San Francisco, open city

by Silvia Musso

Last November in San Francisco a decree became active. The decree, wanted by Mayor Gavin Newsom, is about the transparency of public administrations. According to the new law, departments and agencies of the city must publish the data at their disposal to better communicate with citizens. In this way www.datasf.org was born. It is a site that collects information relating to the territory of the City and County of San Francisco, divided by type: administration & finance, environment, geography, housing, social services, public safety, public works, transportation.

The site allows you to find the set of data in different ways: general research, tags / keywords, and categories. The objective is to improve the access to the city data through open reading formats.

Once registered you can post comments, reflections and criticism, ask questions that will appear publicly and will be read by other citizens and administrators. In this way you can open a dialogue and exchange.

Regarding the issue "environment" the news and data available are very diverse. Ranging from the study on monitoring of winds to the action plan on climate change in San Francisco, from the monitoring of the state of pollution of beaches to the water quality in the Bay of SF, from the Parks management to the program for green businesses.

For each topic there is a brief description, some information and links to access to further information and documentation and a place where you can leave comments and share them publicly.

The practice of open data, that is the issue of public data in open format, so as to make it easy to access and reuse, endorsed by the SF administration, is present in many other contexts, such as Washington, London, Canada , Australia and Scandinavia to name a few. This approach requires that government data are made public, accessible and usable by everyone, not passively, but to encourage exchange, dialogue and debate. In this process of release of data, the Internet turns out to be the best way because it allows a high degree of interactivity and can be used by everyone.

Also in Italy there are similar experiences, as www.spaghettiopendata.org. Unfortunately this is not an institutional or government site, as in the case of SF, but the action of a group of individuals. It is the result of work of many citizens that have reported links and reorganized them. The aim, as stated on the site itself, is, on one hand, to provide a provisional entry point to the Italian public data waiting for them to become Open Data, and, on the other, to give emphasis and visibility to the various database of local administrations that have moved autonomously making public their information.

Although the result of the will of individuals, it is still a very useful tool to follow the evolution of this particular type of public communication, based on transparency and on direct consultations with citizens. Of particular interest is the concept of reusability that depends on two essential conditions for the Open Data: the format (for example a XLS file is more reusable than a PDF, but less than a XML) and a license that enables the reuse .

Regarding the relationship between environmental data and the theme of the Open Data, Matteo Brunati, one of the owners of the site Spaghettiopendata, says: «The State was also created to manage public affairs, namely that set of assets that belong to all citizens. Among these things there is obviously the territory. At a quantitative level the territory speaks to us through the data, through its monitoring that actors on behalf of the State are delegated to do. All data, collected during such operations should have the right of an open and facilitated consultation. The data tell a lot about environmental pollution trends, mobility and the exploitation of our land. They can be a vehicle of a new participatory urban planning, much closer to the life of active citizens of the territory. For this they are also a fundamental medium to trigger new virtuous mechanisms of control on long-term defense of that common good which is the place where we live».