A Recap of Open Data Day 2018 | Miami
Last week, around 90 folks, mostly students and journalists gathered for the seventh annual Open Data Day.
Open Data Day was launched to highlight the work that can be done through open data initiatives and the benefits of sharing information across sectors. Since it’s inception, many local communities have shown their governments and fellow citizens how important the adoption of open data policies is to the innovation in and thriving of their local communities.
This includes our own efforts back in 2015. During that year’s Open Data Day(also known as CodeAcross) Miami Dade County’s own Mayor Gimenez arrived to unveil the Miami-Dade County’s Open Data Portal.
This year Open Data Day picked up where with left off with last year’s sea level rise focused Open Data Day and took part in collaboration with FIU’s Department of Journalism + Media in North Miami.
The day started with an opening presentation from Jane Gilbert, the Chief Resiliency Officer to the City of Miami and Mike Sarasti, the Chief Innovation Officer to the City of Miami where he shared the new City of Miami Alpha website.
Brian Schriner, the Dean of the College of Communication, Architecture, and the Arts at FIU kicked off our event sharing the data-driven initiatives the school is advancing through their GIS and Journalism programs.
The majority of our attendees sat in on one of the morning workshop sessions: Google MyMaps and Fusion Tables with Samantha Sunne from Society of Professional Journalists & ArcGIS Online and Story Maps with Sheyla Aguilar de Santana from FIU GIS.
Post a riquísimo PubSubs lunch, attendees gathered for a presentation on Climate Gentrification from Valencia Gunder, who has a long list of prerequisites: Soros Justice Fellow at the Open Society — Executive Director of Make the Homeless Smile — Community Liaison at EcoTech Visions —South Florida Coalition Organizer for the Florida New Majority — etc.
“You have to take climate, or any issue for that matter, to people’s front door.” — Valencia Gunder on how to see action in the issues that matter most to you. She was sharing how through a bit of door-to-door conversations, neighbors were able to call their local reps to push for trash pickup before Hurricane Irma hit.
All in all some good work was done over the day. We were able to cleanup the homepage for and update the API keys for the King Tide Data Collection app: WillItFlood.org. Another project worked by a handful of attendees included the collection of and visualization of Sea Wall data.
Another attendees mapped out campaign donations for the recently elected Mayor Suarez.
Progress was also made towards “Treegram”, a project that came out of the last Code for Miami event: National Day of Civic Hacking 2017. The project is a tree permit alert system using data coming from the City of Miami’s Open Data Portal.
Special thanks to our participants, speakers and workshop hosts, our photographer Bryan Agredo, and special thanks to our sponsor, FIU, and our City of Miami friends for furthering their open data initiatives in the recent months. Here’s to more to come!
If you have an idea for change or want to pick up one of the projects listed here, join us during one of our weekly hacknights hosted every Monday night on the sixth floor of the CIC Miami from 7–9pm.
