Open San Diego
Slides from Ignite San Diego 2 on August 3rd, 2010
This presentation was essentially the launch of Open San Diego. We're still a few months away from beginning our projects, but Ignite was a great opportunity to explain our mission and find people excited to join our cause.
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When the United States started to urbanize in the 19th century, many people developed a fear of cities. This kind of general fear is common during big societal shifts.
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Cities were seen as monsters that swallow people and ruin them. Young women who moved to cities would turn into prostitutes. Young men would become thugs. Children would be ground down by greedy industrialists until…
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…they became urchins—begging, causing trouble, and otherwise loitering in the street with dead horses. It was common to believe that cities were loud, dirty, and dangerous places—not the kind of place you'd want to live.
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The 20th century witnessed a revolt against cities. We built suburbs where people could live away from cities and factories. Cars made this possible, and we looked forward to a safe and quiet future.
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But we learned that the suburbs had their own problems. They made people feel isolated. Some people complained that they forced homogeneity and robbed areas of their charm. People said that suburbs were cultural wastelands. We realized that people like living in "noisy, dirty, crowded cities…because most of the things we value are provided by other human beings, and being in a large city puts us in close proximity with many more of them." (that's from Timothy B. Lee)
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And we learned that kids will be weird no matter where they live. If they don't have dead horses to hang out with, they'll just pretend to be werewolves instead.
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One of the greatest lessons from the 20th century is that we can't just build a place to live from the top down. We need a nuanced understanding of how places actually work before we try to cobble together a livable community out of what we think are the right elements.
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And I don't want this to be a discussion about cities versus suburbs. We have to live with both, and we all know that good and bad things have come out of both cities and suburbs. We also know that both cities and suburbs are in serious trouble—from sustainability issues, to governance issues, to budgetary issues. We want to have a deep discussion about how places work, or don't work.
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A shortfall of many armchair discussions about cities and suburbs is that they're rooted in emotion or personal preference. A city will not make a person immoral, and a suburb will not make a person stodgy. It's not a simple algorithm. We'd benefit from taking a deeper, more scientific, look at the places we live.
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Wouldn't it be nice, though, if it were an algorithm! What if we could figure out how to make it so that a person born in San Diego (or who moves to San Diego) would become totally awesome! It's a nice thought.
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Where we live has a profound impact on us. Where we live determines our access to education, jobs, culture, and healthy food. Where we live determines how likely it is that our house will burn up in a wildfire or get knocked over by an earthquake. If you live somewhere that requires a car, that'll cost you about 5 grand a year—it's like an extra tax. If you live somewhere that makes it hard to walk, you'll probably get fat.
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Now we have the technology to gather and collaboratively analyze data about the places we live. Which is why we're starting…
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Open San Diego! We're a non-profit (actually, not yet) that wants to help people understand how San Diego works. We hope to do this by focusing on a simple mission…
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We make data about San Diego freely available for anyone to use. We say "data about San Diego" because it's nice and broad. Here are a few general categories of data that we want to make more readily available for people to use:
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Municipal data are "official" data provided by municipal governments. These data are usually the outcome of municipal programs. What you see above is Sandag's San Diego Bike Map. It's awesome, as are a lot of the data from Sandag. We want to make more of these data available.
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Political data describe how policy is made in San Diego. They can include electoral data, data describing the municipal legislative process, and data describing the many different political districts that we live in (congressional districts, state representative districts, city council districts, county supervisor districts, school districts, etc).
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Environmental data describe the world around us. They help us understand where it's safe to develop property, where it's safe to swim, where you should farm, what you should grow, and the impact we're making.
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And my favorite: emergent data. These are data that we produce by simply living our lives. The above map is made up of red points where tourists have taken pictures and blue points where locals take pictures—it paints a remarkably accurate picture of life in San Diego. We're really excited to find stories in the data we create simply by living our lives, by applying for a job, opening a business license, selling something on Craigslist, renting property, graduating from school, etc.
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We want to emphasize that we're not a political organization, nor are we journalists. We are citizens who want to help journalists and policy makers use science to do their jobs.
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We're just getting started. If you're interested in helping, please follow us on Twitter and consider joining our Google Group. We can use all the help we can get!