[Open-data-census] Feedback on standards for City Census datasets

[James McKinney]

A very simple dataset that very few governments publish is simply a spreadsheet listing all elected officials for that government, along with contact information. A few governments in Canada have been adopting common CSV headers for this dataset.

If the officials are elected by district/division, a geospatial dataset should be made available to describe the boundaries of the electoral districts. With respect to format, all governments I've been in touch with have geospatial datasets available as ESRI Shapefile. GeoJSON is great, but it is very easy to convert a shapefile, so I don't think the census should demand GeoJSON.

Also, if the officials are elected by district/division, a spreadsheet should be made available mapping each address in the government's territory to the district in which it belongs. In many cases, it is not possible to simply use a geocoder and a boundaries file to determine which district an addresses belongs to; for example, in the US, each floor of an apartment building may belong to a different district.

Another valuable dataset is a simple listing of each elected position within government (i.e. a description of the position itself, not the person who holds it).

With these datasets, it is possible to build a basic but fundamental service like https://developers.google.com/civic-information/ which allows citizens to look up representatives by address. I can provide example datasets for each of these.

James

On 2014-02-17, at 11:43 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault wrote:

> Greetings all;
> 
> I wonder if building inspections would be a good complement to building permits? That way data about building quatity and the quality of stock can be known.  Big issue in rental markets.
> 
> Also, Canadian cities and Dublin track data about Housing and homelessness, and I wonder if those would not be good socip-economic indicators.
> 
> a) stock of social housing in a city, and the count of those on social housing registry waiting lists
> b) data about the homeless populations as per shelter counts in a city
> c) data about foodbank usage
> 
> Cheers
> t
> 
> 
> On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 4:14 PM, Christian Villum <christian.villum at okfn.org> wrote:
> All,
> 
> We're putting together a list of standard datasets for the coming City-Census (as part of the Local Open Data Census)
> 
> https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqR8dXc6Ji4JdEEwSFF6OTJTMnhYa3h2ZS1temlDS3c&usp=drive_web#gid=0
> 
> Feedback appreciated!
> 
> -Christian
> -- 
> 
> Christian Villum
> International Community Manager
> 
> skype: christianvillum  |  @villum
> The Open Knowledge Foundation
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> -- 
> Tracey P. Lauriault
> http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/
> https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
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