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 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]

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 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.

The Society of Professional Journalists 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 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

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Tom Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
<a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">505.577.6482(c)                                    <a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">505.473.9646(h)
Society of Professional Journalists   -   Region 9 Director

http://www.jtjohnson.com                   [hidden email]
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