Open Data: What is it anyway?
It's simple really.
"A piece of data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/or share-alike."
Data in government usually means tabular data: CSVs, Excel Spreadsheets, tables embedded in PDFs. Which could be budget reports, library circulation data, etc.
But also things like maps and map features: Shapefiles and the like. Could include locations of fire hydrants, bicycle parking locations, city boundaries.
Now that we know what open data means...
why does open data matter in the government context?
An Example
Giving access to data can improve the delivery of public service.
In Uganda, service delivery is stifled by corruption and inefficiency.
So the government decided to try an experiment: publish information on monthly transfers of grants to a set of randomly selected schools.
What they found was that by providing this access to the public (mainly teachers and parents) more of these funds actually went to the schools
Another Example
Giving access to information that allows the public to assess politician accountability allows the public to elect better policy makers.
In 2003, Brazil randomly selected municipalities to audit their spending of federally transferred funds. They made this information public.
Doing this reduced the likelihood of re-election of officials by up to 17% when at least two violations associated with corruption were reported in the audited municipalities
So making data available to the public is beneficial!
On June 1st, Mayor Berke signed an executive order establishing a city open data policy: https://github.com/cityofchattanooga/Executive-Orders
And a data portal!: http://data.chattlibrary.org
So how can you actually participate?
Suggest a dataset: https://data.chattlibrary.org/nominate
Get involved with Open Chattanooga!: http://openchattanooga.com
Also, check out our GitHub organization. Feel free to contribute to a project! openchattanooga.com is a GitHub page!: https://github.com/openchattanooga
Watch the Trello board
Propose a project on Open Chattanooga's project ideas
You don't have to tie the project in directly with a dataset, but if it happens to need one and doesn't already exist, we'll try to make it happen.
Do something cool with a dataset from the portal and show it off!
For instance, a visualization.
An application that uses open data.
Using data from the portal for visualizations and apps is pretty simple.
The data portal supports CORS! So you can do this..
More about querying the data through each dataset API can be found here: http://dev.socrata.com/docs/queries.html
Each dataset API is self documented. For example, the bicycle parking data API: https://data.chattlibrary.org/developers/docs/bicycle-parking-locations-in-the-city-of-chattanooga
If there is a dataset without an API that you'd like to use, let me know!
Thanks for listening! Questions?