March is here already and with it we are excited to celebrate International Open Data Day!
We’ll be joining the our local host, Code for San Francisco, for a day filled with projects and an “unconference” agenda created by participants. We hope YOU will join us there tomorrow, March 3rd, 2018. You can RSVP here.
While you’ll be able to talk about all things open data, there are a couple of general themes from the international organizers. This year, they are:
- Open research data
- Tracking public money flows
- Open mapping
- Data for equal development
In anticipation of tomorrow’s event, we wanted to highlight a couple of datasets that are captured by some of these topics.
Tracking public money flows
Nobody tracks public money in SF better than the Controller’s Office and the Ethics Commission.
The Controller’s Office manages the City and County budget datasets as well as data on spending and revenue. Below are some resources published by the Controller’s Office:
- Budget: This covers the budgets of the various departments
- Budget - FTE: This dataset provides budget related to salaries for each department and associated department programs.
- Spending and Revenue: This dataset tracks spending and revenue by department and related programs.
One of the key mandates of the Ethics Commission is in educating the public of campaign and lobbyist spending. While there are a lot of datasets the Ethics Commission publishes, here are some choice selections:
- Lobbyist Activity - Contacts of Public Officials: A dataset of each lobby visit. A treasure trove containing who was doing the lobbying, what official they talked to, and why.
- Lobbyist Activity - Payments Promised by Clients: A dataset of lobbyist contributions. Contains lobbyist, firm, payment amount, and client.
- Lobbyist Activity - Political Contributions: All political contributions of $100 of more by lobbyist.
- Campaign Consultants - Client Payment: Record of payments to campaign consultants
Open mapping
This one is a tough one to hone in on. Nearly 60% of all the datasets on the open data portal include some easy to map geometry (points, lines or polygons).
Here’s a highlight of a handful of interesting datasets in different sub-topics.
Housing and development
- Check out annual housing inventories or quarterly development pipeline reports. These offer snapshots of housing production and completion over time.
- Building permits include data from the Department of Building Inspection
- Planning records include data generated by the planning department during the planning process
- The affordable housing pipeline includes data on the location of affordable housing under development tracked by the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development
Environment
- Street Trees! We have a lovely dataset with the location of street trees maintained by Public Works.
- Parks! Rec and park has a number of datasets showing the location of parks and facilities in those parks.
Others
There’s so much more to map. You can peruse the portal by department or type and find all sorts of mappable data. You can also browse all the maps and map data on the portal in one list.