Civic Knowledge

The Challenge

As part of it’s “Free The Data” program, the California Health Care Foundation sponsors projects to make health data more available, including the HealthData+ project, which gives county health departments a platform for telling data-based stories. Although a commercial tool, LiveStories, could handle the story telling component, the system still required dataset that were specific to the wide range of stories its users would write.

The Solution

The California Health Care Foundation hired Civic Knowledge for both its data wrangling services, but also for its expertise in locating the best datasets for any story. Over the course of the 2 year project, we provided hundreds of indicators for the HealthData+ library

Project Description

When Wendy Fry, a reporter with NBC 7 San Diego, requested data for a story about street sweeping, the city sent her a dump from their dispatch system’s GPS logs, a dozen files with several million records. Civic Knowledge, working under its nonprofit San Diego Regional Data Library, processed the records to determine which streets had been swept. By merging the reduced data with records of traffic tickets, we determined where residents had been ticketed for parking on a street that was not swept, to support a series of NBC 7 stories and television segments.

The Challenge

The San Diego Housing Commission reviews data reports from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act to ensure that San Diego area lenders are following the law. When they wanted to reduce costs of processing the data into summary reports, they turned to Civic Knowledge for help.

 The Solution

Because we had already loaded HMDA data into our data warehouse, we could quickly produce the required reports,  and because all of the work was done using Python and IPython notebook, the reports will be repeatable in future years, for an even lower cost.

The Challenge

When recently graduated students told us that it was difficult to land data analysis jobs without experience, we realized there was an opportunity to simultaneously give students experience and aid local nonprofits with answering data questions.

The Solution

In spring of 2015, operating as the San Diego Regional Data Library, we ran a data contest with a student group at SDSU. The week long event gave 30 student teams valuable experience and produced a broad range of data insights for the San Diego Food Systems Alliance and the Monarch School.

The Challenge

While more data is available than ever before, it is still difficult to use, and journalists have a particularly difficult time finding data to support stories within their time and cost constraints. The California Health Care Foundation asked us for ideas about making health data more widely available and useful to journalists.

The Solution

The Health Reporter project studied how journalists use data and explored two ideas for making data more useful and available. The first is a user interface model for exploring large collections of data quickly and efficiently, and the second is a data packaging system to reduce the cost of maintaining data repositories. Both of these ideas are discussed in the project final report.