Outreach
From SF Data Wiki
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Email
General Audience
My name is ______ and I am a project member of CivicDB. The mayor of SF, inspired by Obama’s call for transparency is laying out a broad vision that will transform city hall. SF sees tremendous opportunity in cultivating open data, open participation and open source but face many challenges: political will, resistant culture, fostering participation, sustaining digital communities, etc.
The City of SF is sponsoring an experiment to develop an open source platform with the community that will help improve public access to raw government data in machine readable formats. We see a great opportunity to work with other cities and developers in creating technology that is re-usable, free and open source to solve a common challenge. As members of _____ , I'm writing to you to see if there is any interest in this initiative.
Developer Audience
If you're interested in open government and open data you should take a look at the CivicDB project (civicdb.org). Their goal is to develop an open source platform to help govt agencies publish machine readable dataset to the public. They currently have a need for the following skillsets: SQL, data processing, API design, GIS, Python, Drupal and graphic design. You can join their mailing list if you want to learn more.
TV/Radio
How did this all begin (Blair)
- SF work (open source)
- Obama/Vivek/Gov 2.0 as catalyst
How do we execute CivicDB (Jay)
- Background
- Recognize that we all face the same challenge: liberating govt data
- Open source is the best approach in terms of quality, cost, sustainability
- Goal
- The goal of our community is to develop an open source platform to help improve public access to raw government data in machine readable formats.
- Provide tools for any govt org to free data
- why?
- Raw data, freely available to the public, allows for open-ended analysis by the community at large.
- Government is more transparent and open when data is liberated.
- Community is asking for it
- Develop applications: SF Crime Map, EcoFinder
- Why now?
- Obama Jan 21 memo
- Data.gov
- Gov 2.0 community
- How
- Sent CL ad looking for volunteers
- outreach to dozens of groups and individuals (Macon Philips, Sunlight, DIYcity, Open Government Working Group)
- Phase 1 - just do it - portal approach
- Phase 2 - CivicDB - central repository - allows for multiple open formats
- Establishing of Data policy
Public interest & participation (Tom)
Who
- Techies
- Interested People
What
- Providing bodies to do the work
- Providing input on what citizens need doing
Why
- ability to shape government into something that useful to citizens
- help promote open source
How
- help build software and data frameworks
