California Data Camp: Exploring State Data and DataSF App Contest

What happened at the first ever California Data Camp?

A live blog of the event from Spot.Us. The event was attended by roughly 100 people at Citizen Space in downtown San Francisco.

The hashtag for the event was #CAdata and one can construct the day's events here as well.

We will soon have a professionally edited video of the day. Stay tuned!

 (Scot Hacker and Chuck Harris - winners of the DataSF App contest: See all photos - over 44 pictures on Flickr.)

Sessions included

• A primer on getting data (live blogged by TechLiminal)
• Discussion of immigration data in California (see photo of immigration data wish list)
• A discussion on stimulus data lead by Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation.
• A discussion on crime data
• Read a wrap-up from the Huffington Post.
• and much more....

Craig Newmark joined us and took note of the important work being done.

Apps built during the day

Winner of the DataSF App contest: Tree Data: A web App for municipal tree tracking with the goal to

• Make it easy for citizens to explore and discover the huge number of plant species and individual trees maintained by the city.
• Make it easy for citizens to “flag” a tree as needing maintenance, water, food, etc.
• Make it easy for citizens to request a tree at a particular location
• Provide data visualization tools to let citizens explore and understand the plant variety visually.
• Make it easy to see what a given species will look like in 5,10,15,20 years when requesting a tree.
• Ideally, a future version of the app would include ecology data on all species, listing the water consumption and carbon offset of each.

Details from Scot Hacker.

For handicapped parking

Two apps centered around finding Blue Zones in the city.

Silver ribbon winner (prize sponsored by MobClix): A geo spatial app that allowed you to hold your phone up to find the nearest trees, crimes and blue zones. You could also add a layer to find the closest species of a tree or a type of crime. If looking for handicapped parking, just spin your phone around you 360 degrees and you'll find the closest space. Details on how this app came about from Josh Livni.

Blue Zone Application: Find the nearest handicapped parking space while on the go. "The full source is downloadable from the app link.  It's all client-side javascript, so it can be run locally, or anywhere you can view a basic HTML page."

Produced by Mark Shervey

After School Special: By Gabe Scelta of zapsqueak.com built in one day. More about the After School Special.

The site uses school sets from datasf.org and combines them with library and food information from GeoCommons. It is a PHP application with a simple admin area and a MySQL database behind it. Ultimately I'd love to expand this out so that more discreet data can be shown. If have a relevant dataset, have suggestions or happen to have a lot of time to enter address data into the database please let me know.