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Making Open Data Meaningful: A Summit Workshop

Tiffany Chu edited this page Aug 29, 2014 · 5 revisions

Meeting 12 Aug 2014 // Attendees: Danny, Tiffany

“This is how you can make open data meaningful. (Brought to you by Citygram!)”

GOALS OF WORKSHOP:

  • advocate for the need to make open data valuable to people
  • share how it can be possible in the context of Citygram
  • develop a curriculum that can serve as a part of the Citygram onboarding process later on
  • offer low-barrier opportunities for participation and involvement
  • present a deeper, richer dive into data that can’t be included in Charlotte + Lexington’s 5-min presentations onstage.

STRUCTURE OF WORKSHOP: a ~1.5 hr interactive demo session.

  • intro: problem statement of open data
  • what is Citygram, how does it work (brief, assume most folks have heard our 5 min lightning talk)
  • WHY one should do this.
  • step through the process of what it’s like to use the ETL tools that we’ve built to connect, transform, and serve it up as an example of geoJSON that Citygram can consume.
  • collaboration / ecosystem: what cities are involved, what open data portals are involved, how, etc. (i.e. Partner with Jim van Fleet, Code for Charlotte to show what is possible from the brigade side?)
  • The importance of templating in natural language for what the notification is about. What bits of this data are meaningful? How can we provide context to citizens? Semantic meaning.
  • hands-on non-coding activity, i.e. give teams different / interesting data sets, and have them massage the data into human messages. (i.e. Socrata does SFdata.gov. We can see if there are any fun topics / data feeds lined up to be released. Later we can add to Citygram SF. Then people can walk away having contributed something.)

“Getting notifications from Citygram is like watching a github repo, where the repo is the codebase of the city.” -a nice quote from Alex.