Stage

Maintaining

README

OpenDataPhilly is a regional open data catalog, providing a repository for information about open data available from the City of Philadelphia, non-profit organizations, university research projects, and other publishers of open data about the region. It was originally developed by Azavea and is now volunteer maintained.

While most open data catalogs are maintained by a single government entity, we believe that a diverse array of open data is more useful to the community than many repositories with discrete collections. We seek to maintain the regional character of OpenDataPhilly while growing the community of users and contributors to the catalog.

In order to reduce costs, simplify infrastructure, and improve security, OpenDataPhilly migrated from CKAN to JKAN, moving it from a database-driven application to a static web site. This was successful, but the functionality and visual design have regressed from the previous version, and we seek support to improve these aspects of the project.

Azavea provided support for OpenDataPhilly on a pro bono basis for more than a decade, but now aims to sustain itself independently of any single organization’s goodwill. In the long run, we seek to grow the community of contributors to the project in order to improve resilience and make it a truly community oriented project.

Our top goals include: 1. Visual Design - The new web site is not an attractive design and the home page could be significantly more visually appealing. Further, the interior pages should also be re-themed to match the home page. This work could reflect the original design of the CKAN OpenDataPhilly web site or could be a departure. 2. Search - Improve search by adding direct search access to the home page and by providing additional filters (particularly by organization and theme) to the interior search page 3. Data interoperability - the data.json page that is available for harvest by the federal data.gov project is not compliant with the current data.json specification. In addition, we would like to be able to harvest data catalog entries from DVRPC’s open data catalog’s data.json file.

Project Activity

Calling all data nerds: OpenDataPhilly needs your help to get back to its prime

“The team behind a longtime Philadelphia data project is calling on users to help improve it — and the city to help fund it.

OpenDataPhilly, a catalog of publicly available datasets across Philly, is run by a small team of volunteers who have stayed committed to the site and its mission despite a lack of money and participants. The more people that contribute to its success, the more it can help Philadelphians get engaged with issues they care about across the city, they said.

But there’s only so much this small team can accomplish as volunteers. With more help and financial support, the site could add features that make the data easier to find.”

Read the full article on technical.ly…Published