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:
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.
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.
This is actually an installed solution from Socrata (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.
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.
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.
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!
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/
(Disclosure?: I'm friendly with the Socrata folks)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] cjoh|11 years ago|reply
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...
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|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mitchellh|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
[1] https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Crimes-2001-to-...
[+] [-] incision|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bluetidepro|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
(Disclosure?: I'm friendly with the Socrata folks)
[+] [-] eli|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jemaclus|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.slashg.car...
[+] [-] schnable|11 years ago|reply
Some really interesting stuff has been built on this, like this map of property tax deadbeats: http://www.philadelinquency.com/map/delinquent.html
[+] [-] jostmey|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TheLoneWolfling|11 years ago|reply
Ok, that got me to smile.
[+] [-] yen223|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] invisiblefunnel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanewest|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nt_tdc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cridenour|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcgun|11 years ago|reply