Open Data Essays
-
A Radical Approach to Open Police Data
On page 112 of the report of the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force, “Recommendations for Reform: Restoring Trust between the Chicago Police and the Communities they Serve“, there is a section about the publication of police data that might change the way we think about “crime data” in the #opengov and #civictech movement. In the section on Early…
-
These are the places near the place where police killed a boy in Chicago.
The place where teenager Laquan McDonald was murdered by Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke seems desolate in the video of his death. He walks a few steps on a wide-open street with no traffic before dropping from bullets. He laid dead in front of a bus stop and a sign heralding the construction of a new Marshalls…
-
Breaking Down the Homan Square Story from an Open Data History Perspective
Yesterday morning one of the most respected publications in the world, The Guardian, dropped a story bomb on Chicago: The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site’. As someone who has worked in the open data movement for a while, who lives and works in Chicago, this one hurts. Let’s break it down:
-
Uber and the Open Government Data Movement
Yesterday was something of an odd watershed for the open government data movement. Uber, the private transportation giant that has done, in the main, whatever it damn well pleases in cities all over the world (though there has been a growing regulatory backlash) announced a data sharing partnership with the City of Boston. There is…
-
On the Odd Ubiquity and Invisibility of Speed Camera Data
Over there weekend, there have been at least three news stories have referenced super-specific figures on speed cameras as released by the City of Chicago, but none of them link to the actual data. I read these stories, and marveled and the incredibly specific information they’ve pulled from what seems to be a specific document,…