The Open Planning Project

As San Francisco and Washington D.C. prepare to launch their new APIs we’d like to have other cities and managers of 311 services show their support for implementing an interoperable standard for these APIs. The more cities get behind this effort, the better for developers, for city budgets, and for citizens. Showing a critical mass of support for using this standard will help encourage developers, other cities, and existing 311 services to become more invested in the potential of an interoperable system.

A standard means that people can use their favorite app in every city and developers can focus on new features rather than different requirements for each city. Everyone can then benefit from new innovations built from a common foundation. Additionally, interoperability is helpful not only to simplify the offering of citizen interfaces, but also to help unify and better facilitate inter-agency coordination for city managers.

To date, the people who have joined San Francisco and Washington D.C. by showing their support for implementing a standard API include directors of these services and CIO or CTOs in cities like Boston, Portland, Edmonton, Seattle, and Los Angeles as well as those from services like SeeClickFix and Ushahidi.

Please take the pledge and show your support.

In preparing some data for our next round of training courses, I spent a fair amount of time today processing and cleaning the US Federal Electoral Commission (FEC) database for 2008. The FEC is extremely good about releasing their data, even though it looks like they have to dump it out of a very old database system.

I processed the three main files, and then converted the associated code tables into side tables, so the whole thing is pretty self-contained and hopefully self-explanatory. I had originally hoped to fully replicate something like the FundRace site from 2008, but since the FEC data only has zip-code as a location entity, that is not going to happen this time around. I assume the FundRace folks also had access to a nationwide telephone directory or some other way of taking name and zip-code and using that to leverage out an actual street address.

If you are interested in playing with the FEC data and don’t feel like spending a couple hours mucking about in Perl to get it into tables, I’ve placed a PostgreSQL dump file online. Candidates are linked to individuals via committees. The FEC model has a lot of complexity hiding in it, with some committees not associated with candidates, and so on, so using the data correctly will probably require a little care.

Between 2001 and 2009, the share of trips that Americans made in cars dropped by more than four percent, with walking, bicycling and transit use picking up the slack, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Last year, 11.9 percent of all trips were on foot or by bike, while 4.2 percent of trips were on transit. Both figures signify major increases.

The National Household Travel Survey, the source of the new stats, is the gold-standard for transportation data. As Mobilizing the Region reported, while the Census only tracks how people get to work, the NHTS gathers data on all trips taken. It also distinguishes between, say, driving to a park-and-ride bus area and walking to the local bus stop.

The downside to the NHTS is how infrequently the survey is conducted, which makes it difficult to determine how much the 2009 data reflects a larger trend, and how much may be due to temporary changes brought on by fluctuating gas prices and the recession.

The high quality of NHTS data means that it can supplement NYC DOT's own numbers, which have shown a large rise in cycling over the same period. We've put in a request to the state DOT and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council to get access to city-level data once it becomes available. 

The US National Weather Service has a lot of weather to watch! They have sensors all over the continent, and in space, ranging from simple thermometers to orbiting satellites. When weather happens (and let’s be honest, weather is always happening, it’s happening on me right now) it happens fast — how does the NWS take in the whole situation at a glance and make decisions? On a map, of course.

The NWS Central Region Headquarters has built a test-bed for putting their situational information onto web maps, and the toolset they used is the OpenGeo suite of applications: PostGIS, Geoserver, OpenLayers. They also used raster-data standby GDAL for handling gridded data conversions.

A paper on their work (”Development of Web-based GIS Applications for Decision Support and Situational Awareness“) was presented by Brian Walawender at the  American Meteorological Association Annual Meeting this week.

San Francisco recently established a new policy requiring open source software to be considered equally with commercial software within the city’s procurement process. It’s important to note the actual inclusion of the word “equal” in this policy. Emphasis here is mine:

The Software Evaluation Policy will require departments to consider open source alternatives, when available, on an equal basis to commercial software, as these may reduce cost and speed the time needed to bring software applications to production.

— San Francisco Open Source Policy

This is much like the legislation passed in Vancouver last May:

Open Source Software – the City of Vancouver, when replacing existing software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles;

— Vancouver Open Source & Open Data Policy

Back in September, I think Portland actually initiated the “First-In-Nation Open Source Software Policy for City Government,” but the language in Portland’s resolution is definitely not as strong:

Establish best practices for analysis of business requirements in software review and selection processes, identify existing commercial software systems with licenses that are scheduled to expire in the near future, and encourage the consideration of Open Source Software in the review, replacement and continual improvement of business solutions;

— Portland Open Source & Open Data Policy

Portland’s resolution should be amended from “encourage the consideration” to “require equal consideration” and other cities should make sure that they provide measurable policies for using Open Source rather than simply to “encourage consideration.”

These developments are huge and these cities deserve to be lauded as great pioneers, but we also need to help support them and to spread these kinds of policies to other cities. You can learn more and contribute to the creation of resources for open cities with the nascent OpenMuni project.

Every day at Streetsblog San Francisco, our writers and editors marvel at the intelligence and passion of our readership, though we rarely get to meet this community of dedicated urbanists in person. Recently we threw ourselves a birthday party at the LGBT Center in San Francisco to celebrate all that has come in one year and we were joined by 150 of our closest friends and avid readers. We broke bread and raised our glasses in honor of the impact that our brand of advocacy journalism has had on the Bay Area, where Streetsblog San Francisco has quickly become the go-to source for sustainable transportation and smart growth news. The event even became a stop on the campaign trail for current Board of Supervisors candidates intent on pressing palms with some of the smartest and most passionate of their constituents.

Special thanks to Jonathan Weiner, without whom this past year would have been impossible. Thanks also to Katie Brodie and Nico Martin Presents for the great crew of smiling servers, impressive spread and delicious mash potatoes bar (which was quite the hit), B-Haul for the (Tasty) tunes, super volunteer Denyse Trepanier, the LGBT Center, Swirl Wine Bar, SFBC and its volunteers for weathering the rain to provide valet bike parking, Supervisor David Chiu, Supervisor Eric Mar, Judson True, Leah Shahum, Andy Thornley, Gabriel Metcalf, Chris Carlsson, Dave Snyder, John Hamilton (for the great Streetfilm you see above), Mike and Sarah Sonn, Brooke Dubose, Greg Riessen, Gary Fisher, and many, many more...

Here's to a wonderful 2010 and many more reasons to celebrate the San Francisco Bay Area and its improving public realm.

This week, OpenGeo released version 1.0 of our OpenGeo Suite.

When we initially announced the OpenGeo Suite, it was a notion — a collection of individual software pieces we would professionally support as a whole. Now, it’s a product in the conventional sense — one download that provides all the pieces in a simple installer for Windows, Mac, or Linux:

• GeoServer — a geospatial data and map server;
• GeoWebCache — a map accelerator;
• OpenLayers/GeoExt — user interface libraries for building map applications;
• (New!) GeoExplorer — a browser-based map composer and publisher;
• (New!) Styler — a WYSIWIG editor for map styles (SLD);
• (New!) Recipe Book — code samples and documentation for building your own map applications;
• Full documentation for all components; and
• (New!) Dashboard — a unified administration panel for starting and managing the components of the OpenGeo Suite.

Up to this point, we have concentrated on clients already adept at downloading, integrating, and using the pieces of the Suite. With version 1.0, anybody can start publishing their data and building applications right out of the box.

This ease of entry aligns with the OpenGeo mission.  As an organization, we want to democratize mapping. That means offering tools available under non-discriminatory legal terms, like open source. It also means lowering barriers so that more people can use, build, and grow these tools.

Both novice and expert benefit from the seamless integration of the OpenGeo Suite.  By placing everything together in one place — software, documentation, examples, administration — the Suite offers a central resource to navigate, configure, and support the various pieces of your mapping application.

At a decision making level, we provide a corporate entity tightly bound to the software, providing support, expertise and training services to the community of users and administrators.

Version 1.0 is the first step in a long journey, but we know where we are going. Every day we ask ourselves: can we make our product easier to use? can we make it easier to learn? can we make it easier to try? We would love your feedback, so download the free 30 day trial and let us know what you think!

We’re looking forward to an exciting 2010, meeting those goals and growing our community.

Worthy news all around the TOPP-sphere this week:

• Streetsblog and TOPP Labs are both talking about the MTA's move to open up transit data on their new website. On the heels of this announcement, we're hosting the next meeting of the NYC Open Transit Data Meetup on January 20th.
  
• As the extent of the heartbreaking disaster in Haiti unfolds, Philip Ashlock has an excellent overview of open issue-reporting systems, with an eye on how they can impact disaster relief efforts.
• In partnership with the World Bank, OpenGeo launched GeoNode.org. The GeoNode project is taking the principles and practices of openness which have empowered the modern web, and using them to build a spatial data infrastructure solution appropriate for large NGO’s and government agencies. Announcement here.
• Streetsblog got a hat-tip in the New York Times for its coverage of Manhattan district attorney's decision to review the case of a former Police Commissioner who backed his SUV into a pregnant woman.
  

The quest for open transit data in New York continues, but the Times’ coverage today of the upcoming launch of the MTA’s new website gives cause to be optimistic. As the Times reports, the MTA is set to launch a redesign of its website this Wednesday, giving the agency’s site a much needed — and appreciated — overhaul. The overall design of the site looks to be greatly improved, and the subway service status on the front page is alone reason to celebrate, as anyone who’s been bitten by weekend service changes will surely understand.

Another welcome change is the addition of the trip planner to the front page. Interestingly, the default option now uses Google’s transit planner, though the screenshots reveal that you’ll also be able to plan trips using either Trips 1-2-3 or the in-house MTA trip planner.

The most exciting part for open data geeks though is this promising morsel:

The new site will also make it easier for outside software designers to get free access to system timetables and routes.

The article contains no further information about what this means, though the screenshot does show a “Developer Resources” link on the lower right-hand corner of the page.

The MTA has hinted for a while at changes to its developer and licensing policies, but beyond the cessation of legal threats last August, there’s been virtually no public announcements on the topic. Many people, including those of us here at TOPP who founded the NY Open Transit Data group, have long advocated and worked to open up New York’s transit data. We’ve had increasingly positive interactions with the MTA, particularly since the arrival of chairman and CEO Jay Walder last October, but are still waiting to see results.

It’s unlikely that the launch on Wednesday will be perfect, but I think it will prove to be a significant step toward the goal so many of us share: universal access to free, complete, and up-to-date transit data for New York.

It looks like it’s going to be a good week for open data.

Our OpenGeo division is on the hunt for a talented systems administrator to help develop their suite of open source geospatial solutions.

The OpenGeo team develops spatial web services based on Java and clients in JavaScript. Our primary technology stack consists of Linux, Postgresql with a spatial extension, Jetty or Tomcat to run our servlets. We use webservers for static content and proxying. Additionally, we provide a few services to the projects we are involved in, such as Trac, Wordpress, and build bots for automated testing. A system administrator dedicated to this team provides a platform for running these services, as well as a supporting role for a team of 9 highly dedicated software developers and outreach engineers. There may also be some consulting work for clients, either to avoid scalability issues or to help debug problems on production servers.

The position provides you with the chance to design the infrastructure that you think is best suited to get the job done. A good candidate should therefore be analytical, self-driven and able to handle multiple tasks. We emphasize understanding fundamental concepts and being able to find more information, as opposed to experience with advanced tools. For instance, you should be familiar with /proc and the various tools used to extract information from this resource, as well as manually query HTTP based services.

Full job description..