SDSU’s Annual Big Data Hackathon is scheduled for March 9 and 16. This year’s prize pool is $3550, in multiple categories, for innovative ideas and implementations around the theme of “Smart Living”. Visit the hackathon web site and register before the Feb 22 deadline.

Combines geographic boundary files for communities, cities and tracts in San Diego County.

sandiegodata.org-geography-2018-12

Resources

Direct access to individual CSV files.

• tracts. Tract census information
• places. Census place information, which includes incorporated cities and unincorporated towns like Julian and Romona
• places_boundaries. Census place boundaries, which includes incorporated cities and unincorporated towns like Julian and Romona
• city_boundaries. Boundary shapes for cities
• sd_community_boundaries. Boundary shapes for SD City communities
• county_boundaries. Boundary shapes for unincorporated County areas
• district_boundaries. Boundaries for special districts, such as the Promize Zone
• county_communities_boundaries. Boundaries for county communities
• combined_boundaries. Boundary shapes for all communities, county regions and cities combined
• tract_boundaries. Tract boundary shapes
• tract_communities. Link between tracts and cities, communities and county regions, with one record per tract. No geometry.
• sd_county_boundary. Boundary shape for SD County

Packages

Collections of all files in the dataset. ZIP packages have all files and documentation in a ZIP file and are compressed to load faster. Excel files have all data in worksheet tabs. CSV packages reference files stored on the net, and are best for use with analysis tools like Metapack.

I’m in training this afternoon for using the API for San Diego’s CityIQ Smart street lamps. These street lamps have cameras and computers that can detect and report:

• Parking, cars moving into and out of a parking space
• Count and speed of cars in street
• Pedestrian counts, speed and direction
• Environmental measurements: temperature, humidity

I’ll be working on extracting some of this data into an analysis package, so let me know if you’d like to work on a data project using the data.

The Data Library is offering a grant for $6,000 of data services, which nonprofits might use site planning, donor segmentation, analyzing client retention, data storytelling and other operational improvements. If you are looking for data help for your organization, visit the Data Grant web page for application guidelines and deadlines.

Test your skills and help SDSU journalism students with a class project. The Data Library will be helping SDSU Digital Journalism students with an interesting joint project: students ask data questions, we give data answers, and they write articles. You can test your data skills, and maybe learn a few new skills, by helping to answer some of the questions. Over the next week, the students will be formulating interesting questions about San Diego business, demographics, environment, traffic and other issues. They’ll submit the questions to our Data Insights Question and Answer service, where we will answer the data questions. Then, the students will write news articles about the insights. If you’d like to work on data questions, we’ll be meeting regularly:

Our Insights Service is a Question and Answer site for data questions, to make it easier for civic-minded San Diegans to better understand our local issues. However, it can be difficult to ask a good question that our analysts can answer. Here are some tips for writing a good data question. A good data question is specific and asks “when”, “how much,” “how many,” or “what is most”. It should have an answer that is something that is countable, usually a number of people, a number of dollars or the number of times something happened. The easiest questions to answer are formulated with a dataset in mind, or a hunch about what data you might find. Some places to find datasets that can help you understand what you can ask and get good answers for are:

This Saturday we will be meeting, at the regular Python Saturday Meetup session, to work on some of the data questions in our Insights Q&A service. To attend, please RSVP at both:

• The Python Meetup page
• Our Meetup page

Hope to see you there!

The Data Library now offers a new Jupyter web service, where you can get an (almost) fully configured Jupyter installation, without fighting the installation on your own machine. It’s probably best to install it yourself, if you can, but for everyone else, this service is a great option. The Url is: http://jupyter.sandiegodata.org You log into the service with Github, but before you can log, your github account must be a member of the SDRDL Data Projects Github organization. Email your github user id to eric@sandiegodata.org to request access.

The San Francisco Estuary Institute is running a visualization contest for water quality measurements from San Francisco Bay. The Data Library will be organizing a team to create one or more submissions. If you’d like to join the project, come to our next meetup or join our Water Project Google Group.

The Civic Knowledge Insights service is a Question and Answer website for social questions and data driven answers. The San Diego Regional Data Library will be using it to organize data questions from journalists, nonprofits, governments and social enterprises and to recruit volunteer analysts to answer the questions. Future Data Library meetings will focus on working on creating answers to the questions. Please ask a question! This site is the best way for San Diegans who have data-driven questions to connect with the experts who are mostly likely to know, or be able to find, the answer. Follow the #insights Slack Channel to get updates from the service: new questions, answers and comments. And, if you know something about a question, feel free to add an answer. We’re setting up this site as a new direction for running Data Library projects, to make it easier for analysts to get engaged and work on questions that interest them, and to make it easier for the public to submit questions. The site is just getting started, but here are two examples of questions with answers: