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Volume 10: This Week in Civic Tech/Open Data

in THIS WEEK IN CIVIC TECH
5 min read

This Week was a slow week for visualizations, but we have a lot of tweets of what folks talked about in Civic Tech. And the Shifting Neighborhoods story makes up for it, because it is so great.

Visualizations

SHIFTING NEIGHBORHOODS

Gentrification and cultural displacement in American cities

This report is sad but very well made. It looks at census tracts and their development over time and calculates if they are gentrified and if there is a social displacement happening as well.

There are a ton of graphics in this report that helps make the point.
Let’s dive a little deeper, but I think this should be a separate post.

The next graphic is a little misleading or does not make an excellent point. Bigger cities tend to have more neighborhoods gentrified because they have more census tracts. They have identified 1000 census tracts to be gentrified. If a census tract has on average a population of 4000 (source), this means that 4,000,000 people or ~1% of the US population are facing or faced gentrification.

They have a graph later that would be much better suited for this map: “Cities with high percentages of eligible gentrifying neighborhoods.” And it paints a more nuanced picture.

They also include an interactive version of their map but “only” for the tracts, not the bubble maps.

Takeaway:
Be aware of population maps. Mapping an absolute number only makes sense in very limited cases.

AirBnB Data

New airbnb dashboard built on our open data network, showing valuable insights for cities real estate. How are prices evolving? The number of rooms available? Easily analyze over a million records worldwide

It’s excellent that AirBnB finally shares some more detailed data and I encourage everyone to check this out. There are a lot of cities available. But there is no legend for the colors. You need to click individual neighborhoods to see the underlying data.

Takeaway:
Always include your legend. Make it easier for your users to understand your map.

Civic Tech

Boston Birth Certificate App

Need a Boston birth certificate? You can now order one online.

Great writeup about the way the City of Boston built the Birth Certificate app.

At the beginning of this project, we invested time researching the reasons why people get birth certificates. The goal was to understand who the audience for the application was, and to ensure our design met their needs.

City of Louisville Builds Open Source Traffic Tools using Data, Collaboration, and the Cloud

Using AWS, Schnuerle, and his team have created an open-source, cloud-based system for historic and real-time querying, analysis, API hooks, mapping, and integrations. Instead of paying $50,000 for a multi-week traffic study to see if your road configuration changes had an impact, you can use this Waze cloud database at no cost for instant, unlimited results.

Civic Tech Reads of the Week

We’ve got quite the selection this week, ranging from the French gilets jaunes to the nature of online identities. Missed your last weekly dose of mind-boggling reads?

New dataset: Detailed Manifest - All Incoming Containers at Port of Savannnah, 2018

1.3 million records of all incoming bills of lading arriving at Port of Savannah during 2018.

New App: Adapt a Drain Durham

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