Urban Strategies Council has been sourcing local public data for decades to be used in analysis, in research and to support data driven decision making in our community, and now we're supporting the idea of opening government data for real, efficient, equitable public access. The City of Oakland has eagerly jumped onto this Code4Oakland event as a great opportunity to engage residents and especially local software developers as well we residents with issues that may be improved through tech solutions. However the single biggest stumbling block to our community benefiting from the huge pool of interested, engaged developers, hackers and data junkies has been the total lack of open, public data across almost every city and county agency.
In mid 2010 our Research & Tech team decided that we would encourage this opendata effort locally by building our new data mapping & visualization system with a focus on accessible data. Instead of being a proxy for a local government data silo, we would open our data warehouse for public access in all cases where it was safe to do so- we take protection of our confidential data very seriously.Our new web mapping platform is about to hit public beta in the next couple of weeks, but in anticipation of this hackathon and the need for good, reliable local data we fast tracked the release of a chunk of local datasets, the are available in our Data Portal here. Initially our data is being released in shapefile format, when we complete our platform we will have google earth KML files, CSV text files, shapefiles and a number of REST APIs available for developers and analysts to tap into.
We currently have available the following datasets:
Block Groups
Tracts
Cities
School districts
Supervisor Districts
City Council Districts
Police Beats
Police Command Areas (soon to change...)
Neighborhoods
Redevelopment areas
Philanthropic and government initiative areas
Voting precincts
Colleges
Schools
Health Clinics
Hospitals
Psychiatric Health Clinics
Toxic Hazard Sites
In addition to our own efforts to open up data in Oakland/Alameda, the City of Oakland has also agreed to release a set of files for the event. This is the first time the City has made a significant chunk of data publicly available and easy to obtain, and we're excited about this step forward for our town! The official City of Oakland data page now lives at http://www2.oaklandnet.com/Government/o/CityAdministration/OAK029272
The datasets they have released for this event include:
| Assessor Parcel Data | AssessorData |
| CIP Locations | Capital Improvements Locations |
| CIP Locations (not Single Address) | Capital Improvements Locations (not Single Address) |
| Pools | City Swimming Pools |
| Council Districts | Council Districts |
| CPRB Complaints | Citizens Complaints |
| CPRB Sustained Allegations | Sustained Allegations |
| Crime Watch Tabular Data | Sustained Allegations |
| Even Start | Even Start |
| Food Distribution Sites | Food Distribution Sites |
| Head Start Locations | Head Start |
| Library Branches | Library Branches |
| Oakland Parks | Parks |
| Schools | Oakland Unified Schools |
| Post Offices | Oakland Post Offices |
| Senior Centers | Senior Centers |
| Sage Programs | Senior Programs |
| Stars Programs | Youth Programs |
We're excited to see what great apps and ideas get developed at the Code for Oakland event using these data now they are available!
If you're not sure why this whole open data thing really matters, consider a typical scenario as it currently plays out across almost every local government agency in Oakland and Alameda County:
- You have an idea, research project, development, issue you need to work on.
- You know roughly the data you need to support your issue, explain your problem or to answer your question.
- You try to find any data relevant to your issue- search google, search government web sites, and you invariably find nothing. Frustration.
- You call a city agency and perhaps get put through to someone who is overworked and not sure about the legality of giving you the data you want, and likely they're not sure what they have either.
- Aforementioned government worker spends time digging up the data you wanted, tries to get is approved and gives you a proprietary file format or a scanned PDF document. Neither of which you can do much with.
- You get desperate and make a PRA request for the info you wanted, wait months and maybe get just what you wanted. Or if you have a known reputation for reliable data/research work you negotiate a MOU/NDA with the agency for their raw data, taking days of effort form your staff and agency staff.
The open data scenario plays out much differently. Now pretend you're in San Francisco or New York City.
- You have an idea, research project, development, issue you need to work on.
- You know roughly the data you need to support your issue, explain your problem or to answer your question.
- You visit your city's open data portal, do a quick search and discover the data you want in a freely available format or as a feed, you tap it and can get working on your analysis right away.
- Government time is spent simply uploading the data or building an automated upload mechanism so public databases get synched with the online versions so the public have access to near real-time information on their city. Not on responding to hundreds of data requests from hundreds of residents!
