

The City of Chicago is on Github - adamstac
http://thechangelog.com/the-city-of-chicago-is-on-github/

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stblack
This is a very nice initiative!

A question: as a non-american, in view of America's current levels of
paranoia, does this really have much potential beyond, say, bike-racks and
street-lines?

I'd love to know, for example, which areas are served by fibre, which have a
high numbers of wireless communication towers, which are serviced by new (as
opposed to ancient) utilities? I can imagine some bureaucrat deeming many
game-changing datasets as "security risks".

If that's true, then what's left to publish?

I'd also like to know, what commitment is there to keeping datasets updated?
My guess: GitHub makes this much easier. For example, how long before hundreds
of privately owned bike racks get added? How long before pathways get crowd-
sourced into the data?

We'll see.

~~~
dfc
Sean Gorman did a lot of work around critical infrastructure and national
security at GMU.[1] He ruffled a few feathers at the time. His research at GMU
later turned into GeoIQ/[2]. I am not sure if you are interested in actual
fiber mapping or the level of paranoia. If its the former there are some
publications listed in the research section specifically about fiber
mapping.[3]

[1] <http://gembinski.com/interactive/GMU/>

[2] <http://www.geoiq.com/>

[3] <http://gembinski.com/interactive/GMU/research.html>

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jarvuschris
So is Philly: <https://github.com/PhillyCDO>

~~~
jimktrains2
There really isn't any data there though.

Pittsburgh has a lot of good data too, it's just not on github:
<http://pittsburghpa.gov/dcp/gis/>

~~~
mcginleyr1
<http://www.opendataphilly.org/>

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polemic
Merging user contributions comes with a number of problems. It'll be
interesting to know how they'll manage it. Or, they won't, and this is
entirely token. For example, if the city tenders for engineering works, they
will likely be required to supply the consultant with source data like road
centrelines and road reserves, as-built water networks, etc. That _has_ to be
the official, verified, accurate data. User supplied just won't cut it.

I'm also dubious that GitHub is the right way to release data. There are a
huge number of people interested in civic data, and GitHub is probably one of
the least accessible ways for 99.9% of people to get it.

For example, a number of city and regional councils in New Zealand publish
their data via Koordinates.com. Wellington City Council alone publishes over
50 key datasets:

<http://koordinates.com/maps/wcc/layers/>

(disclosure: I work for Koordinates)

~~~
mortenjorck
For the vast majority of non-technical (or even highly technical in some area
other than software development) users, The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for
Planning has a site called MetroPulse, which offers a large selection of open
data browsable through a (sometimes) friendly GUI. It's more demographically
and statistically focused (though there is a map view), but it's a much more
generally accessible platform than GitHub.

~~~
polemic
That's good to hear, but it raises the question: why doesn't the City use
GitHub to host code and tools to _extract_ data from MetroPulse? Now you've
got a situation where there are two versions of the data.. which is the most
up to date or authoritative?

It _is_ good to see public entities picking GitHub as a collaboration tool
though.

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sokrates
Github is ridiculously unsuited for one-time publication of blobs. Seriously.

~~~
yellowbkpk
As the person that convinced them to use GitHub, I suggested it to them
because they were looking for an extremely easy way to bring changes from the
community back in to the city's data. I suggested GitHub and GeoJSON because I
envisioned them taking pull requests from citizens interested in adding more
detail to their data or correcting existing data.

You're right, though: GitHub is horrible for large blobs of data like this. At
the time I didn't know how big the data releases would end up being.

Tom and I have plans to talk more about future data releases and how they
might be made with a more appropriate tool.

~~~
stblack
I have a hard time imagining a more appropriate tool.

The best tool would offer

    
    
      * Discoverability
      * Updatability
      * Transparancy (who, specifically, is behind it)
      * Tracability
      * Time stamping 
      * Linkability, with über-stable URIs
      * Public issue tracking.
      * Documentation, including the possible crowd-sourcing thereof.
    

How is this not GitHub?

Edit: In this case we have identifiable and passionate individuals behind the
initiative. This is far from faceless and cursory, as most data-dumps are.
What's not to love here?

~~~
yellowbkpk
The only issue is that with huge data dumps (the buildings dataset here as
GeoJSON is ~2GB uncompressed and ~1GB as shapefile) it becomes difficult to
make direct pull requests against the data. Indeed they zipped the JSON file
up before uploading it so it's impossible to make pull requests (I originally
suggested GeoJSON because a pull request could be read by a human as opposed
to a shapefile diff which could not be read).

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moderation
Cool initiative. Quick import of the bike rack data into Fusion Tables and
then into map view -
[https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1KXdOsA...](https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1KXdOsALBG05LR_M11odqNaLA6CnvbYDuHi9jDdk#map:id=3)

I don't believe it is possible to have Fusion Tables refer to the raw Github
CSV. The ImportData in Google Spreadsheets first and them import into Fusion
Tables isn't working.

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dquigley
Glad to see my city in the news for a good reason!

~~~
enjo
I'm going to be visiting it for the first time this week (on business), I'm
really excited. Except for the cold:)

~~~
vxNsr
Yeah for some reason it's still snowing and below 30 most days. About the
topic though: I'm really excited to see what people come up with... I might
even have a few ideas

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samgranieri
Chicago and most cities have had their GIS data available to the public for
years, so this seems like a nice progression

~~~
yellowbkpk
Two key differences here:

1\. The data is now available under the MIT license. This is important because
(a) it is a predictable, well-known license that allow businesses to interact
with the data without fear of the unknown (license) and (b) it does not have
the "you must remove our data if we ask you to" clause that their data portal
has [0].

2\. They're actively seeking contributions from the community. None of the
existing data portal tools have a built-in way of doing this, so they went
with GitHub because it's a step in the direction of taking feedback. Is the
data wrong or lacking something? Add it yourself and submit a pull request.

[0]
[http://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/narr/foia/data_disclaim...](http://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/narr/foia/data_disclaimer.html)

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thefuturewasnow
Absolutely wonderful birthday present for the greatest city on planet earth.

