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FI$Cal Exec to Headline Workshop on Open Data

FI$Cal rolled out its open-data website, Open FI$Cal, a couple of years ago. This is an opportunity for professionals and hobbyists alike to delve into the numbers and see what they can do with them.

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A key executive from the Financial Information System for California (FI$Cal) will be among the participants Saturday at an Open Data Day workshop in Sacramento.

Joel Riphagen, senior adviser to FI$Cal’s director, will address the Code4Sac Meetup.

“Our goal here for Open Data Day, which is a celebration of all things open data, is a chance to educate the public about our data,” Riphagen told Techwire. “We want to get public feedback about our data and our website. We want the public to help us find use cases for our data, and just improve public awareness of FI$Cal’s capabilities.”

FI$Cal rolled out its open-data website, Open FI$Cal, in September 2018. This is an opportunity for professionals and hobbyists alike to delve into the numbers and see what they can do with them.

“I think these sorts of events are fun in that you get the public there — a lot of people who are interested in transparency and in open data,” Riphagen said. “You get both technically minded folks who can build things out of your data, which we hope happens on that day, as well as just lay people who are interested in learning more.”

As part of Saturday’s daylong event, participants will also be using data sets from Sacramento on homelessness, and the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration will be demonstrating a Business Intelligence data dashboard it’s been working on.

Although the event is intended for data enthusiasts, it’s open to the public — including vendors.

Vendors “are certainly allowed to take part, and as far as the results, it’s anyone’s guess as to what the public will be interested in and what they’ll create,” Riphagen said. “It’s really an opportunity for folks in the community to get more familiar with the data, so it’s not vendor-focused, but there may be things that come out of it. If somebody creates a new visualization, or connects our data to some program data, who knows what they’ll create? The short answer is I don’t know of a vendor outcome from this.”

Open Data Day comes a little more than a month after Data Privacy Day, which was Jan. 28.

Dennis Noone is Executive Editor of Industry Insider. He is a career journalist, having worked at small-town newspapers and major metropolitan dailies including USA Today in Washington, D.C.