If they were really about social justice they would be more concerned with fighting crime than data.
Senior Oakland City Official about our opengov release on the lack of data behind the 100 Blocks Public Safety Plan.
opendata
Come and Code for Oakland in 2012!
It’s on again! We’re helping run the second wonderful hackathon for Oaktown: called Building Our Civic Web.
The focus of this year’s hackathon is on building apps, hacking public data and building tools to support economic development in Oakland, improve civic engagement, improve digital education and literacy in our residents and provide tools to attract and sustain local business in the town.
We’ve all seen ways that new businesses, local communities and the city itself could be massively improved through the thoughtful, creative use of good new tech solutions right? This is the perfect opportunity to show how the awesome developer community in Oakland and around can contribute in a powerful way to the improving and sustaining of our city. Coders matter.
As a lead up to the main hackathon our wonderful volunteers are running a month-long series of focused listening sessions to share your ideas, brainstorm community needs and help shape what is built at the hackathon. We want to hear from small business owners, community activists, teachers, city staff, nonprofit leaders and people from across the city- your ideas may just spark a great new app or tool to make positive change in our city!
I hope you will join Oakland’s community of civically engaged developers, coders, designers, entrepreneurs and innovators as we re-imagine ways in which collaboration and technology can help shape, grow, and sustain the healthy future of our City.
We think sustainable communities are important, and software needs sustaining also, so this year we’ll feature the great apps built last year and check in with the teams on how they’ve struggled or succeeded in getting their work into heavy adoption. We’re doing this to get real about how we as a community can better support any new apps built and make sure good ideas get more than just recognition and prizes- they get used and change our community!
Register now at http://codeforoakland2012.eventbrite.com/
Follow the action with #CodeforOakland
Code for Oakland- Volunteer Mixer
Are you a programmer, coder, mobile developer, engineer, product manage, UI/UX designer or some other tech loving person who wants to improve our city using technology?
If the answer is yes, and you’d like to get involved in this year’s Code for Oakland – the Oakland and East Bay-focused hackathon scheduled for July 21, right here in Oakland at the Kaiser Center near the lake – please come to the first Volunteer Mixer where you can meet and join the core Code for Oakland team and help make something really cool happen.
We’re looking for volunteers for the following teams:
Data catalog: Help pull together date developers can use to build apps for Oakland. We’re working with both local state, city and county data and national data sets that have local value.
Team Leads: Steve Spiker, Urban Strategies, Nicole Neditch, city of Oakland
Logistics and day of: Who, what, when, where, wires and wireless–this critical team makes sure we have a space, volunteers to check people in, food, drinks and a nice after party–and maybe some cool T-shirts? If you’re good at getting things done, we could use your help.
Team Lead: Anca Mosoiu
Marketing and Promotion: We want everyone to know about the Hack Day and the programs we’re putting on July 21, so folks with skills in marketing, social media promotion and event management are needed.
Team Lead: Krys Freeman
Outreach and Community: The focus may be tech, but the problems we want to solve are those many in Oakland experience. Help plan and present some listening sessions and events that empower community members to share ideas for apps to build.
Team Leads: Paul Richardson, Matt Senate
Programming: What’s on the agenda day of? Who are the judges, speakers, presenters as we kick off our hack day–and what’s the format for those who wish to attend to learn, not to code? Help plan a great program.
Team Lead: Susan Mernit
Sponsorships: Want to help make sure this event – and the prizes for developers who build products – get funded? Join the Sponsorship team to help make the costs balance out.
Team Lead: Deb Acosta
Sustainability: How do we make sure we USE what our hack teams build–and how do we help these teams finish what they start? This is a critical question – and one we hope everyone who works on Code for Oakland and has an interest can help address – just let us know you’d like to be involved.
We have about two months till the event. We’ll be meeting every two weeks for an hour in the evening and working virtually through tools like Google Docs, Basecamp and possibly a wiki to coordinate.
If you’d like to participate, RSVP to our invite and come to our Volunteer Mixer at Tech Liminal to sign up for a team to work with.
The Deets
SIGN UP AND LET US KNOW YOU’RE COMING: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/3634559064
When: May 29, Tech Liminal, 6-8 p.m.
Where: 268 14 St., Oakland
And coming from behind: Alameda County to adopt OpenData!
Some days you get pleasant surprises. Some days bureaucrats really do get stuff done. Some days government staff really do agree and align their efforts with those of the elected leaders who typically just butt heads with those they lead. Yesterday was one of those days.
Alameda County is going to be adopting an opendata platform this year, with either a live portal or an alpha version for internal review by the board of supervisors retreat in September. Just like that. Well, not quite that easy. Late last year we were part of a new committee setup by Supervisor Nate Miley to examine ways to integrate data between agencies and after some initial discussions we pushed the group to consider the value of making much of these data available to the public. We delivered a few demos on our web mapping and data tools and developed some materials showing the benefits, principles and reasons for opendata in governement. As with the City of Oakland I drafted a policy piece, some guidelines on how to select data within each department and a guide to implementing opendata across the county. Couple meetings happen, then nothing, silencio.
But during the silence the county was actually doing something constructive. Albeit choosing a vendor (some things don’t change), one with a heavy monopoly, but still making a good decision for the county. Alameda County will be rolling out a Socrata portal. Now I do like their tools, they make an excellent product, I’m just saddened to see a steady monopoly in a space that is all about openness, opensource and innovation. Personal grievance aside, this is GREAT!
There is now some real momentum to this working committee to make something happen. Socrata got the nod because it’s just so damn easy, turnkey and all that. I can’t disagree, it really lowers the barrier to entry for agencies without the opensource chops to stand up a CKAN instance, sadly, and that will likely be the same scenario in most US cities I’m guessing, although it will be interesting to see just what Junar can come up with.
There’s a lot of work to do, many agencies have reservations, many have piss-poor data ecosystems and this seems threatening, but there is some exciting progress, including the sheriff agreeing to publish their data in a usable format for the first time publicly. Did you know that Alameda’s sheriff published block level (hmm) crime data to Crimereports.com for the past year? I didn’t, not that it matters much when you only publish government data into one closed, average system.
Our next step is to work through some issues that we’ve discovered within the county systems in the course of our work- serious data deficiencies that only a small does of modernizing would yield some serious gains. We’re also hoping to get a couple of new data sets released in time for the next #CodeforOakland hackathon on July 21st. I’ll also be curious to see if a larger urban county can help to pull up some of the smaller cities in it’s coverage to use their same data platform.
What is surprising is that despite their being serious approval of this effort at an elected leader level there isn’t a desire to formalize this effort in legislation, policy or directive. I suggested that this rare circumstance of staff and leaders wanting the same thing is the perfect opportunity to get supporting legislation or directives in place- partly to sustain it beyond the current champions and also to really leverage these good efforts. It’s really wonderful to see county staff and leaders working in the same direction- it’s not as common as you may think. Once again technology and data are really capable of bringing about cultural and functional changes beyond their seemingly innocuous scope of impact. Geeks unite, open government is creeping forward.
Lost Opportunities in Government – The CDO
Just read a great blog post by Logan Kleier, the Information Security Officer for the City of Portland on the lost opportunities that US cities face because of how the CIO role in most cities has devolved. Chief Information Officers are present as senior or cabinet level technology professionals in many large cities and counties, many are incredibly innovative and forward thinking individuals, but as Logan very cohesively states:
“In order to manage this transformation of computing and storage power, city governments followed the private sector’s lead and created Chief Information Officers (CIOs). However, something went wrong. CIOs started managing the infrastructure and not the actual information. No one was managing the lifecycle of the data. In fact, an environmental scan of the 20 largest cities technology initiatives shows that most of their work isn’t around improving data access or decision-making. Instead, it’s about managing device and network lifecycles.”
His summary rings true with my experiences partnering with many municipal agencies. It’s even worse in places like Oakland where we don’t even have a CIO level position- technology just gets relegated to a “fix my computer, nerd” type of role in government, and this is both stupid and counterproductive. Instead of realizing technology as a huge leverage point for cities, we label tech folks as nerds and never really capitalize on their abilities or potential.
So many cities and counties appear to be crippled by the lack of strategic use of data and information (and tech too, different tale though), and to me this stems from the way we’ve relegated IT to a desktop support role. Time after time I’ve seen agencies struggling to manage their data, operate in complete ignorance of what other agencies may have, use clunky, time wasting tools to “analyze” their data and make poor decisions as a result. It’s so clear to outside data geeks when cities present poorly synthesized data to support a policy or decision. Yet our elected leaders don’t seem to connect this consistently poor planning and research with the fact that they have no-one responsible for managing the rich data resources the city generates, nor for leveraging those resources in strategic ways.
When data does get applied to a decision making process it also seems to lack any level of contextual awareness from the users- again something that is abundantly clear to external planners, researchers and analysts. To me this results in a continuous stream of poorly reasoned, barely supported by data, in-justifiable policies. And it doesn’t need to be this way. When we devalue Information, bundle it with technology support and cripple it with siloed responsibilities we cannot expect more from the outcomes. Our municipal leaders need to recognize the huge strategic and operational benefits of thoughtful data use in government, and take steps to leverage this resource. As I’ve said before, the first step is to appoint a Chief Data Officer for the City of Oakland and the County of Alameda. Both these government bodies would realize enormous benefits from investing in this position. I’d ask the elected leaders in these governments to take a quick read of Logan’s post to see why this really matters, from a very independent source!
The Case for a Municipal Chief Data Officer.
Logan is twittering from @PortlandInfoSec
How to (not) support new business in Oakland
There’s a lot of excitement in Oaktown lately, lots of amazing national press coverage about how amazing our town is, how great and diverse the food and culture is, the art and music scene and the bustling new venues to enjoy. People in city hall and various chambers are talking about new business opportunities here and are optimistic about the chances for a real retail and commerce boost to this wonderful but struggling city. I’ve been chatting with people about the ways to enable and encourage new business start-ups, in both the tech and regular retail/commerce world, lots of folks are positive about spaces being leased and used from Jack London to Uptown. Then I ran across a hackathon (that is sadly fully booked, say what?) with a focus on building opportunities for commonly disenfranchised and discouraged communities to help establish new businesses in their communities, very cool TED. And I started thinking about how a new entrepreneur goes about finding the space for their new business in San Francisco, and conversely how they would do the same in Oakland. Profound differences.
In SF you quickly stumble upon the official SF Prospector, an online tool that is old and clunky from a UI point of view but never the less allowed me to pick some square footage requirements, select an area of interest, a leasing rate and some other sensible variables and then to automate the process of finding possibly suitable sites. For my theoretical new photography studio I found a good location, that happened (by pure luck I’m sure) to be on a block with several other photographic studios close by, so fortunate locality with related traffic in the area, awesome.
But if I wanted my new site to be in sunny Oakland, to establish my new business in this side of the bay? Good luck. Leg work, connections, various real estate and small business sites with no real info and no leads. Nada from the city or the county. So we have a new dream team of the city administrator Deanna Santana, well reputed deputies in Scott Johnson and Fred Blackwell and zero ability for new business owners or expanding ones to find possible new locations quickly and online and at no cost. I was really stunned, nothing official, nothing to make the path smooth to help business locate in our town. WTF.
We recently soft launched www.infoalamedacounty.org as a web mapping and data viz tool to allow people to combine public data from multiple city and county agencies, all in one place, to promote data driven decision making and real, informed planning decisions. We aimed at our main partners in the CBO community, organizers and policy makers needing better access to data. But it may be that we need to load in all our countywide property data, connect up the foreclosure filings (which are privately held and sold by the way, or scraped…) and wait till the city releases all the current business permit data and vacancy info so we can just build this ourselves. The technology is no longer a real barrier, building interactive, responsive, usable tools to support our community should be a no-brainer for our governments, but it seems very slow in coming in the east bay. Technology is an enabler, but only if you choose to use it that way.
PS If you do know of a web based tool that does help businesses plan and launch in Oakland PLEASE let me know, I’d be happy to eat my words and let people know that it is actually possible!
Studies have indicated that Federal agencies are not effectively using geospatial technologies
and can improve the management of information resources and other applications.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr4233, well hello, you’d ever believe this if it wasn’t in a federal bill…
OpenData v Absentee Councilors
After all the excitement (mostly on my part) of finally seeing an opendata resolution making its way through city hall, just like that, pow, it’s off again. At a Finance Committee Meeting, two city councilors (Brooks, and the committee Chair, De La Fuente) didn’t show, rendering the meeting null, no quorum, hence no vote to support an opendata resolution for Oakland, hence no change happening yet, no better engagement with the tech community, no new start-up possibilities encouraged just yet…
We are on the agenda now for the next month… sure this can wait, but every extra month it takes is an extra month where our city isn’t improving, isn’t getting better PR, isn’t enabling innovative new solutions that government data can help unlock. And that’s a shame.
OpenData hits Oakland City Council
Today is a very exciting day in the city of Oakland, especially so if you’re in any way interested in public data, civic engagement, open government and technology incubation and innovation in your community. At noon today the city council’s Finance and Management Committee (sounds fun doesn’t it!) will hear a resolution and likely pass said resolution requiring the city to move towards a true OpenData platform. After 18 months of civic hackers, developers, journos and tech heads talking, encouraging, blogging and educating our elected officials, we finally are at a place where our cities enormous data holdings can be utilized for more than mere compliance reporting and perhaps occasional management tasks.
This represents some very real, very powerful change for our town. It means that our rich developer community will have a huge trove of data to work with for app development, research, analysis, data visualization, accountability work and for planning of new businesses in the tech and non-tech sectors. It’s a chance for us to not be a lagging city, to really tap the potential we have both internally in city hall and in our residents.
Imagine- being able to quickly and easily find all the current business permits by address, to compare that with the vacant and blighted property datasets, city zoning standards for every parcel, to then add in the best crime data, population demographics and public works calls for service- all the key pieces of information a potential new business owner would want to consider placing a new location in Oakland. Key things that allow commerce to grow and prosper, all available to everyone, at no cost. The potential for our town is huge, city data warehouses, bureaucratic spiderwebs of red tape and uncertainty over what data exists and can be released are a real and present barrier to growth and development in our city, especially in micro-enterprise and new, innovative start-ups. But this can change.
The resolution hitting the committee today, introduced by Council member Libby Schaaf is a result of slow, honest education of our elected officials and leaders of the value of data to both our community and to city staff, and open data policy, process and web portal will mean incredibly smooth access to data for city staff and officials that do not have access even now, which is a travesty. It’s also a result of some fantastic field building efforts courtesy of CivicCommons, Code for America and the Sunlight Foundation.
Now that several other US cities have established OpenData policies and work-flows, I don’t see the need to go through all the pain and red tape of new policies drafted by committees in every single city in the US, (ala my piece on Barriers v Processes). I’ll write up the whole process from day one of trying to get a city to consider and implement an OpenData policy once it’s all done, but for now I want to show how the pieces can be massaged to work together.
The resolution and the report for the committee includes concepts, large chunks of text and principles from the following sources:
- New York City OpenData Bill
- San Francisco OpenData Executive Directive
- Sunlight Foundation’s 10 Principles of Open Data
- Local stories of how public data and civic hacking has benefited our community.
So we’re not there yet, but it’s finally happening, and I want to make sure the above sources get due credit for making the path straighter for us here in Oakland. If we can build and reuse technology in government we sure as hell should be reusing policies, reusing approaches to get new policies in place or at least considered, and reusing approaches to highlight the value of opendata for our local governments.
Lastly, regarding the build-out of an opendata portal for Oakland, as we had been planning (via Urban Strategies Council and the Code for America Brigade), we are going to wait for this resolution to pass, hoping that the city administrator or mayor’s staff will be willing to really engage us and the tech community to plan and help build out a system for both the community and the city to use and manage. I’d always prefer a partnership approach than a solo gunman approach. Hopefully this will be the first big opportunity for the city to open up and work with its very skilled, motivated tech community!
Code for America in Oaktown?
Today the City of Oakland met with Code for America to learn more about the fellowship and how it could benefit our town. We had representatives from the Mayor’s office, the new deputy Administrator, city council and ourselves. There was real excitement from the city folks about this partnership, and a very sure commitment from leadership that the city was serious about this possibility and clearly understood the benefits we stand to reap from being part of Code for America in 2013. This was for the first time a group of senior leaders who were willing to stick out their necks and allow for innovation in city hall. There was a clear understanding of many impediments our city faces to improving service delivery, being a more open and engaged city, removing barriers and blockages to effective service delivery and to allowing new technology to be a spur for process changes.
I’m personally very excited about this effort. Our city has faced numerous real challenges in the past year and there seemed to be no coordinated leadership to effectively use technology to improve our city and no chance city hall would get it together to present a cohesive, thought out application for CfA. But they’re on it. Giddy would be appropriate. I went in hoping it wouldn’t be CfA needing to sell itself to the city and was very happy to see the city staff and leaders being gung-ho to start this relationship and to become part of this dynamic, powerful network that CfA represents.
The idea pitched by the city resonates with my experience working in and with the city. But I’m not going to steal anyone’s thunder by publishing what it was- that honor needs to remain with the people who actually formed the idea (and dealt with my constant stream of encouragement and nagging to become a CfA city). Combined with a very serious plan to move an OpenData policy through city council, this represents some really positive changes for our town. I’ve been open about poor decisions and bad tech in the past but I’m going to be even more vocal about good decisions and people trying to innovate and take risks rather than do the same ol thing the same ol way that never worked in the first place.
Let’s go Oakland! (Yes I just watched Moneyball and nearly shed a tear hearing that chant as Beane walked back into the stadium on the 20th game of the streak.)
Steve Spiker 