Salinas, a city of more than 150,000 that’s known for its agriculture, has developed a significant focus on data in recent years. The municipality worked with the Sunlight Foundation in 2017 to create an open data policy that its City Council adopted in June 2017. In early 2018, with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies' What Works Cities initiative, Salinas contracted with Opendatasoft to utilize its cloud-based data sharing platform as the foundation for its Open Data Portal. It debuted that June. Among the city’s takeaways:
• Eric Sandoval, Salinas’ GIS administrator, told Techwire that standing up the portal has improved transparency, a goal. The partnership with Opendatasoft and a Memorandum of Understanding with Waze that’s still being finalized are enabling staffers to aggregate Internet of Things traffic data from sensors in the field with internal information from City Hall to inform residents. Salinas has also developed an app for internal use only by staffers, to push traffic and road closure information to Waze, letting the transportation company update its algorithm in real time.
“What our idea was, is that if we could get the Waze data to correlate with a high probability with the Internet of Things and mac address tracking data, we might be able to use that as a proxy for traffic volumes and counts,” Sandoval said. “And then we can look at the Waze data across the entire landscape of the city and make some estimations on traffic decisions based upon those correlations.” The city also maps bike paths and tracks collisions through a pie chart and heat map.
• The portal is Opendatasoft’s first contract of its kind with a California city — and it educated Salinas on where to meet its residents digitally. When the portal first launched, roughly 60 percent of users accessed it with cellphones. Sandoval said that percentage remains high despite settling somewhat.
“One of the things we know about our community is it’s a fairly lower economic community,” he said. “The economic demographics tend to be on the lower side and so people don’t tend to have laptops or desktop computers. If that’s the fact … then our applications or the information that we provide does need to take into consideration the smaller screen.” The portal offers information in English and Spanish.
• Officials have added 67 data sets to the portal in six areas including economic development, government, transportation and infrastructure and quality of life. Any promotion usually yields an “immediate impact” from residents, the GIS administrator said; and the site usually generates 8,000 to 9,000 hits and API calls per month, with about a half-million API calls since its launch. The site itself scores data sets from 0-12 on their popularity. To date, its crime data set is the most popular, at 10.7, followed by one on school sites, at 5.3; and one on bikeways, at 4.7.
