Blog Post

An 'Open' Invitation

Come join us March 4th for a celebration of Open Data
Come join us March 4th for a celebration of Open Data
Source: "open data (scrabble)" by justgrimes is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

March is a special month for many reasons: St. Patrick’s Day, Women’s History, the start of spring, and daylight savings time. But here at DataSF there is one extra special day we celebrate…

International Open Data Day!!!

via GIPHY

As is tradition, DataSF is celebrating big time and YOU are invited.  We are participating in SF’s Open Data Day Celebration brought to you by the brilliant folks from Code for San Francisco.  It will be held tomorrow (4th) at the Microsoft Reactor and you can register for this free all day event here.  There will be activities for all levels of engagement:

  • Have an amazing idea for a project involving open data? Great! There will be opportunities to present.
  • Want to help pitch in and join a project? Plenty of opportunities for that.
  • Just want to take it all in or learn something new?  DataSF will be running a workshop on using the SF Open Data portal.

This year Open Data Day is focusing on 4 key areas:

  • Open Research Data
  • Tracking Public Money Flows
  • Open Data for the Environment
  • Open Data for Human Rights

In anticipation of the festivities, DataSF would like to shine a spotlight on a selection of SF datasets that speak to some of these topics.

Tracking Public Money Flows

Where does the money go? Nobody does this better in SF than the Controller’s Office and the Ethics Commission.

The Controller’s Office manages the City and County budget datasets. Below are some resources published by the Controller’s Office:

Budget: This covers the budgets of the various departments

Budget - FTE: This dataset provides salary information for each department and associated department programs.

One of the key mandates of the Ethics Commission is in educating the public of campaign and lobbyist spending. While the amount of datasets the Ethics Commission publishes can be overwhelming, here are some choice selections:

Open Data for the Environment

The Planning Department and Department of Public Works has just launched a fantastic new dataset of every public trees in SF.  The project is appropriately titled EveryTreeSF.  The icing on this delicious data cake is an interactive map that allows you to select any tree and find out a variety of eco benefits.  You of course have access to the cake as well.

Street Tree - You can export all the underlying data via the export button at the top.  Inside you will fine geo-coordinates, species, dimensions, and tree condition.

The Department of the Environment also maintains a couple of datasets around emissions and energy performance:

Existing Commercial Buildings Energy Performance Ordinance Report: All commercial buildings with at least 10k sq ft of conditioned space must track how much energy their building uses each year.  You can read more about the enacting ordinance here.

San Francisco Municipal Greenhouse Gas Inventory: this dataset tracks each City and County departments greenhouse gas emissions.

We hope to see you there!