City of Chicago Data Portal
data.cityofchicago.org
data.cityofchicago.org
But once you start to dig a bit deeper and scratch the surface, just barely, you can see that it's actually a graveyard of an open data era gone by. Many of the datasets here look like this:
https://data.cityofchicago.org/FOIA/FOIA-Request-Log-Mayor-s...
Where they were initially placed online, perhaps with an attempt to be more transparent and open to the public, and they haven't been updated since 2012. The political points got scored by the elected officials and appointees, but either the software that the career bureaucrats is too burdensome to use, or the will to be open to the public just isn't there.
After spending 10 years in this field, That's the primary problem with these transparency efforts. They sound great to the public, and great to the politicians, but nobody bothers to sell the staff of government on why it's important. And when they don't want to do something, or when they're not sold on it, it just doesn't get done.
Software designers and "civic hackers" need to grok that to be successful their first customer isn't the public or the politician, it's usually the career civil servant.
I do agree with you though that UX is one of governments biggest problems. Imagine the training dollars that could be saved if enterprise software was as intuitive as consumer software, let alone the intangible efficiency gains from things getting done more quickly/effectively.
And not some ham fisted usability standard, the best response I can see is getting user advocates involved early in the process. Get some vendor trials going asap and immediately disqualify anything that isn't even trying in the UX department. Just one more thing for gov project managers to think about sadly which is why it won't happen.
So far, we have a financial transparency product available to cities. Check out Palo Alto's site on OpenGov: http://paloalto.opengov.com.
Transparency visualizations for the public are one thing, but one of our ultimate goals is to positively impact the civic financial planning. Keep an eye on OpenGov.
We're growing fast and looking for developers, designers, and data scientists. If you're interested, hit me up: aliebchen at opengov dot com. YOU could help build our public API.
Doesn't take away from the original post, but could be interested for anyone who might have some influence in their local government to know this is fairly off-the-shelf.
[1] https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Crimes-2001-to-...
I'm not surprised to see that salaries are the the most popular data set by far. I was working for a public agency during the first year they made salary information readily available.
There were two main types in the deluge of complaints:
1.) The significant others of people who had been lying about their income.
2.) People dripping with rage that 'uneducated' people (jobs that don't require a degree) were collecting 'outrageous' (lower middle-class) salaries.
I would agree.
What the experience above and others since evidenced to me is that quite a few people look at a degree as ticket - admission to a higher class.
They see the people who manage to earn above their apparent class as frauds - stowaways who don't belong. People who are somehow gaming the system - stealing what degree holders are entitled to.
I'm not sure what to make of it exactly. I'd guess it's an amalgamation of crushing student loan debt, the misleading marketing of college as a guarantee of prosperity and perhaps a socially acceptable facade for old-fashioned class/race discrimination.
That's an odd way to phrase that. There are plenty of people who are born with this aptitude who take different actions in life and plenty who never have the opportunity to use it for reasons other than aptitude.
I think a minor edit makes this statement more accurate:
Basically, people who complete higher education get a 50% premium on their efforts in aggregate.
Though as others have noted before, this level of analysis is in and of itself problematic. If top performers for multiple generations have entered the higher education system, it is difficult to separate out the confounded variables of natural ability, drive, and the "higher education premium" (so to speak).
How do we necessarily know that college graduates are earning more due to their education, and not because the population of the most driven and/or most able individuals happens to go to college? It's a difficult problem.
The only real viable suggestion I've heard is to compare earnings of individuals with similar pre-college academic performance who attended college to those who didn't. Most likely, these individuals would have to be on the threshold of collegiate entrance (by SAT, GPA, etc.), so perhaps even this analysis would not properly assess the benefit of college to high performing students.
One thing I found interesting is the data in "Current Employee Names, Salaries, and Position Titles." The mayor is actually the 2nd highest paid employee (surprised me) at $216,210. The highest paid is the superintendent of police, making $260,004. Pretty neat data sets, thanks for sharing the link!
(Disclosure?: I'm friendly with the Socrata folks)
San Francisco has some great ones that could be used to make new startups... things like street cleaning schedules, maps of every building in the city, the location of every parking space, and so on. You could easily build a niche app to, for example, remind you to move your car when street cleaning is coming by. Or maybe an app to inform you of local graffiti reports so you can be a good Samaritan and clean it up.
It's really great stuff. I love public data sets like this... and I'm actually using Chicago's (and several other cities) in my own work at my day job, so it's nice to see this get some recognition!
I've actually created an app called Car Pal which helps you avoid parking tickets by reminding you when to move you car based on where you park & street cleaning schedules.
Check it out here https://www.carpalapp.com
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.slashg.car...
Some really interesting stuff has been built on this, like this map of property tax deadbeats: http://www.philadelinquency.com/map/delinquent.html
The schedule of when the city is supposed to clean the streets was ignored. My car was ticketed because the city decided to sweep one day early. * * *k chicago.
Ok, that got me to smile.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13797389/utf8-post-parame...
The link was at the bottom. Maybe if it was more prominent and closer to the top it would give users the impression that they have a stronger role in this.