Santa Rosa rolls out new data website
Santa Rosa has launched a new website designed to give residents greater access to data about their city government and the tools to help them make sense of it.
The city’s “open data” site assembles in one place information such as public employee salaries, crime reports, and building permit activity, and allows people to view it graphically via customizable maps, charts and graphs.
The initiative is part of Santa Rosa’s new focus on being more accessible and transparent to the public, a broader “open door” effort that includes the creation of a one-stop service hub and redesign of the city’s main website.
“Our old website was user-surly, but this one is user-friendly for sure,” Councilwoman Julie Combs said.
The idea has been under consideration for a couple years but picked up steam last fall when Sonoma County officials were getting close to picking a vendor for their open data platform, Eric McHenry, the city’s chief technology officer, told the council recently. The two organizations agreed to pick the same vendor to facilitate the sharing of data, and also to make it easier for residents, he said.
“We’re really excited about it,” McHenry said. “We really want this data to be available and to be responsive to our public.”
The city quietly launched the new site in January and has been gradually adding new data to it ever since.
It started with data sets McHenry said he thought the public would be most interested in. These include: crime information, fire department responses, employee salary and compensation data, public service requests made on the city’s mobile app MySantaRosa, budget data, building permit data, parks and recreational facilities, business tax data, and capital improvement projects.
Much of that information was spread out in various locations on the city’s homepage, www.srcity.org, but finding it was challenging, McHenry said. The new site is found at http://data.srcity.org.
In many cases, the data were available on the site but not in a reader friendly way, McHenry said. For example, the city’s budgets have long been available online, but they’re just electronic versions of documents that are hundreds of pages long. Similarly, other data, such as salary and benefit information, was available but often embedded in PDF formats, McHenry said.
But information on the new site is organized in databases that are downloadable, searchable and capable of being presented visually with easy-to-use software, he said.
“One of the basic tenets of open data platforms is everything that is up there, you can pull it down, you can massage it, twist it around and visualize it,” McHenry told the council.
A mapping function allows large sets of data to be displayed visually using heat maps that show where certain activities like crimes or building permits are concentrated over time.
At the moment, however, there are limitations to the data and its presentation.
For one, the only crime data available on the site presently appears to be from a few days in January. In addition, the details of the police responses are very limited. For example, mousing over one of the dots on the crime report map near the intersection of Fourth Street and Pacific Avenue reveals “Drug/Narcotic Offense” at 2:27 a.m. on Jan. 25, but does not give a precise location or any additional information.
Similarly, the locations of the nearly 21,000 fire and medical calls performed by the fire department during 2014 and January of 2015 have the last two numbers of the addresses obscured. So the Nov. 21 fire that displaced the residents of a 100-year-old home on Orchard Street, lists the call simply as “Fire, 12:37 p.m. 8xx Orchard Street.”
Such details were intentionally obscured. In both cases, the departments provided the data in “abstracted” form for privacy concerns, McHenry said. It’s one thing to report the general areas of public safety responses, but specifying exact addresses raises concerns about identifying the people who call for emergency services, he said.
“City staff is always concerned about respecting the privacy of the public,” he said.
Another limitation is that not all the data are categorized in a way that creates accurate geographical presentations. For example, a bubble map that purports to show where the capital improvement projects in this year’s budget are located shows a huge circle over City Hall.
That gives the inaccurate impression of a massive investment in downtown. Upon closer inspection, many of the projects lumped together in the downtown blob are for citywide projects, such as $900,000 budgeted for pedestrian improvements throughout the city and $600,000 for replacing streetlights with LED bulbs. Others are simply not coded for the correct location, such as $4 million budgeted for structural upgrades to the city’s Laguna Treatment Plant southwest of the city and $233,000 for work on the fire training center on West College Avenue.
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