While the April 26 webinar was hosted by Socrata, very few details were giving about its offerings. Instead, the session titled "Chicago's Smarter City Transformation" focused on what the city did with the platform. It built an open data portal. Join Brett Goldstein, Chicago’s Chief Data Officer, and Danielle DuMerer, Open Data Project Manager did most of the talking.
Goldstein noted how the platform was design to serve many including academics, the press and hisand other Mom's. There was one shoutout to GIS professionals: Goldstein noted that putting out shapefiles was not enough, so they also provide KML. DuMerer showed off data tables, maps of the data, views of the data, etc. Chicago held a contest to encourage app development and recieved 60 submissions. The open data portal stats include:
- 328 datasets
- 470,000+ embeds
- 1000 + user views
- 50+ apps
More important perhaps were the ways the open data project impacted they city:
- No more FOIA (Freedom of Information Act requests)
- Departmental accountability
- Cost effectiveness
- Smarter decisions
- Civic engagement (included classes to introduce the data and platform)
The two big takeaways for me were:
1) Building such portals (or the SDI for that matter) is still about digging up and reformating data. An engineer wanted to buiild an app about street sweeping. After digging around the city the data was found - it was in a spreadsheet embedded in a PDF. So, it had to be extracted and turned into a data table and geographic layer. As new and shiny as open data programs are, we are still doing much of the same work extractino and conversaion work we did in the 1980s.
2) Return on investment is not being formally measured. Goldstein responded the ROI question by asking how you value gaining public trust or encouraging sotware developers to donate time to trackling civic issues. If Chicago is not insisting on some measure of ROI, I do hope Socrata is working with customers to develop some sort of response to this perennial question.
