Making data available online doesn’t automatically mean that it’s accessible to the average citizen. How do we ensure that the data Philadelphia’s city government releases on OpenDataPhilly.org is easy for engaged residents to download, understand, and use?
With this question in mind, the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Open Data and Digital Transformation (ODDT), Philadelphia Parks and Recreation (PPR), and Azavea partnered with organizers of the 10th annual PhillyCHI Design Slam to see what user experience professionals and design enthusiasts would come up with when put to this challenge. The host of the event, PhillyCHI, is an interdisciplinary academic and professional group interested in Human-Computer Interaction, User Experience, and Usability.
For civic technologists interested in making applications, or tech-savvy data scientists, OpenDataPhilly.org works well. But we exist in a world with a sharp contrast between those who have ready access to computers and the Internet, and those who do not. This “digital divide” often falls along lines of race and socioeconomic status. The positive impact and use of digital communications remains more limited for communities of color and people with low incomes. And even with greater access, lack of comfort with technology can obstruct participation by even the most active community members, civic association leaders, non-profit advocates, and social service providers. These leaders, while interested in using data to improve their neighborhoods, may not have the same digital expertise to navigate the portal and make what they need. The Design Slam provided an opportunity to explore how we might make this data hub more engaging and simpler to use for a wider audience.
The Design Slam Countdown!
The Design Slam took place during Philly Tech Week 2016, with about 40 designers gathered in the City of Philadelphia’s Innovation Lab during a rainy evening on Tuesday, May 3, 2016. With a large digital clock counting down the hour, the room buzzed as participants competed in five teams, which PhillyCHI assigned to ensure a diversity of skillsets. Within the hour, teams were asked to assess the problem, discuss possible solutions, come up with a shared concept, design a few takeaways, and prepare a presentation. Teams then pitched to the group and a panel of judges their design solution to make OpenDataPhilly.org even more broadly accessible to the public.
As a contributor of departmental data, Philadelphia Parks and Recreation’s Andy Viren answered teams’ questions and served as a judge; also participating were City representatives Tim Wisniewski, Chief Data Officer, and alpha.phila.gov Lead Content Designer Erin Abler. They were joined as judges by three design professionals: Amber DeRosa of Vanguard, and 2015 Design Slam winners Lauren Schneck and Connor Hasson of O3 World.
A few design highlights:
- Build a landing page that allows for audience-based navigation that directs people into different views based on their [self-identified] level of familiarity with data – one path guides newer users on how to download and start projects and the others takes seasoned technologists and data scientists directly to the data.
- Develop a space on OpenDataPhilly.org for those using the data to share their projects (i.e. maps of where swimming pools are in the City). This would provide examples of what is possible for new users and allow other visitors to re-use relevant projects.
- Connect super users to subject matter experts who have less technical skills. This could be in the form of an online board where community members could share what they’d like to have made and others with the analytical or visualization skills could volunteer to assist.
- Make OpenDataPhilly.org available in different languages.
- Create a companion site called phillyadvocacy.org that allows users to select categories of information of interest (i.e. recreation centers, crime incidents, demographic data). The site would pull relevant datasets from OpenDataPhilly.org and provide visualizations of the data.
“The annual Design Slam has become a staple event for PhillyCHI. The excitement of slammers, spectators, and organizers alike is palpable, and it’s this energy that makes the exercise such a success. It was an honor to work with the City on a tangible goal to make open data more accessible for Philadelphians,” said Brian Crumley, of O3 World and the Design Slam’s lead coordinator.
Design solutions were judged based on their feasibility, creativity, suitability, and presentation. PhillyCHI awarded the winning team medals, along with a trip to visit usability professionals and sightsee in another east coast city (to be named later this year). PhillyCHI and ODDT will share all of the design ideas with Azavea to review and assess their ability to implement the suggestions.
Robert Cheetham, CEO of Azavea, said “OpenDataPhilly began as a community effort, and continues to be a data catalog jointly managed by the City, Azavea and Temple University. I am thrilled that the Philadelphia design community sees the project as a community asset worthy of their creative investment. I’m looking forward to seeing what they’ve developed.”
The Past, Present, Future of Open Data
While implementing these suggestions depends on staff capacity and funding, Design Slam organizers wanted to prioritize a real-life challenge for participants to ground the theory of user-design in a practical application. Seeing this as an opportunity to explore cutting-edge design ideas that could make OpenDataPhilly.org an even more user-friendly portal, representatives involved in maintaining it provided context to Slam participants before they brainstormed. ODDT, which spearheads the release of city datasets, presented a brief history of open data and provided a tour of Philadelphia’s current Open Data portal.
Kistine Carolan, Data Services Manager, shared that – in many ways – ‘open data’ started in 1946 with the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which gave private citizens the right to request policies, data, and information from government agencies. However, this meant data was shared on an as-requested and individual-only basis. In 2003, the City of Philadelphia’s GIS Services Group (GSG) began systematically and proactively releasing spatial data – one of the first large cities in the country to do so – through the Penn State University’s PASDA site.
In April 2011, local software developer Azavea built and rolled out the OpenDataPhilly.org portal, leading an effort to provide a catalog to publicly available data sets, applications and APIs. The original project was largely developed on a pro bono basis by Azavea, but the William Penn Foundation provided funding to support community engagement features as well as providing prize money for the first Open Data Race, an effort to nominate data sets for release that would help the nonprofit community use the data in productive ways. A year later,in 2012, then-Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter signed an Executive Order mandating city agencies and departments share their useful data on the portal.
A particularly exciting outcome of this event is that by focusing on increasing local accessibility and community engagement, Philadelphia could contribute to a similar shift globally. In the most recent version of the OpenDataPhilly site, released in early 2015, Azavea used CKAN, an open source software platform that governments and other organizations around the world use to make open data available. CKAN, as a data management system, makes publishing easy and includes a powerful search functionality (by organization, topic, datasets). The open-source nature of CKAN means that any design changes made as a result of this Slam could be replicated on open data portals across the world – further shrinking the digital and data divide.
Keep in Touch!
There’s lots of ways to get involved. For information about City datasets and others, go to OpenDataPhilly.org. Visit this resources page for video tutorials and links to tools to help analyze data. Follow @PhilaGovData on Twitter to get alerts on future data releases, share how you plan to use open data with data@phila.gov, and join us on the public open data google forum.
Photo caption: A team at the PhillyCHI Design Slam 2016 asks Tim Wisniewski, Chief Data Officer, questions about OpenDataPhilly.org to help craft their design solution to make the site accessible to a broader audience. Photo by Kistine Carolan.