The new data set, announced Tuesday, is the most recent addition to the city’s open data portal, which started modestly with a single data set about five years ago and has grown to more than two dozen. The portal offers a way for residents, researchers and community advocates to not just access data, such as the kinds found in a spreadsheet, but to be able interact with it.
“Honestly, this has been something that we've been trying to do for a long time," Adam Grubbs, city community development management assistant, said. “Working with the data guys, GIS, IT and [others within] the city really gave us a great opportunity ... to demonstrate what we have been doing over the past couple of years and really showing how we ... allocate funding for different projects where we're trying to address the highest need.”
The city’s Data and Analytics Division worked with its Community Development Division on the project, with Grubbs’ office being the “data owner.” The result: a comprehensive five-year data set covering affordable housing, homelessness prevention, capital improvements, public facilities, and public services. Funding comes from federal, state and local sources, and the information is robust because grantees monitor and report their programming — which includes down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, emergency repair programs and accessibility upgrades for seniors and residents with disabilities.
What residents see on screen is powered by an in-house data pipeline built with Microsoft SQL Server and Azure Data Factory.
Watch city employees interact with the dashboard in the video below.
“Once Adam has curated the data on his side, then it’s a matter of us building a pipeline, a data pipeline, to process that data,” Andrew Feuerborn, the city’s chief data officer, said. It’s the “behind the scenes thing that nobody ever sees, but it’s a critical piece to keeping the data up to date and current. Every time he delivers a new payload of data, we have an automated process that picks that up, moves that data into the data warehouse, and then eventually publishes that data out to the website.”
Diar Talabani, a city data analyst, takes that “hidden piece” and brings it forward with interactive dashboards, adding filters such as year, ward, funding type or program category. The dashboards are illustrated with doughnut graphs, charts and trendlines, accompanied by downloadable spreadsheets and FAQs.
“The difference between public data and open data is, open data is supposed to be more accessible, so we help curate and guide the user through it,” Talabani said.
Creating an open data portal, team members said, requires creating content, curating data and setting standards; and they are now gauging interest and tracking use. For example, the city’s lead water pipe dashboard gets consistent use and points to the national focus on remediating lead service lines by 2034. Cities including Jackson, Miss.; Fort Worth, Texas; and Chicago are among those with similar public-facing tools.
“Don’t be afraid of the data,” Talabani said. “It can work for you. It’s sort of like turning the lights on in an old attic — at first all you see are the cobwebs. But after a while, it becomes a place you want to visit.”
