Code for San Jose Celebrates Open Data Day with Mayor Sam Liccardo
Mar 16, 2016 • Radhika Nair
Code for San Jose recently held an Open Data Jam, to coincide with the International Open Data Day on March 5, 2016 and CodeAcross events taking place throughout the Code for America network.
The Open Data Jam brought together 40 data enthusiasts, civic hackers, government staff, and a Mayor; all united in their desire to improve San Jose through technology. The Tech Museum of Innovation hosted the event while Microsoft provided food, beverages, and support.
The goal of CodeAcross is to activate the Code for America network and inspire residents everywhere to get actively involved in their community. Kalen Gallagher and Michelle Thong, co-captains of Code for San Jose, kicked off the event and then let people loose to jam away on various open data challenges.
Mayor Sam Liccardo’s guest appearance was the highlight of the afternoon. The Mayor described his goal of making San Jose’s government as innovative as San Jose’s population, attentively listened to descriptions of our projects, and provided thoughtful feedback based on the priorities and problems that his administration is tackling. With his suggestions and support, the Mayor’s participation exemplified the kind of collaboration we’d love to see more of between Code for San Jose and our municipal partners.
The City of San Jose staff, Kevin Miller, Erica Garaffo, Arti Tangri and Shireen Santosham were also present at the venue, encouraging the data jammers and asking Code for San Jose members to provide feedback on citizen engagement and city initiatives.
Here are some of the projects the teams worked on:
Visualize San Jose Building Permit Data: This is an ongoing project that started at a civic hack night at City Hall last fall. At the Open Data Jam, Clarence Leung and Jennifer Prufer continued to analyze San Jose’s permit data (which dates back to 1900!). The team reached a major milestone finishing up most of the data cleaning, adding latitude and longitude coordinates, joining it with some of the inspection documents data that the city had, and converting it all to JSON. Work is still in progress at BuildingPermitPlus.
Dashboards: This is a new project aimed at creating simple and engaging dashboards that make open data more accessible and easier to interpret, for both citizens and government. It’s inspired by the “How’s Business” dashboard app by civic hackers in Chicago. Betsy Megas identified this as a useful and relevant project for San Jose, and developer Laurie Reynolds was inspired to adopt the Chicago codebase to create the start of a collection of dashboards using San Jose data.
Affordable Housing: Many participants were very interested in the pressing issue of housing affordability in the Silicon Valley. They are hoping to develop an interactive map using the affordable housing data sets published on the San Jose Open Data portal.
Tool for Residential Garbage Pick-Up: Based on the Hauler Data published on the San Jose Open Data Portal, the team under Vivek Bansal is trying to create a more user friendly lookup tool than the one currently on the City of San Jose Website. The app would answer such questions as: “When do I need to put my garbage out?” and “Who do I need to talk to when my trash can is broken?” Work continues at Trash Pick Up Portal.
Beta Testing the Open Data Portal: The challenge was to provide a summary of user experience of the recently launched Open Data Portal. The task included but not limited to analyzing a dataset of interest by using a tool of participants’ choice, such as statistical tools, spreadsheets, or own code. The spotlight of this hack was the spot prize announced by the event organizers. The participant who files the highest number of defects on the portal would win INOX tickets for two. Along with Vivek and Jennifer Prufer, I joined this group as usability was something closer to heart. Finally I ended up being the lucky one to grab the IMAX tickets !
The hackers and attendees shared their experiment and experience with the world by posting pictures of themselves on various social media by using the hashtags #CodeAcross and #opendatajam.
Here goes the exclusive highlights of the event from the Twitter feed:
Highlight of my #opendataday: @codeforsanjose sharing ideas with Mayor @sliccardo, #SanJose city staff. #opendataWWC pic.twitter.com/V4yctVSQRd
— Michelle Thong (@michellethong) March 6, 2016
At #OpenDataDay at the Tech Museum today with @codeforsanjose. Great to see mayor @sliccardo as an open data fan! pic.twitter.com/RRTYuaLBAM
— Clarence Leung (@clarler) March 6, 2016
Big #civic ❤ to #SanJose city employees & public officials @ #CodeAcross #OpenDataDay! @_KevMiller @codeforsanjose pic.twitter.com/QcOdEF0BDr
— Jessica Weare (@JessicaWeare) March 5, 2016
Great to celebrate #OpenDataDay with Civic hackers and @sliccardo @codeforsanjose pic.twitter.com/KSA63EOl8H
— Shireen Santosham (@SSantosham) March 6, 2016
Last Saturday, community members (including @SLiccardo) met up to use open data to improve #SanJose! #OpenDataDay pic.twitter.com/QYxsoNOd2H
— Kalen Gallagher (@KalenGallagher) March 9, 2016
Huge thanks to our fab #opendataday partners @JessicaWeare @KennySpade @MicrosoftSV @EngineerEmily @TheTechMuseum pic.twitter.com/uVmGfwxcda
— Code for San Jose (@codeforsanjose) March 6, 2016
Great to see a room full of coders on #OpenDataWWC working with open gov data Thanks @JessicaWeare& @codeforsanjose pic.twitter.com/2k0rFXOfjn
— Sam Liccardo (@sliccardo) March 6, 2016
#OpenDataDay #codeacross @codeforsanjose how can we use data to solve affordable housing in #SanJose pic.twitter.com/XFFt2VFa62
— Erica Garaffo (@erica_garaffo) March 5, 2016
Whoever gave the most feedback today re: #SanJose’s #OpenData portal gets @IMAX tickets @TheTechMuseum! #CodeAcross pic.twitter.com/1nU1BzJbPG
— Jessica Weare (@JessicaWeare) March 6, 2016
#OpenDataDay #CodeAcross @codeforsanjose projects in progress. pic.twitter.com/OQDQVvzDEB
— Radhika Nair (@radhikapc) March 5, 2016
Originally published at codeforsanjose.com on March 17, 2016 by Radhika Nair
