[1st-mile-nm] It's The People's Data Initiative in Santa Fe

[Tom Johnson]

Friends in Santa Fe:

Here's a short anecdote of what citizens can do in a democracy that
embraces  Open Data:


*"Sandra Moscoso of Washington, DC is raising two children with her
husband. She wants an easy way for her and all DC parents to understand
what each school offers, including whether or not the school has a
librarian. She won an OpenGov Champion award
<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/04/09/filming-opengov-champions-sandra-moscoso-washington-dc/>from
open government advocacy group the Sunlight Foundation in 2013 for her work
to get the District of Columbia to open up its public school data and make
it more accessible to citizens. She and other parents have banded together
to create the Capitol Hill Public School Parent Organization (CHPSPO) and
are demanding changes that will improve the school selection process in the
years to come." [more
<http://www.socrata.com/blog/citizen-benefits-open-data/>]*

In a similar fashion, Open Data drives better administration of government,
new business opportunities, improved citizen access to government services
and data and heightened citizen overview of government.

Unfortunately, we do not have full access to the potentially rich data paid
for by citizens of Santa Fe.  Yes, the city has a Checkbook Register
<http://www.santafenm.gov/checkbook_register> web site, for example, but
taxpayers cannot figure out why and for what someone named "Cole Courtney"
(or should it be "Courtney Cole") was paid $108.18 on May 28.  Or why ASI
CONSTRUCTORS INC was paid $300,000.00 from an account called "Cash in
Common" on May 6.  [Analytic Journalists are always suspicious when
financial data ends in nice, neat zeros.)  A positive example of municipal
open data can be found at Chattanooga, Tenn <https://data.chattlibrary.org/>
.

The Society of Professional Journalists <http://www.spj.org> are putting
together a broad-based citizen's initiative to make government data of all
types easily available to taxpayers for analysis.  We are bringing together
individuals with broad interests, skills or just curiosity to, first,
conduct a census of City of Santa Fe databases in order to create an easily
searchable database of that data, a *meta-database*, if you will.  At the
same time, we will train participants how to search, extract, clean and
analyze that data.  These will be foundational skills that anyone can use
for multiple analytic objectives -- social and educational services,
economic development, political insights and tracking government
performance far beyond what public employees have the time or money to
conduct.

We plan to hold initial organization meetings in early July.  Attached is a
memo outlining the project.  Please read it and, if you are interested in
participating, click on the link at the top of the memo to go to a sign-up
form or click here <http://bit.ly/1dfrxZ0> for the same form.

Please forward this email and the memo to everyone you think might be
interested.  Also, we would like to make a presentation on the *It's The
People's Data *initiative to any civic, religious, political, social
service and educational group in the city and county of Santa Fe.  To get a
broad idea of the dynamic progress of this trend, do a Google and/or
Twitter search with *#opendata* .

We look forward to hearing from you.

-Tom Johnson

============================================
Tom Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
Society of Professional Journalists <http://www.spj.org>   -   Region 9
<http://www.spj.org/region9.asp> Director
http://www.jtjohnson.com                   tom at jtjohnson.com
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