City of Detroit launches open data portal | Hacker News Reader

City of Detroit launches open data portal

data.detroitmi.gov

46 pointsrmason9 comments

Here's more from the mayors press conference:

http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2015/02/detroit_...

This has me so excited because the number one request we've had at Code Michigan has been for Detroit API's.

Now locals should fill out the rest of Detroit on the U.S. City Open Data Census. http://us-city.census.okfn.org/

Then you can see how it compares to other cities and have some good conversations with city departments on how to improve the quality of the data they do release.

Very cool and a step in the right direction. When I saw the headline, I was crazily surprised. The only other issue I see with this, is how residents of Detroit who do not have Internet/Access to Computers ect are being left out (probably more than we think).

Nice that they're using Socrata. My only complaint is that Socrata doesn't expose an API to list all the datasets in the catalog.

You can get this from /data.json. I've been spending a bit more time with Socrata of late due to a research project I'm working on, and I've found some minor issues with the APIs, but have otherwise been happy with how the data is exposed. Also, while being grouchy about not being able to get a schema, I found this tool, which is now on my todo list to try: https://github.com/socrata/datasync

Socrata has been doing a nice little business here in Seattle! I keep half expecting Tableau to buy them out and then Microsoft to buy out Tableau. This PhD student has been keeping an eye on both as potential non-academic career routes.

This is pretty sweet. Looking forward to playing with it tonight.

This is nice. I hope other cities/states follow.

Open data is a good start, but not enough for people to meaningfully participate in the urban planning process. A lot of planning is informed by manual, non-reproducible, or otherwise blackbox analysis done by agencies and consultants. Hoping to make this part of a dissertation topic...

Yeah those agencies and consultants. Our school district hired those, because school changes are laced with emotion and the school board was full of cowards. The agency googled some data, made some powerpoint slides and charged $150,000. The data was patently wrong, even to the board members.

But remember, consultants are just a meat shield to protect those that hire them from criticism or accountability. So I guess it worked from the board's point of view.

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