The City of Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology released the OpenData ETL Utility Kit at the Code for America Summit this morning. The ETL Utility Toolkit will give cities the same tools Chicago uses to get data from their own internal systems and unto their data portals.
Photo by Chris Smith Photography
We’ll explain why this is such a big deal and what ETL is below the fold!
Note: this is the first Smart Chicago blog post by Andrew Seeder. Andrew has worked for the Chicago Community Trust on data projects for CEO and President Terry Mazany, and has been doing lots of thinking and writing from the Chicago School of Data project. Here’s his presentation of what we think can be a helpful classification system for seeing and understanding our regional data ecosystem. He will be at our conference this Friday and Saturday— please talk with him about what you think! — DXO
After months of interviews and hundreds of surveys we’re beginning to see how the regional data ecosystem fits together. The ecosystem grows and develops because we create data for others to use, we consume data made by others, and we enable each other to do the same. We found data creators, data consumers, and data enablers.
Some organizations create packaged data sets of data they’ve collected, while other organizations make it a business of cleaning free, public data. Others donate hardware and their expertise to local schools or, as an institution, they fund organizations working in the field. But data creators consume data and data consumers enable others to create data. These broad categories aren’t mutually exclusive.
Among data creators, some organizations provide their data for free, at no charge to either the public or other organizations. These “open” organizations include a lot of large (especially public) institutions, like the City of Chicago or the U.S. Census Bureau. They have the resources and capacity to develop full toolchain platforms. They are one-stop shops for pre-packaged data, also known as data that can be uploaded into and illustrated by common workplace software. There are far more organizations that offer data for a fee, or only under special circumstances.
Data!
Twitter recently released the ability for anyone to be able to get access to Twitter’s analytics panel. So, we’d like to share ours.
I spoke at City Club on Monday, September 8, 2014. Here’s a video:
Daniel X. O’Neil, Executive Director, Smart Chicago Collaborative from City Club of Chicago on Vimeo.
Here’s the slides:
Sean Thornton has a great post this morning on the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School Data-Smart City Solutions Blog: The Chicago School of Data: Building a Framework for Chicago’s Data Ecosystem. Here’s a snip:
There’s the Chicago school of architecture, made famous by Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan. The Chicago school of economics, led by Milton Friedman and other economists, has been a highly influential body of thought for decades. The Chicago school of sociology, meanwhile, led by George Herbert Meade and Jane Addams, ushered in modern urban sociological study.
Of course, these disciplines, styles and approaches have little in common other than being developed in Chicago. They were also all largely developed in the 20th century, and are all alive and well today.
The Chicago School of Data is less of an academic discipline and more of a method for cooperative, data-driven progress united by one key principle—that data, as public good, is one that is at the service of all people, not a select few or special interests. Moreover, that cooperative method doesn’t require its players to be major organizations or government bodies; any resident who uses data or works to improve lives is a part of the Chicago School of Data.
This is the best explication of the phrase I’ve heard yet. Bonus: my pic!
Here’s an article in a leading industry magazine about Foodborne Chicago. Snip:
An added benefit for public health agencies is that FoodBorne Chicago is an open-source framework, which will enable other health departments adopt the application free of charge, Harris said. Richardson said the cost of developing the FoodBorne Chicago program was “minimal between staff time and a few nominal costs for the server, the URL and things like that.”
