Andy Keatts, a reporter for Voice of San Diego, had been working for months with the City’s Development Services Department to release hundreds of thousands of development permit records, but working with XML data was beyond a reporter’s typical skill set. Civic Knowledge extracted the records from the City’s API and converted the XML records … Read more
The Challenge After writing a series of stories about San Diego city infrastructure, Voice of San Diego reporter Liam Dillon turned his attention to street lamps. Although the city published GIS data for the locations of street lamps, Liam wanted to understand how the number of lamps varied by community. The Solution Working through our non profit project, … Read more
A California Health Care Foundation sponsors projects to make health data more available.
By merging the reduced data with records of traffic tickets, we determined where residents had been ticketed for parking on a street that was not swept, to support a series of NBC 7 stories.
Project Description When Wendy Fry, a reporter with NBC 7 San Diego, requested data for a story about street sweeping, the city sent her a dump from their dispatch system’s GPS logs, a dozen files with several million records. Civic Knowledge, working under its nonprofit San Diego Regional Data Library, processed the records to determine … Read more
The Challenge The San Diego Housing Commission reviews data reports from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act to ensure that San Diego area lenders are following the law. When they wanted to reduce costs of processing the data into summary reports, they turned to Civic Knowledge for help. The Solution Because we had already loaded HMDA data … Read more
The Challenge When recently graduated students told us that it was difficult to land data analysis jobs without experience, we realized there was an opportunity to simultaneously give students experience and aid local nonprofits with answering data questions. The Solution In spring of 2015, operating as the San Diego Regional Data Library, we ran a data contest with … Read more
The Challenge While more data is available than ever before, it is still difficult to use, and journalists have a particularly difficult time finding data to support stories within their time and cost constraints. The California Health Care Foundation asked us for ideas about making health data more widely available and useful to journalists. The Solution The … Read more