Roadmap

The problem

We work with a number of people inside and outside of the City to empower use of data. It's a lot of work to make data available and while the current state of our open data offerings satisfies a subset of our users, it fails to meet the needs of many other users.

Specifically we've found that City staff users:

• Have a hard time instructing their stakeholders on how to make use of open data falling back on old habits
• Don't know themselves how to make use of open data for their own purposes without heavy coaching
• Don't feel like making data available is having the impact they'd hoped (even if it is)

We've found a range of users (inside and outside of the City):

• Don't trust the data for any number of reasons (poor documentation, unclear or hard to discover update schedules, etc.)
• Don't know how to leverage data in other tools
• Have a hard time understanding the context around the data

These challenges are not all addressed singularly through technology. Rather, a mix of processes, technology, design and people will help us realize our mission around empowering use of the City's data.

This project is a more visible manifestation of that bundle of work.

The approach

We believe in making small bets, and developing iteratively, openly and with our users. As such this project:

• Will move through an iterative development process starting with alpha releases, moving on to beta and then on to a first "official" release.
• Will be open source and documented to the best of our ability
• Will invite user feedback and research

Below, we define the goal posts for alpha, beta and the first "live" release. As we get closer to 1.0.0 release, we'll begin mapping out our direction toward 2.0.0 and so on.