Local web developers pave way for infrastructure project transparency

Hutton Marshall | Downtown News Assistant Editor

The City of San Diego has $179.4 million budgeted for its Capital Improvements Program (CIP) in 2014.

With that considerable amount of money on the table for improvements and construction on streets, buildings, sewage and all the other civic capital considered “infrastructure,” one can safely assume that quite a few of these projects should get underway. One issue, however, is the ability of the average San Diegan to track these projects and stay in the loop.

For example, say a resident living in North Park submitted a request for their sidewalk to be repaired. A few months go by, maybe even a year, and they want to learn how the project is coming along. Aside from calling up city employees until the correct person is tracked down, it would be difficult to find any answers.

While there are city staffers tasked with providing this type of data to the public, none have the time or resources to provide constant updates on the 1,000+ proposed, planned or current infrastructure projects to every resident who wants them. Citizens want to know the status of projects in their neighborhoods, or simply that their voice is being heard. Everyone wants the information made available to those who want it, but there’s one glaring problem: the enormous amount of data to sort through in order to do so.

Last year the City estimated there was approximately $898 million worth of CIP to be done. The assessment process is still taking place to measure what that number is today. However, in order for the information to really be useful, the projects need to be not only identified, but also constantly updated.

It’s a daunting problem, but about a year ago, a group of civic-minded web developers, known within our city limits as Code for San Diego, decided to address the issue by attempting to make this information accessible online.

Code for San Diego’s leader, their “brigade captain”—he promises he didn’t choose the title—is Jeffrey Johnson, an Oceanside resident who specializes in open source apps used by cities.

“The citizens have no insight into [ongoing CIP projects] at all,” Johnson said. “That’s what we’re trying to do, to make that sort of information easier for people to digest and know when their roads are going to get ripped up, or when this building is going to get built or what’s the status of this project.”

While infrastructure is the first big issue Johnson and Co. have chosen to tackle in the name of civic open data, much of the group evolved out of Open San Diego, an informal organization that Johnson described as “a broader group for people interested in open government who aren’t necessarily practitioners in implementing it in the software way.”

Code for America, a San Francisco-based 501(c)3 started in 2009 that helps cities utilize web developers and leverage technology for civic engagement projects, reached out to Open San Diego about forming a Code for America “brigade,” which is a volunteer arm run autonomously in individual cities. With the formation of Code for San Diego, Johnson and other technical minds the opportunity to explore open data in a very project-oriented manner. All they had to do was work for free.

So around March 2013, they got to work on an interactive visualization that would show the details of ongoing infrastructure projects in the city’s limits. The final version of this, which is still in the development stages, is expected to be rolled out in February.

Councilmember Mark Kersey, deemed the chair of the newly created infrastructure committee around the same time Code for San Diego came to be, has worked closely with the web developers on the project, pushing the need for transparency on a fundamental level.

“This data belongs to the people and the default should be that the data is made public,” Kersey said. “Obviously there’s got to be exceptions—certain privacy issues that have to be kept in mind—but for the majority of the data that the city has, it belongs to the public and the public should have access to it.”

Kersey said that although the work Code for San Diego is doing is still in a preliminary phase, it sets a precedent of utilizing technology in the push for open data.

“I think this is really a model going forward for how the City can better interact with its citizens,” Kersey said.

The current website is infrastructure.opensandiego.org, which visualizes current San Diego infrastructure projects, although the information is outdated—almost eight months old—according to Johnson. The website coming in February will still base itself around an interactive map, but seeks to be much more data rich, providing a timeline showing each phase of planning and construction, and allowing users to sort through projects by council district, phase, or asset type, such as buildings or transportation. So far, 956 projects exist on the current site.

Johnson hopes to incorporate even more information, from requiring onsite project managers to provide updates to go on the site, to showing the funding sources for each project. The site could even be used as a voting system for the prioritizing of projects in the preliminary stages.

Despite its great potential, the problem as to who will see to the site’s upkeep still remains. Johnson, like most of the others involved with Code for San Diego, has a full-time job. Running a site like this would likely require the creation of a full-time position and an open data policy ensuring information is constantly provided. Johnson hopes to see something along the lines of Donna Frye’s role in Bob Filner’s administration as director of open government, but more tech-oriented. He suggested “chief data officer” or “chief innovation officer,” but the creation of a position along these lines would be up to the incoming mayor.

“We would hope that this new officer takes on this kind of stuff inside City Hall,” Johnson said. “The main thing is open data, to get a priority placed on that, with the city publishing their data by default.”

Kersey recently authored a draft of an open data policy—with Johnson doing the bulk of the legwork, according to Kersey—that is currently under review by the Rules Committee. While preliminary, the report looks at open data policies adopted by other major U.S. cities, such as Washington D.C., Boston and Chicago.

For more information on Code for San Diego, visit codeforsandiego.org.