Engaging your Community with Open Data Courtney Claessens

Product Engineer, Esri R&D Center, Washington DC

Getting it out there: step one

•  Accessible, discoverable, explorable, downloadable •  Standard formats

•  Licensing

•  Forming the basis of a culture of civic data (internal and external)

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Turning data into knowledge is hard!

“making sense of data – turning it into knowledge… is still one of the greatest challenges we face as a global and increasingly interlinked society”

- Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation

Information creation and use leads to an open data ecosystem

Portal

Engagement

Ecosystem

What’s an open data ecosystem?

•  Beyond data sharing •  Cycles and feedback loops •  Government releases data à users distill data à uses are reincorporated in a

reusable way

Housekeeping What do we need first?

Housekeeping

•  License - Creative Commons

Identification Who is your community?

Who is your community?

•  Define the data being used - What are the high value datasets - Analyze FOIA requests - Ask other agencies for data requests

•  Analytics

Who is your community?

•  Surveys •  Define the data uses

- Everyday information - Research - Civic hacking -  Journalism - OpenStreetMap - Commercial - Government

You Are Here Project, MIT Media Lab

Who is your community?

•  Who is not using the data? Where are the gaps? - Breaking down constituency demographics

-  Residents, tourists, youth, elderly… -  Who are potential users of data?

-  How do you connect with them? -  Turning data browsers into data users

Feedback

•  Add feedback mechanisms to your homepage •  Enable two-way conversations with your users

- Commenting!

Outreach Where is your community?

Getting the word out

•  Blogging, social media •  Journalism and press releases •  How can Esri help?

•  Site of the week

Meet your community where they are

•  Meetups •  Coworking spaces •  Civic hacknights •  GIS Day, Data Innovation Day, Open Data Day, make your own day

Bring your community to you

•  Office hours •  Hackathons, datapaloozas, contests

- Create event-specific sites: HUD Zillow Hack

•  Continuous programming

5 Modes of Civic Engagement in Civic Tech

1.  Utilize existing social infrastructure 2.  Utilize existing tech skills and infrastructure 3.  Create two-way educational environments 4.  Lead from shared spaces 5.  Distribute power

http://www.smartchicagocollaborative.org/5-modes-of-civic-engagement-in-civic-tech/

Ecosystem Creation and maintenance

Closing the loop

•  Showcasing what people are doing with your data •  Acknowledging the value-adds and new insights from mashed up data •  Feeding that back into government

Challenges

•  Policy challenges •  Measurement challenges

•  Community identification - What data is being used? - Who is using your data?

•  Community outreach - Where does your community

gather? - Creating shared spaces -  5 modes of civic engagement

•  Ecosystem creation and maintenance - Closing feedback loops - More than the sum of its parts

•  Challenges - Measurement - Policy

Summary

Session survey

•  Please fill out the session survey in your mobile app •  Search Open Data in the mobile app •  Select Community Engagement •  Click “Demo Theatre Survey” •  Answer a few short questions and enter any comments