SpotCrime.com: former Philadelphia resident turns tragedy into data

SpotCrime.com screenshot showing its database goes back several years, older than many other services online.

On May 7, 1998, 23-year-old Wharton Ph.D student Shannon Schieber was strangled to death on her second-floor apartment by Troy Graves, who would later be characterized as a serial Center City rapist.

That’s about the time when Colin Drane first moved near 22nd and Chestnut streets in Center City.

“I believe this was part of my inspiration to inform the public and help catch bad guys,” Drane, 41, said. It felt like a Penn student was assaulted every day that September, he added.

His form of detective work? Data. In 2007, Drane launched SpotCrime.com, one of a handful of national city crime data aggregation tools. Drane has been collecting crime reports in Philadelphia for more than four years, first by scraping news reports, then through a daily data dump from the police department.

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OpenDataRace: contest from OpenDataPhilly to partner city data and nonprofits

A new contest launching today solicits votes on what currently obscured city data should be made open.

Dubbed the OpenDataRace by those behind the nascent OpenDataPhilly.org, the project this month solicits nominations of civic-orientated city data sets paired with relevant nonprofit missions. Next month, votes will be cast trumpeting what data sets most interest Philadelphians, with $3,500 in small cash prizes for the nonprofits connected to the three winning entries.

Find the brief nomination form HERE.

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Daily News: “The openness of Open Records just became a concern”

As It’s Our Money from the Daily News shares:

For half a century, Pennsylvania had an embarrassingly bad open-records policy. The 1957 law held that all government records were closed to the public unless a citizen met the legal burden of explaining why they should be available. A 2009 law, championed by Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, turned this idiocy upside down: It made government records open unless the government could show they were covered by one of a number of exceptions. And it created an Office of Open Records (OOR) for citizens to appeal to when agencies denied their requests. That office has thus far been a staunch advocate for open government, taking a generous view of what records should be made public and helping citizens get them. But a new court decision, reported in the Inquirer on Monday, threatens to shut the door on open records, at least part way. It forces citizens to jump through hoops in order to get the help of the OOR…

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CrimeReports.com partnership with latest six months of Philadelphia Police crime data

Homicides, assaults and robberies between early February and early August 2011 according to CrimeReports.com, using newly released Philadelphia Police Department data.

Updated 12pm 8/10/11 details on existing police department mapping tool.

Preliminary public safety reports from the last six months, the deepest public archive to date, are now being published online by the Philadelphia Police Department in a partnership with CrimeReports.com.

“We want to help create a cycle in which police departments share more data and the general public delivers value back with more information from their communities,” said Greg Whisenant, the CEO of Public Engines, which publishes CrimeReports.

The five-year-old Salt Lake City firm is offering at no cost its proprietary software that is installed on the police’s private server to extract, clean and publish incident reports, said CEO Whisenant. Normally the software would cost at minimum “a few hundred dollars a month,” he said. There is currently no API for the Philadelphia police data, though Whisenant said his company could provide one.

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Esri highlights OpenDataPhilly and technology behind Azavea-built project

GIS leaders Esri highlights OpenDataPhilly:

Through the OpenDataPhilly website, the City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, now provides access to over 100 datasets, applications, and APIs containing authoritative regional information on a wide variety of topics. The site includes a series of map services built with ArcGIS technology from Esri that offer data and imagery related to census tracts, political wards, crime incidents, hydrology, evacuation routes, bicycle networks, and more.

Deb Boyer of Azavea noted a few new open data projects added to the site this week:

• Phind It For Me – http://opendataphilly.org/opendata/resource/166/phind-it-for-me [Technically Philly coverage]
• DisasterMapper.com – http://opendataphilly.org/opendata/resource/160/disastermappercom [Technically Philly coverage]
• Property Owner Search – http://opendataphilly.org/opendata/resource/161/property-owner-search [Technically Philly coverage]
• Philadelphia Dance Calendars – http://opendataphilly.org/opendata/resource/69/philadelphia-dance-calendars/
• Philly Dance Spaces and Dance Directory – http://opendataphilly.org/opendata/resource/165/philly-dance-spaces-and-dance-directory/
• Census Tracts (2010) – http://opendataphilly.org/opendata/resource/164/census-tracts-2010/
• Street Centerlines API – http://opendataphilly.org/opendata/resource/39/street-centerlines/
• Trulia Crime Maps – http://opendataphilly.org/opendata/resource/163/trulia-crime-maps-phila-only/

City of Philadelphia wants more school district data, documents

The Daily News reports on the city government’s desire for more data, documents and internal information from the school district:

City officials were recently granted an unprecedented look at internal Philadelphia School District documents, providing a level of access that has long evaded those trying to keep tabs on the district. But after sifting through the boxes of district data released to the city as part of the Educational Accountability Agreement signed last month by the city, state and School Reform Commission, officials want more.

Neil Kleinman on OpenDataPhilly: “it is not be too late to demand that we have the right to know who is looking”

As OpenDataPhilly.org moves on, adding new data sets from the City of Philadelphia and other civic agencies, privacy concerns are clear.

While no data on individuals, health providers, crime reports or other particularly sensitive material is included in the data catalog, University of the Arts Professor Neil Kleinman shared the following thoughts last month:

This New York Times article [on the sensitivity of personal data breaches] reminds us of issues we need to face as Open Data Philly moves along.

Open Data Philly promises much in the way of citizen participation in the details of the city – what works, what doesn’t, and what needs to be monitored. It promises the ultimate in a system of checks and balances. It opens up the possibility of a new generation of citizen journalists, who can investigate the business of the city and the Feds without extraordinary access to resources.

Connecting people to data” is good. But let’s remember that corporations are people too. Just like us, they have access to “the data” – both public and private – collected in the course of doing business with the city or the federal governments.

Privacy may be dead. But it is not be too late to demand that we have the right to know who is looking.

This is something the European Union understands. It has been developing guidelines that give individuals the right to know when someone has been poking around in their data – who’s doing it and why. For lots of reasons, the United States has not taken such an approach. When are we going to begin?

Chicago CTO John Tolva Says Open Data Will Go Into ‘Overdrive’

New forward motion from new leadership in Chicago, according to Government Technology:

John Tolva, Chicago’s new chief technology officer, isn’t wasting any time looking to revolutionize the way the city’s agencies do business. He recently announced his intention to turn the Second City into an interactive platform where open data is used to increase the efficiency of government services.

OPA Data Liberator: the hackathon project that fills in where city property records leave off [VIDEO]

Hackathon team OPA Data Liberator

Coders and journalists need to hang out more. It’s becoming something of a mission here at Technically Philly.

On Saturday, at the Open Gov Hackathon presented by Tropo, as a part of the third annual BarCamp NewsInnovation, former Inquirer City Hall reporter and current freelancer Patrick Kerkstra walked into the TV Studio at Temple University’s Annenberg Hall.

In the chilly, cement-floored room, Kerkstra presented a simple problem to a handful of developers there early for the hackathon. On the website of the city’s Office of Property Assessment (the reconstituted Board of Revision of Taxes), the search function is limited to specific address and doesn’t extend to names.

So, say, a small-time property developer wanted neighborhood approval for a zoning variance at a newly purchased property. Until Kerkstra inspired a pack of hackers, there was no easy, online way for concerned neighbors to find out other properties that property developer owned.

Now there is. Visit the OPA Data Liberator.

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DATA CRUNCHED: All that’s needed to jump start an open data movement is a city government that doesn’t stand in the way

If you were going to judge the City of Philadelphia’s involvement in the buzzy good government movement of the past five years, you’d need some way to evaluate how much of its agency data is shared. Until the launch of OpenDataPhilly.org this afternoon, it’s not entirely clear where you would have started.

The web and its users, some progressive governments and their constituents have all conspired together in the past half decade to set a precedent troubling for others: the data and information, numbers and calculations, charts and graphs that government institutions have collected for a century or two should be made available for public consumption.

The city governments of Washington D.C., San Francisco and London are leading the way, creating agency workflow that incorporates the Internet and uses it to share its practices and data collection as a norm.

This year, New York City followed its BigApps contest — built to spur third-party development around city data — by unveiling a real-time 311 request map and plans to put QR codes on building permits by 2013. Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake signed an executive order compelling agencies to post its data online, and Raleigh, N.C. has made a case for open source technology.

More broadly, the Canadian federal government has launched a data catalog of its own, following Data.gov, championed by the Obama administration.

Now, with the April 25 unveiling of OpenDataPhilly.org, the City of Philadelphia has made a great, albeit perhaps belated, step forward. The puzzling part seems to be how little the city actually had to do with it.

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