

City of Chicago Data Portal - ca98am79
https://data.cityofchicago.org/browse?limitTo=datasets&utf8=%E2%9C%93

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cjoh
This tells an interesting story about good "looking" but not adopted software.
At a cursory glance, this looks great! All these datasets online! How
wonderful.

But once you start to dig a bit deeper and scratch the surface, just barely,
you can see that it's actually a graveyard of an open data era gone by. Many
of the datasets here look like this:

[https://data.cityofchicago.org/FOIA/FOIA-Request-Log-
Mayor-s...](https://data.cityofchicago.org/FOIA/FOIA-Request-Log-Mayor-s-
Office-for-People-with-Di/fazv-a8mb)

Where they were initially placed online, perhaps with an attempt to be more
transparent and open to the public, and they haven't been updated since 2012.
The political points got scored by the elected officials and appointees, but
either the software that the career bureaucrats is too burdensome to use, or
the will to be open to the public just isn't there.

After spending 10 years in this field, That's the primary problem with these
transparency efforts. They sound great to the public, and great to the
politicians, but nobody bothers to sell the _staff of government_ on why it's
important. And when they don't want to do something, or when they're not sold
on it, it just doesn't get done.

Software designers and "civic hackers" need to grok that to be successful
their first customer isn't the public or the politician, it's usually the
career civil servant.

~~~
ENGNR
How is this not a success for the vendor? They got paid.

I do agree with you though that UX is one of governments biggest problems.
Imagine the training dollars that could be saved if enterprise software was as
intuitive as consumer software, let alone the intangible efficiency gains from
things getting done more quickly/effectively.

And not some ham fisted usability standard, the best response I can see is
getting user advocates involved early in the process. Get some vendor trials
going asap and immediately disqualify anything that isn't even trying in the
UX department. Just one more thing for gov project managers to think about
sadly which is why it won't happen.

~~~
andrewliebchen
I'm designer for OpenGov, we're an a16z-backed startup that's doing precisely
this: the usability and simplicity of consumer apps to the world of government
finance.

So far, we have a financial transparency product available to cities. Check
out Palo Alto's site on OpenGov:
[http://paloalto.opengov.com](http://paloalto.opengov.com).

Transparency visualizations for the public are one thing, but one of our
ultimate goals is to positively impact the civic financial planning. Keep an
eye on OpenGov.

~~~
modarts
Very nice; any plans for a public data api?

~~~
andrewliebchen
Yeah, I think that's on the road map.

We're growing fast and looking for developers, designers, and data scientists.
If you're interested, hit me up: aliebchen at opengov dot com. YOU could help
build our public API.

[http://opengov.com/careers](http://opengov.com/careers)

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mitchellh
This is actually an installed solution from Socrata
([http://www.socrata.com/](http://www.socrata.com/)). You can see in their
hero element they actually show Chicago as a successful use case. There are
many other cities/states that have installations from Socrata and they build
good tech to make it relatively easy for this sort of thing to be setup.

Doesn't take away from the original post, but could be interested for anyone
who might have some influence in their local government to know this is fairly
off-the-shelf.

~~~
glaugh
Fwiw, here's a fun little blog post on Socrata's blog, pulling from the crime
dataset[1], looking at which crimes happen at which time of day/week/year:
[http://www.socrata.com/blog/crime-time-visualizing-crime-
dat...](http://www.socrata.com/blog/crime-time-visualizing-crime-data-
chicago/) (Disclosure: I wrote the post)

[1] [https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-
Safety/Crimes-2001-to-...](https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-
Safety/Crimes-2001-to-present/ijzp-q8t2)

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incision
One of the nicer public data portals I've seen.

I'm not surprised to see that salaries are the the most popular data set by
far. I was working for a public agency during the first year they made salary
information readily available.

There were two main types in the deluge of complaints:

1.) The significant others of people who had been lying about their income.

2.) People dripping with rage that 'uneducated' people (jobs that don't
require a degree) were collecting 'outrageous' (lower middle-class) salaries.

~~~
rayiner
Look at the sanitation department. These are probably the jobs that require
the least education. General laborers seem to start at $40k. Sanitation
laborers and truck drivers seem to mostly be in the $60-70k range. Foremen
around $75k. Then look at the law department, which is probably the jobs with
the most educational requirement. About $60k to start, going up to about $110k
for supervisors who aren't top-level managers. Basically, people fortunate
enough to be born with the aptitude for higher education get a 50% premium for
their efforts. Seems pretty fair, at a high level.

~~~
josephschmoe
>Basically, people fortunate enough to be born with the aptitude for higher
education get a 50% premium for their efforts.

That's an odd way to phrase that. There are plenty of people who are born with
this aptitude who take different actions in life and plenty who never have the
opportunity to use it for reasons other than aptitude.

~~~
jkimmel
>Basically, people fortunate enough to be born with the aptitude for higher
education get a 50% premium for their efforts.

I think a minor edit makes this statement more accurate:

Basically, people who complete higher education get a 50% premium on their
efforts in aggregate.

Though as others have noted before, this level of analysis is in and of itself
problematic. If top performers for multiple generations have entered the
higher education system, it is difficult to separate out the confounded
variables of natural ability, drive, and the "higher education premium" (so to
speak).

How do we necessarily know that college graduates are earning more due to
their education, and not because the population of the most driven and/or most
able individuals happens to go to college? It's a difficult problem.

The only real viable suggestion I've heard is to compare earnings of
individuals with similar pre-college academic performance who attended college
to those who didn't. Most likely, these individuals would have to be on the
threshold of collegiate entrance (by SAT, GPA, etc.), so perhaps even this
analysis would not properly assess the benefit of college to high performing
students.

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tptacek
What would be really nice would be if Chicago could find a way to federate
this portal with the suburbs.

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bluetidepro
This is pretty interesting stuff, esp since I live in Chicago. There could be
lots of neat data apps created from all this data.

One thing I found interesting is the data in "Current Employee Names,
Salaries, and Position Titles." The mayor is actually the 2nd highest paid
employee (surprised me) at $216,210. The highest paid is the superintendent of
police, making $260,004. Pretty neat data sets, thanks for sharing the link!

~~~
glaugh
Here's a smattering of example apps built off this kind of data (e.g., data in
Socrata-powered open data portals like this one):
[http://www.socrata.com/civic-apps/](http://www.socrata.com/civic-apps/)

(Disclosure?: I'm friendly with the Socrata folks)

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Jemaclus
Most major cities have public data portals like this, including San Francisco,
Chicago, New York, Boston, Seattle, Austin, Oakland, and so on. Some are more
useful than others, I think. (For instance, Oakland is mostly crime-related
reports... surprise?)

San Francisco has some great ones that could be used to make new startups...
things like street cleaning schedules, maps of every building in the city, the
location of every parking space, and so on. You could easily build a niche app
to, for example, remind you to move your car when street cleaning is coming
by. Or maybe an app to inform you of local graffiti reports so you can be a
good Samaritan and clean it up.

It's really great stuff. I love public data sets like this... and I'm actually
using Chicago's (and several other cities) in my own work at my day job, so
it's nice to see this get some recognition!

~~~
varungoel
The City of Chicago's open data portal is very neat!

I've actually created an app called Car Pal which helps you avoid parking
tickets by reminding you when to move you car based on where you park & street
cleaning schedules.

Check it out here [https://www.carpalapp.com](https://www.carpalapp.com)

Android:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.slashg.car...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.slashg.carpal)

~~~
Jemaclus
The open data portal is actually open source... many of the larger cities in
the US are using it.. but yes, it's great!

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jostmey
The dataset I used was completely wrong, and it cost me!

The schedule of when the city is supposed to clean the streets was ignored. My
car was ticketed because the city decided to sweep one day early. * * *k
chicago.

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TheLoneWolfling
> &utf8=✓

Ok, that got me to smile.

~~~
yen223
I've seen that around other websites as well. If I remember correctly, it's to
force IE to post data using UTF-8 encoding.

~~~
jamesmiller5
A snowman is also used to achieve this.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13797389/utf8-post-
parame...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13797389/utf8-post-parameter-on-
gmail-login-contains-a-snowman-character)

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invisiblefunnel
[https://data.sfgov.org/browse?limitTo=datasets](https://data.sfgov.org/browse?limitTo=datasets)
[https://data.cityofnewyork.us/data](https://data.cityofnewyork.us/data)
[https://data.lacity.org/data](https://data.lacity.org/data)
[http://www.civicdata.com/en/dataset](http://www.civicdata.com/en/dataset)

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seanewest
I like how you can suggest datasets:
[https://data.cityofchicago.org/nominate](https://data.cityofchicago.org/nominate)

The link was at the bottom. Maybe if it was more prominent and closer to the
top it would give users the impression that they have a stronger role in this.

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nt_tdc
I'm actually working on an app that pulls data from here and compares all of
the aldermen in the city. Most people living in the city have no idea what
their alderman is doing for them. I want to give people the ability to compare
theirs to someone else's, at the minimum.

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cridenour
Cincinnati, while maybe behind, is pushing forward with theirs with a
partnership with a non-profit.
[http://opendatacincy.org](http://opendatacincy.org)

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jcgun
ctOS v0.1

