
City of Philadelphia: Open Data Census - ca98am79
http://cityofphiladelphia.github.io/slash-data/census/
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dmschulman
Philly has some great digital data initiatives. I don't know if this is the
norm for most cities that aren't the size of San Francisco or NYC (or have
budgets that these cities have) but the City of Philadelphia has pursued
excellent open data policies which have led to projects like:

[https://www.opendataphilly.org/](https://www.opendataphilly.org/)

[http://www.phlcrimemapper.com/](http://www.phlcrimemapper.com/)

The city also has an interesting github page:
[https://github.com/CityOfPhiladelphia](https://github.com/CityOfPhiladelphia)

I know I'm missing a couple of other great pages. AXISPhilly used to be my go-
to place for open data projects here but they closed up shop in 2013.

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jarvuschris
Philly is the 5th largest city in the country, nearly 2x the population of
SF... JUST SAYIN :)

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dmschulman
Yeah very true! Budget would dictate city resources more than population
anyway (though budgets would also scale with population density (bigger tax
base) and greater need for city resources in a perfect world). I might have
overstated that case a bit in my previous comment.

To note, however: I did some very preliminary research on city budgets for
Philly and SF. I'm still scrolling through PDFs from the SF Comptroller's
office, but phila.gov gives me this handy visual breakdown:
[http://www.phila.gov/openbudget/](http://www.phila.gov/openbudget/)

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jasonlotito
Should probably stress that they aren't just releasing the data, but they've
been fairly active in reaching out to the tech community and encouraging them
to use it.

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hackuser
How many cities are doing something like this, and have this much data
available? Is it the norm?

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jarvuschris
Code for America maintains a map of their open-data volunteer groups (called
brigades):
[http://www.codeforamerica.org/brigade/](http://www.codeforamerica.org/brigade/)

Open Knowledge Foundation has a census tool that links out to lots of open
data, their data isn't comprehensive though as it relies on crowd-sourced
reporting and has specific slots they're looking for: [http://us-
city.census.okfn.org/](http://us-city.census.okfn.org/)

