level and no lower- and the tract boundaries don't even come close to matching the beat boundaries (or should that be the other way around...?). Given a huge spatial misalignment and the massive margins of error in these ACS data (as these are sampled data they have errors- at the tract level the margins of error for poverty in Oakland are as large as the numbers themselves- very hard to trust!), we no longer have any way to calculate these essential data for the Stressors model.
As opendata and opengov are increasingly powerful movements, without quality data of the right type even this new Gov2.0 effort often is not enough. When federal agencies do not have a grasp on the needs and uses of their data at a grassroots, academic and community level they will make decisions that impact us and as with the ACS these decisions are now starting to have a serious impact on important work in our communities. Data driven is great, but poor data means poor decisions.
We're open to ideas others have about rebuilding the Stressor model using other sources, we have some ideas but would love your thoughts too! The last update of the model is attached if you're that way inclined...
To all the developers, coders, graphic designers, engaged citizens and tech heads in the East Bay,
Join us on June 4 for the first ever Oakland hackathon/bar camp dedicated to building applications that meet the needs of our local community.
This event is being organized by Urban Strategies Council along with Innovative Oakland, Oakland Local and Code for America.
Twitter hashtag: #code4oakland
If you haven't heard about our exciting new hackathon Code for Oakland read more about it here and join us on June 4 at the Kaiser Center.
One thing that has become clear to many city and federal government agencies in dozens of countries worldwide, is that opening up government data for public use is an incredible spur for innovation, accountability and creativity. Making public data available to the public in formats that are easily accessible has led to some incredible new technologies that are transforming communities in San Francisco, New York and Philadelphia. To open up city and county databases to public use at first seems like a very threatening idea to many government agencies with valid concerns about legality, responsible use and more, however the precedent has been set very aggressively by the federal CIO in D.C. and these other leading cities.
March 30 is worldwide Document Freedom Day! Why should you care? What does this mean to you anyway? Read on and discover something new for the day..
For democracy to be truly representative and effective, citizens must be able to access the information governments use for decision making and operating. Much of our work involves accessing sensitive government data then cleaning and presenting those data in a way that educates the community and public agencies and can improve the decision making process- often called data-driven decision making. In order for residents of a community to gain meaningful access to government data, those data and documents need to be made available in formats that are actually usable by regular folks and techies alike, hence the need for Open Standards and Document Freedom efforts. Too many government agencies still use practices like responding to a Public records Act request by delivering boxes of photocopied papers - following the letter of the law but making every effort possible to stifle transparency and openness.
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