Open Data Day 2018

Open Data Day is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. It is an opportunity to show the benefits of open data and encourage the adoption of open data policies in government, business and civil society. This year, Microsoft hosted Code for San Francisco’s Open Data Day event at their #ReactorSF developer community hub. The space had recently been remodeled a to create a kind of developer-in-the-round presentation space.

Sandra Zuniga

The keynote speaker was Sandra Zuniga, Director of the Fix-It Team for the City of San Francisco @fixitteamsf. Appointed by the late Mayor Ed Lee in 2016 to lead his Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Promise Initiative, Sandra’s work brings both qualitative and quantitative data together to make sound decisions to improve neighborhood quality of life. As Fix-It Director, Sandra works with seven different City agencies to implement both quick and sustainable fixes in San Francisco, and has championed a number of innovative projects and civic efforts directly informed by unique data analysis.

Lightning Talks

Sandra was followed by two lightning talks from the open data community.

Samuel Estabook on Open Street Map

Samuel provided different ways to participate in the largest open, crowd sourced mapping project: OpenStreetMap.org

Simon Willison on Datasette

Every wanted to know how many ficus trees where in your neighborhood? In the city? Simon Willison from Datasette took the list of trees in DataSF, which includes 190k line CSV file, and published an interface that makes the data searchable: https://sf-tree-search.now.sh/ This is how @simonw did it: https://github.com/simonw/sf-tree-search#how-i-built-this

Unconference sessions

Several workshops and unconference sessions filled out the rest of the data. Volunteers helped with the Open Data census moving San Francisco to #1 on the census. @synchronouscity led two sessions exploring San Francisco’s open data portal and how to make use of the open data portal, including tips, tricks and secrets.

Brigade member, Sony Green, led a session on Data Visualization with VR. Discussions were held around using VR for helping with PTSD, physical therapy, stroke victims and surgery with some cool demos including an Oculus visualization of EEG data.

Wrap Up

At the end of the day we came together over the remaining snacks to share what we learned and will take forward with us. Unlike normal hackathons, where ideas and projects often fade away at the end of the weekend, we aim to continue this great work during our weekly civic hack nights.