We are so excited to launch our strategic plan for Year 2 - Data in San Francisco: Meeting supply, spurring demand!
Read the press release or read the whole thing as a google doc or PDF.
Transforming our City with Data
Data can feel dry, boring and academic. At the same time, everyone loves a good story. But every story has a rich vein of data threaded throughout, describing a pattern and illuminating a path forward. It’s only when we link the data narratives that underlie our stories, that we are able to make new connections that lead to new insights about what is working or what is possible. Our Year 2 plan is not about data for data’s sake. It is about transforming how we enrich our understanding, our experience and our City with data.
Celebrating Year 1
Before we dive into what’s next, we need to step back and celebrate what we accomplished in Year 1. Section 3 of our plan goes into greater detail, but below are some of our favorite highlights from the last year:
- Completed the dataset inventory with the help of our amazing Data Coordinators (learn more about our approach)
- Relaunched our open data portal and created a web home for DataSF
- Standardized publishing methods and metadata requirements
- Established a Citywide open data license for published data
- Launched the Housing Data Hub our first strategic release in partnership with a slew of City departments
- Launched the Data Academy in partnership with the City Services Auditor
- Developed a strategy to improve confidential data sharing with the City Services Auditor and more than a dozen City departments
- Grew our team with the awesome addition of Jason Lally AND sneak peek: we’ll be hiring soon to support open data services and our confidential data sharing project - so keep an eye out!
Leveraging the Foundation from Year 1
If Year 1 was about building the foundation, Year 2 is about buying furniture, painting the walls, hanging photos and throwing a housewarming party. It’s time to open the doors and not just let folks in, but deliver the invite in-person. That’s why the theme for Year 2 is to fill out the supply of data but also ensure that it’s being used by a broader range of people.
It took a village
A key part of our Year 1 foundation was the many people we partnered and worked with. The work we are doing requires the commitment, insight and effort of a tremendous number of people. And the length of our acknowledgements section reflects that.
Our goals for Year 2
For Year 2, we are structuring our work around five core goals and subgoals in some cases.
- Make timely data easily available
- Increase number and timeliness of datasets on SF OpenData
- Enable use of private data, while appropriately protecting it
- Streamline internal data access
- Improve the usability, quality and consistency of our data
- Support increased use of data in decision-making
- Increase internal capacity
- Support public capacity
- Foster and incent a data culture
- Identify and foster innovations in open data and data use
- Continuously improve, scale, maintain and monitor our work
Things we plan to report on next year
If all goes according to plan, we will be reporting on the following key accomplishments next year:
- Fully deployed data automation as a service to ease data publication
- Deployed better, friendlier publishing for geographic data
- Identified methods to crowdsource collective intelligence about published datasets
- Launched new transparency websites
- Engaged our broader community around a handful of key issues or datasets
- Established center to facilitate and standardize confidential data sharing
- Began to systematically tackle data quality
- Developed Data Academy into a professional development strategy
- Enriched our data through effective storytelling
In the meantime, check out DataSF In Progress
Along with our plan, we are excited to launch DataSF In Progress - our live dashboard tracking:
- The Citywide data inventory and status by department
- Department publishing plans
- Publishing activity and performance
Written with LOVE in San Francisco.