Filed under “data”

The work itself isn’t inhumane

 Two weeks ago, while riding BART from East Bay to San Francisco, I was offered a transit survey from a BART Survey Team member. Pointing to what seemed to me to be a large number of written-response questions for a survey being delivered on a moving train, I asked her, “Do you have to read [...]

Crime and Data Leadership

 This afternoon I have been following the mis-framing of Chicago’s newly announced plan to release 10 years of… not crime statistics as has been reported, but… police incident reports. From the Boston Globe: Chicago to publish crime stats online CHICAGO—Long a city with a reputation for withholding information, Chicago now wants to make public every [...]

Data divides and umbrellafication

 Jesse Lichtenstein in “Transparency for All”, writing for Wired: The concern that open data may simply empower the empowered is not an argument against open data; it’s an argument against looking at open data as an end in itself. Massive data dumps and even friendly online government portals are insufficient. Ordinary people need to know [...]

Data-driven, content-first design

DonorsChoose-TextLengths
 I’m working on an app for the DonorChoose.org Hacking Education Contest. DonorsChoose works by having teachers submit classroom project/supply needs that people can then donate to pay for through the internet. Right now the only way to “share” those projects is through the usual email, Facebook and Twitter; my idea for am app is to create [...]

Notes from the City of Boston’s Open311 / Citizens Connect API Developer Meeting

 Today I attended a developer meeting at Boston City Hall for their Citizen Connect API, a to-be-launched Open311 implementation. The city currently has official iPhone and Android apps that allow community members to submit broken streetlights, potholes, graffiti and snow removal, but the intent of the “open” part is to allow unaffiliated developers to integrate [...]

Good enough data

btop-map-combined
 I’ve been spending some time at work scraping data. Long story short: government transparency is not transparent when the only access they give you is a pile of poorly structured html. That’s better than government opacity but not past the level of frosted glass: titillating but unsatisfying. If your expected audience is pencil pushers, please [...]