Oakland has a huge network of Neighborhood Crime Prevention Councils that provide a level of community interaction and engagement around crime and local issues.  This network is supported by city staff (Neighborhood Services Coordinators- NSCs) and Problem Solving Officers (PSOs) and each has a local member as the chair. In come neighborhoods these groups operate more like planning councils on broad topics, in others you’ll find people talking about stray dogs, blight, violence and truancy.  These are mechanisms to engage residents on civic issues. they matter to a city. We have a huge list of all the different yahoo groups where they communicate if we’re interested, but how, just how do you find out what beat you are in?

The city’s current answer: use this incredibly horrible PDF document to clumsily guess. Seriously. I swear the city had something better in the past, but this is how you are meant to find and connect to your “local” group. Even ignoring its purpose, this is one of the worst maps I’ve ever seen in Oakland.

Fortunately I do believe that our interfaces to government can be beautiful, can be simple and can actually function. And I believe that civic engagement and action is critical in a city with such structural problems. So I built a better version. In less than three hours. I give you an open source tool that I originally cloned from a great developer in Chicago and remade as a tool to easily help parents find which elementary school zone they live in, where your free tax sites are in the Bay Area to get awesome free tax prep help from professional staff if you earn under about $50k.

The new web app is found here: http://spjika.github.com/FindYourBeat

It’s simple, does just one thing but hopefully does it well. It’s a small tool that you should only need to use once in your life per house you inhabit.

Knowing how to use the tools and how to find and redeploy open source code means you can produce something incredibly useful and interactive in about the same time as you would take to make a half decent static map as a PDF.  I can say this because I’ve made literally hundreds of good, static PDF maps.

There are obviously dozens of other areas where our local government interfaces are not customer friendly. And we can help to improve them.  At OpenOakland we love to hear about areas that better technology can improve government interactions, citizen engagement and efficiency. Have an idea? We’ll soon have our new project requirements criteria published so you can pitch a new tool, process or tech idea!

If you are confused by the concept of open source, it means that anything you build, you share the source information publicly, freely, for reuse. It can be software code, it can be data and the analysis method you used, it can be a policy! By sharing it, you enable others to do even more with what you made. Just like the app that OpenCityApps built and shared, the app that sparked a hundred websites…

CapGemini recently published their report on the progress and success of global open data initiatives, at a country level. It has some really insightful data and points, and isn’t a tough read at 17 pages. As my city Oakland, and our county, Alameda, launch their open data platforms I think this national level report has a lot for us to consider about local efforts.

Some broad concepts that we seek to capture:

Open Data drives growth by stimulating the creation of firms that reuse freely available government information in innovative ways.

This is the macro promise, and it’s a clear correlation.  In the San Francisco East bay it will be telling if these benefits are local, where the data live, or dispersed and hard to measure as local benefits of local efforts.

And now the test of time begins:

96% of the countries analyzed in our research shared data which is not regularly updated.

This is the ugly stuff- maintenance. It’s great to get publicity friendly wins on the board with data releases, cool new apps and tools, but in a year down the road, if those new data are the same data then we’re just made a blip on the heart rate monitor and it’s not looking like a living, breathing being anymore.

But we need to be honest in the civic innovation/hacking world too- there have been incredibly powerful and cool things built by amazing developers, especially the work of Code for America, but many of these things created in past years that have not been commercialized face an ugly reality- the task of maintenance.

Google learned some good, hard lessons with updating road data for Google maps (Apple Maps seems to be doing more of the hard and less of the good so far). I have some mixed feelings about a lot of tech I love to use- uncertainty about the ease which we can manage both granular and major changes to the underlying data used. If users add to the administrative data it’s a great collaboration, when the underlying data shifts slightly however, we have some tough work to do. Let’s not forget that. Enterprise and government level tech frequently sucks, in some part because it requires full time managing of the data. I’m hoping our more cutting edge tools stand up to these tests in the coming years.

Sustaining open

Open Data initiatives need to be driven from the top with strong political leadership.

We now have two great resources in Oakland/Alameda. City and County staff have listened to those of us who encouraged these efforts and have done good work to implement the tools and practices to support open data. What is now clearly absent from our efforts is the legislative support to truly sustain and mandate these initiatives don’t just disappear at the whim of any bureaucrat or budget adjustment. No US cities or jurisdictions I’m aware of have done it quite like we have here. These efforts have been driven by informed political leaders who have implemented laws and orders to support and sustain open data. We are now at that time in Oakland & Alameda. Our mayor and councilors, our supervisors need to now swiftly adapt legislation used in many other cities (a very easy task, heck I’ve done it for them already and given them copies) to show not only their support for this efforts, but to clarify their vision and intent in law.

I’m looking to our leaders to really drive these efforts, to provide a vision that puts them in context and laws to ensure these great efforts don’t die on the vine like too many other good efforts have.  Open government is good government, it also happens to be smart government. Data is now becoming open and public, now you can really engage your communities  with and through these data!

The original report PDF

Got to be part of the presser for the fellows today, celebrating the start of their placement in Oakland City Hall for their Code for America work. High hopes for what these three can achieve and for the path they can help us lay out for innovation and openness in local government!

The city team and the fellows

Jen Pahlka of CfA

Eddie Tejeda of OpenOakland, CfA alum and BlightStatus