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Created September 9, 2018 18:02
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Open Data 101

Open Data 101

What

  • Open Data definition
    • Structured data that is
      • machine-readable
      • freely shared
      • used and built on without restrictions
  • Specific types of open data
    • Budget
    • Health
    • Science and Research
    • Citizen requests, 311
    • Crime and police
    • Demographic based data
    • Location based data
    • I love you dad and ali, from addilyn to dad and ali
    • Anything else tracked by a system
  • Case studies? Save for end?

Why

  • Transparency & Accountability
    • Necessary for a functioning democracy
  • Building Trust
    • Government is more effective if works for people
    • And if people can work with it
  • Engaging the public
    • Many Minds principle (Rufus Pollock, Eric Raymond)
      • "The best thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else"
    • Crowdsourced work

How <-- Spend most time here

Case Studies

Uruguay collaborates with citizens on health sector data

  • Uruguay has a department of e-government, AGESIC
    • collaborates with local civil groups DATAUY
    • to produce open health sector data
  • Initially the data was sparse
  • A tool was created called "Temporada de pases" (Transfer Season)
    • Needed higher quality data
    • The issue was brought to the open data discussions
  • Led to a new tool, A Tu Servicio
    • DATAUY built it as a collaboration, not as a contractor,
      • first time this had been done
    • Tool allows people to provide information
      • Receive recommendations for health insurnace providers
      • Compare on different important datapoiints.

Budget data in Israel, activism and hacktivism

  • Started as a project find out how much spent on firefighting
    • Bad data though, sparked larger efforts
  • Coders and activists used requests, lobbying, legal action
  • Turned this into a public visualization
    • Public Knowledge Workshop (Hasadna)
  • Budget data originally obtained was incomplete
    • Turns out, about 13% of budget is transferred around
    • Given only reams of paper on the transfers
  • Created a crowdsourcing platform to digitize the information
    • PERSIST!
  • Also added features to see how these transfers changed the budget
  • Last minute, gov finds data and provides it for past years
  • Lots of political back and forth over publishing the transfers as open data
  • Eventually, Stav Shafir became youngest new MK
    • Fought for change within
    • Pressed to get transfers published before voting
    • Now they are!
  • "Budget Key" is newest tool
    • Scans MoF website for new tranfser proposals
    • Turns them into visualized potential changes

Police data in Wichita

  • Project Comport came out of an indianapolis CfA fellowship
    • Goal was to publish police accountability data
    • Improves transparency and increases public trust
  • System was built to allow multiple cities
  • Wichita's new Chief of Police made it an intiative to get our data on there
  • Brought up during Open Data Committee meetings
    • Started after open data collaboration began with City
    • Open Data Policy adopted, monthly meetings established
  • Data is now public at projectcomport.org

Analyzing genome data to identify source of e coli outbreak

  • Had to speed up process of publishing new genome data
    • "tweenome", published on NCBI science repo via twitter
  • Large community took up effort to analyze
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