6 ms·

City of Chicago Data Portal

61 points by ca98am79 12y ago

jcgun 12y ago
ctOS v0.1
bluetidepro 12y ago
This is pretty interesting stuff, esp since I live in Chicago. There could be lots of neat data apps created from all this data. One thing I found interesting is the data in "Current Employee Names, Salaries, and Position Titles." The mayor is actually the 2nd highest paid employee (surprised me) at $216,210. The highest paid is the superintendent of police, making $260,004. Pretty neat data sets, thanks for sharing the link!
- eli 12y ago
  I think elected officials tend to be relatively underpaid. Asking for a raise would almost certainly be used against them.
- glaugh 12y ago
  Here's a smattering of example apps built off this kind of data (e.g., data in Socrata-powered open data portals like this one): http://www.socrata.com/civic-apps/ http://www.socrata.com/civic-apps/ (Disclosure?: I'm friendly with the Socrata folks)
incision 12y ago
One of the nicer public data portals I've seen. I'm not surprised to see that salaries are the the most popular data set by far. I was working for a public agency during the first year they made salary information readily available. There were two main types in the deluge of complaints: 1.) The significant others of people who had been lying about their income. 2.) People dripping with rage that 'uneducated' people (jobs that don't require a degree) were collecting 'outrageous' (lower middle-class) salaries.
- rayiner 12y ago
  Look at the sanitation department. These are probably the jobs that require the least education. General laborers seem to start at $40k. Sanitation laborers and truck drivers seem to mostly be in the $60-70k range. Foremen around $75k. Then look at the law department, which is probably the jobs with the most educational requirement. About $60k to start, going up to about $110k for supervisors who aren't top-level managers. Basically, people fortunate enough to be born with the aptitude for higher education get a 50% premium for their efforts. Seems pretty fair, at a high level.
  - incision 12y ago
    >'Seems pretty fair, at a high level.' I would agree. What the experience above and others since evidenced to me is that quite a few people look at a degree as ticket - admission to a higher class. They see the people who manage to earn above their apparent class as frauds - stowaways who don't belong. People who are somehow gaming the system - stealing what degree holders are entitled to. I'm not sure what to make of it exactly. I'd guess it's an amalgamation of crushing student loan debt, the misleading marketing of college as a guarantee of prosperity and perhaps a socially acceptable facade for old-fashioned class/race discrimination.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - josephschmoe 12y ago
    >Basically, people fortunate enough to be born with the aptitude for higher education get a 50% premium for their efforts. That's an odd way to phrase that. There are plenty of people who are born with this aptitude who take different actions in life and plenty who never have the opportunity to use it for reasons other than aptitude.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - 12y ago
invisiblefunnel 12y ago
https://data.sfgov.org/browse?limitTo=datasets https://data.sfgov.org/browse?limitTo=datasets https://data.cityofnewyork.us/data https://data.cityofnewyork.us/data https://data.lacity.org/data https://data.lacity.org/data http://www.civicdata.com/en/dataset http://www.civicdata.com/en/dataset
Jemaclus 12y ago
Most major cities have public data portals like this, including San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Boston, Seattle, Austin, Oakland, and so on. Some are more useful than others, I think. (For instance, Oakland is mostly crime-related reports... surprise?) San Francisco has some great ones that could be used to make new startups... things like street cleaning schedules, maps of every building in the city, the location of every parking space, and so on. You could easily build a niche app to, for example, remind you to move your car when street cleaning is coming by. Or maybe an app to inform you of local graffiti reports so you can be a good Samaritan and clean it up. It's really great stuff. I love public data sets like this... and I'm actually using Chicago's (and several other cities) in my own work at my day job, so it's nice to see this get some recognition!
- varungoel 12y ago
  The City of Chicago's open data portal is very neat! I've actually created an app called Car Pal which helps you avoid parking tickets by reminding you when to move you car based on where you park & street cleaning schedules. Check it out here https://www.carpalapp.com https://www.carpalapp.com Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.slashg.carpal https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.slashg.car...
  - selectodude 12y ago
    I use the hell out of that app. Thank you very much for making it.
    - varungoel 12y ago
      Thank you so much Selectodude
  - Jemaclus 12y ago
    The open data portal is actually open source... many of the larger cities in the US are using it.. but yes, it's great!
tptacek 12y ago
What would be really nice would be if Chicago could find a way to federate this portal with the suburbs.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
mitchellh 12y ago
This is actually an installed solution from Socrata (http://www.socrata.com/ http://www.socrata.com/). You can see in their hero element they actually show Chicago as a successful use case. There are many other cities/states that have installations from Socrata and they build good tech to make it relatively easy for this sort of thing to be setup. Doesn't take away from the original post, but could be interested for anyone who might have some influence in their local government to know this is fairly off-the-shelf.
- glaugh 12y ago
  Fwiw, here's a fun little blog post on Socrata's blog, pulling from the crime dataset[1], looking at which crimes happen at which time of day/week/year: http://www.socrata.com/blog/crime-time-visualizing-crime-data-chicago/ http://www.socrata.com/blog/crime-time-visualizing-crime-dat... (Disclosure: I wrote the post) [1] https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Crimes-2001-to-present/ijzp-q8t2 https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Crimes-2001-to-...
cridenour 12y ago
Cincinnati, while maybe behind, is pushing forward with theirs with a partnership with a non-profit. http://opendatacincy.org http://opendatacincy.org
TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
> &utf8=✓ Ok, that got me to smile.
- yen223 12y ago
  I've seen that around other websites as well. If I remember correctly, it's to force IE to post data using UTF-8 encoding.
  - jamesmiller5 12y ago
    A snowman is also used to achieve this. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13797389/utf8-post-parameter-on-gmail-login-contains-a-snowman-character http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13797389/utf8-post-parame...
cjoh 12y ago
This tells an interesting story about good "looking" but not adopted software. At a cursory glance, this looks great! All these datasets online! How wonderful. But once you start to dig a bit deeper and scratch the surface, just barely, you can see that it's actually a graveyard of an open data era gone by. Many of the datasets here look like this: https://data.cityofchicago.org/FOIA/FOIA-Request-Log-Mayor-s-Office-for-People-with-Di/fazv-a8mb https://data.cityofchicago.org/FOIA/FOIA-Request-Log-Mayor-s... Where they were initially placed online, perhaps with an attempt to be more transparent and open to the public, and they haven't been updated since 2012. The political points got scored by the elected officials and appointees, but either the software that the career bureaucrats is too burdensome to use, or the will to be open to the public just isn't there. After spending 10 years in this field, That's the primary problem with these transparency efforts. They sound great to the public, and great to the politicians, but nobody bothers to sell the staff of government on why it's important. And when they don't want to do something, or when they're not sold on it, it just doesn't get done. Software designers and "civic hackers" need to grok that to be successful their first customer isn't the public or the politician, it's usually the career civil servant.
- ENGNR 12y ago
  How is this not a success for the vendor? They got paid. I do agree with you though that UX is one of governments biggest problems. Imagine the training dollars that could be saved if enterprise software was as intuitive as consumer software, let alone the intangible efficiency gains from things getting done more quickly/effectively. And not some ham fisted usability standard, the best response I can see is getting user advocates involved early in the process. Get some vendor trials going asap and immediately disqualify anything that isn't even trying in the UX department. Just one more thing for gov project managers to think about sadly which is why it won't happen.
  - andrewliebchen 12y ago
    I'm designer for OpenGov, we're an a16z-backed startup that's doing precisely this: the usability and simplicity of consumer apps to the world of government finance. So far, we have a financial transparency product available to cities. Check out Palo Alto's site on OpenGov: http://paloalto.opengov.com http://paloalto.opengov.com. Transparency visualizations for the public are one thing, but one of our ultimate goals is to positively impact the civic financial planning. Keep an eye on OpenGov.
seanewest 12y ago
I like how you can suggest datasets: https://data.cityofchicago.org/nominate https://data.cityofchicago.org/nominate The link was at the bottom. Maybe if it was more prominent and closer to the top it would give users the impression that they have a stronger role in this.
jostmey 12y ago
The dataset I used was completely wrong, and it cost me! The schedule of when the city is supposed to clean the streets was ignored. My car was ticketed because the city decided to sweep one day early. * * *k chicago.
nt_tdc 12y ago
I'm actually working on an app that pulls data from here and compares all of the aldermen in the city. Most people living in the city have no idea what their alderman is doing for them. I want to give people the ability to compare theirs to someone else's, at the minimum.

61 points by ca98am79 12y ago

jcgun 12y ago

ctOS v0.1

This is pretty interesting stuff, esp since I live in Chicago. There could be lots of neat data apps created from all this data. One thing I found interesting is the data in "Current Employee Names, Salaries, and Position Titles." The mayor is actually the 2nd highest paid employee (surprised me) at $216,210. The highest paid is the superintendent of police, making $260,004. Pretty neat data sets, thanks for sharing the link!

eli 12y ago
I think elected officials tend to be relatively underpaid. Asking for a raise would almost certainly be used against them.
glaugh 12y ago
Here's a smattering of example apps built off this kind of data (e.g., data in Socrata-powered open data portals like this one): http://www.socrata.com/civic-apps/ http://www.socrata.com/civic-apps/ (Disclosure?: I'm friendly with the Socrata folks)

incision 12y ago

One of the nicer public data portals I've seen. I'm not surprised to see that salaries are the the most popular data set by far. I was working for a public agency during the first year they made salary information readily available. There were two main types in the deluge of complaints: 1.) The significant others of people who had been lying about their income. 2.) People dripping with rage that 'uneducated' people (jobs that don't require a degree) were collecting 'outrageous' (lower middle-class) salaries.

rayiner 12y ago
Look at the sanitation department. These are probably the jobs that require the least education. General laborers seem to start at $40k. Sanitation laborers and truck drivers seem to mostly be in the $60-70k range. Foremen around $75k. Then look at the law department, which is probably the jobs with the most educational requirement. About $60k to start, going up to about $110k for supervisors who aren't top-level managers. Basically, people fortunate enough to be born with the aptitude for higher education get a 50% premium for their efforts. Seems pretty fair, at a high level.
- incision 12y ago
  >'Seems pretty fair, at a high level.' I would agree. What the experience above and others since evidenced to me is that quite a few people look at a degree as ticket - admission to a higher class. They see the people who manage to earn above their apparent class as frauds - stowaways who don't belong. People who are somehow gaming the system - stealing what degree holders are entitled to. I'm not sure what to make of it exactly. I'd guess it's an amalgamation of crushing student loan debt, the misleading marketing of college as a guarantee of prosperity and perhaps a socially acceptable facade for old-fashioned class/race discrimination.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- josephschmoe 12y ago
  >Basically, people fortunate enough to be born with the aptitude for higher education get a 50% premium for their efforts. That's an odd way to phrase that. There are plenty of people who are born with this aptitude who take different actions in life and plenty who never have the opportunity to use it for reasons other than aptitude.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - 12y ago

invisiblefunnel 12y ago

https://data.sfgov.org/browse?limitTo=datasets https://data.sfgov.org/browse?limitTo=datasets https://data.cityofnewyork.us/data https://data.cityofnewyork.us/data https://data.lacity.org/data https://data.lacity.org/data http://www.civicdata.com/en/dataset http://www.civicdata.com/en/dataset

Jemaclus 12y ago

Most major cities have public data portals like this, including San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Boston, Seattle, Austin, Oakland, and so on. Some are more useful than others, I think. (For instance, Oakland is mostly crime-related reports... surprise?) San Francisco has some great ones that could be used to make new startups... things like street cleaning schedules, maps of every building in the city, the location of every parking space, and so on. You could easily build a niche app to, for example, remind you to move your car when street cleaning is coming by. Or maybe an app to inform you of local graffiti reports so you can be a good Samaritan and clean it up. It's really great stuff. I love public data sets like this... and I'm actually using Chicago's (and several other cities) in my own work at my day job, so it's nice to see this get some recognition!

varungoel 12y ago
The City of Chicago's open data portal is very neat! I've actually created an app called Car Pal which helps you avoid parking tickets by reminding you when to move you car based on where you park & street cleaning schedules. Check it out here https://www.carpalapp.com https://www.carpalapp.com Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.slashg.carpal https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.slashg.car...
- selectodude 12y ago
  I use the hell out of that app. Thank you very much for making it.
  - varungoel 12y ago
    Thank you so much Selectodude
- Jemaclus 12y ago
  The open data portal is actually open source... many of the larger cities in the US are using it.. but yes, it's great!

tptacek 12y ago

What would be really nice would be if Chicago could find a way to federate this portal with the suburbs.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

mitchellh 12y ago

This is actually an installed solution from Socrata (http://www.socrata.com/ http://www.socrata.com/). You can see in their hero element they actually show Chicago as a successful use case. There are many other cities/states that have installations from Socrata and they build good tech to make it relatively easy for this sort of thing to be setup. Doesn't take away from the original post, but could be interested for anyone who might have some influence in their local government to know this is fairly off-the-shelf.

glaugh 12y ago
Fwiw, here's a fun little blog post on Socrata's blog, pulling from the crime dataset[1], looking at which crimes happen at which time of day/week/year: http://www.socrata.com/blog/crime-time-visualizing-crime-data-chicago/ http://www.socrata.com/blog/crime-time-visualizing-crime-dat... (Disclosure: I wrote the post) [1] https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Crimes-2001-to-present/ijzp-q8t2 https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Crimes-2001-to-...

cridenour 12y ago

Cincinnati, while maybe behind, is pushing forward with theirs with a partnership with a non-profit. http://opendatacincy.org http://opendatacincy.org

TheLoneWolfling 12y ago

> &utf8=✓ Ok, that got me to smile.

yen223 12y ago
I've seen that around other websites as well. If I remember correctly, it's to force IE to post data using UTF-8 encoding.
- jamesmiller5 12y ago
  A snowman is also used to achieve this. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13797389/utf8-post-parameter-on-gmail-login-contains-a-snowman-character http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13797389/utf8-post-parame...

cjoh 12y ago

This tells an interesting story about good "looking" but not adopted software. At a cursory glance, this looks great! All these datasets online! How wonderful. But once you start to dig a bit deeper and scratch the surface, just barely, you can see that it's actually a graveyard of an open data era gone by. Many of the datasets here look like this: https://data.cityofchicago.org/FOIA/FOIA-Request-Log-Mayor-s-Office-for-People-with-Di/fazv-a8mb https://data.cityofchicago.org/FOIA/FOIA-Request-Log-Mayor-s... Where they were initially placed online, perhaps with an attempt to be more transparent and open to the public, and they haven't been updated since 2012. The political points got scored by the elected officials and appointees, but either the software that the career bureaucrats is too burdensome to use, or the will to be open to the public just isn't there. After spending 10 years in this field, That's the primary problem with these transparency efforts. They sound great to the public, and great to the politicians, but nobody bothers to sell the staff of government on why it's important. And when they don't want to do something, or when they're not sold on it, it just doesn't get done. Software designers and "civic hackers" need to grok that to be successful their first customer isn't the public or the politician, it's usually the career civil servant.

ENGNR 12y ago
How is this not a success for the vendor? They got paid. I do agree with you though that UX is one of governments biggest problems. Imagine the training dollars that could be saved if enterprise software was as intuitive as consumer software, let alone the intangible efficiency gains from things getting done more quickly/effectively. And not some ham fisted usability standard, the best response I can see is getting user advocates involved early in the process. Get some vendor trials going asap and immediately disqualify anything that isn't even trying in the UX department. Just one more thing for gov project managers to think about sadly which is why it won't happen.
- andrewliebchen 12y ago
  I'm designer for OpenGov, we're an a16z-backed startup that's doing precisely this: the usability and simplicity of consumer apps to the world of government finance. So far, we have a financial transparency product available to cities. Check out Palo Alto's site on OpenGov: http://paloalto.opengov.com http://paloalto.opengov.com. Transparency visualizations for the public are one thing, but one of our ultimate goals is to positively impact the civic financial planning. Keep an eye on OpenGov.

seanewest 12y ago

I like how you can suggest datasets: https://data.cityofchicago.org/nominate https://data.cityofchicago.org/nominate The link was at the bottom. Maybe if it was more prominent and closer to the top it would give users the impression that they have a stronger role in this.

jostmey 12y ago

The dataset I used was completely wrong, and it cost me! The schedule of when the city is supposed to clean the streets was ignored. My car was ticketed because the city decided to sweep one day early. * * *k chicago.

nt_tdc 12y ago

I'm actually working on an app that pulls data from here and compares all of the aldermen in the city. Most people living in the city have no idea what their alderman is doing for them. I want to give people the ability to compare theirs to someone else's, at the minimum.