[Open-data-census] A different type of city census

Rufus Pollock rufus.pollock at okfn.org
Sat Nov 8 15:24:36 UTC 2014


On 7 November 2014 17:07, Noel Hidalgo <noel at beta.nyc> wrote:

> clkao,
>
> I see back in July you wrote about a different type of City Census. How is
> that going?
>
> Here in NYC, we are thinking of extending the City Census to ask the
> following questions. This would be part of a program to find 100 NYC open
> data users and explore the issues they have. If you've GovLab's Open Data
> 500, this is a similar vein...
>

We're very interested in finding ways to support extending the Census
generally.


> For now, these are the questions we are developing.
>
>
>    -
>
>    Are State Authorities, State Agencies, or City Agencies that produce
>    data on their website that doesn't make it to the City’s portal?
>    -
>
>       If so, what is the state of that data?
>
>
This are what I would call "per place" questions rather than per dataset
questions. I think this is a common need (to ask something about a given
place e.g. NYC) rather than per place + dataset.


>
>    -
>
>    Is the data on the City’s portal up to date?
>
>
So this question does get asked at the moment but per dataset.


>
>    -
>
>    Does the data have a properly formatted address field and columns?
>
>
We did some experimentation earlier this year with some quality questions.
The question is how to do this in a way that is reasonably generic (we
could just ask folks to add this to the comments).


>
>    -
>
>    Does the dataset have Lat, Lon?
>    -
>
>    Does the data have an independant, combined lat/lon field?
>    -
>
>    Date, time stamp of record?
>    -
>
>    Date, time stamp of entry?
>
>
Ditto for these.


>
>    -
>
>    If it is a citation or violations dataset, does it have proper cause
>    or offence?
>    -
>
>    API accessible?
>    - Is there a data standard for such data and is in that standard?
>
>
That we sort of have with the format field and we had thought about
extending that. In particular, if there were a recommended standard for a
given type of dataset we could ask about that.

I would say for all of these, your default starting poiont could be to
encourage people to add this info to the details field. I know it is
unstructured but quite a bit of this info will likely be reasonably
unstructured (and will need additional explanation).

Rufus


>
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