Database content type?

[gabrielaperezdelaosa]

@toribr @Jo-Dwyer

Various departments maintain document databases online that they want to make available to the public. For example, OPO maintains records of police complaints, Boards and Commissions maintains records of meeting agendas and minutes, APH maintains records of restaurant inspections, (CPIO?) maintains common Public Records Requests/BusinessDirectory.aspx?rqst=5). In order for those to be accessible, they need to be searchable.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. The current way this is being handled on austintexas.gov is through the use of various micro-sites and data.austintexas.gov. This makes it so that the website lacks cohesion and doesn't look as professional. It also leads to weird website dead-ends such as this Restaurant Inspection Score page which is not tied to the place where the restaurant inspection scores are housed without any context. Oh yeah, about two months later almost by happenstance I found a searchable version of the data.

Describe the solution you'd like I'd like our official documents content type to be fleshed out to more of a database content type. What that means to me is: tagging functionality and an automatically generated search bar at the top of that content type that searches only through the documents in that database.

Describe alternatives you've considered We find one microsite that does this well and try to get everyone to use just that one? Is data.austintexas.gov? The latter is really not great.

Additional context I think keeping accessibility at the center will be useful in thinking through this need. The current data.austintexas.gov site feels like a site where departments can dump a bunch of content to say that they've made it public, while actually putting it in a less accessible format than if a resident had to send an e-mail to request a document/information.

[Jo-Dwyer]

@toribr I know we've talked about databases in the past—Tim has mentioned that public records are one of the pain points he'd like to address soon. Should we talk with him about what this might require?

[wilhitem]

another example which is a data set of where people can get resources during covid: https://www.austintexas.gov/department/resource-sites-map-covid-19-response

There's a map using ESRI and then data below on when showers are open at locations/etc.

Not sure if that is in our out of scope but wanted it on the radar.

[srigdon]

Next steps:

• [x] Do just enough research on this (~2 hours); use cases are more interesting right now than taxonomy building.
• [x] Reach out to Tim and ask about possible taxonomy for public records.

[gabrielaperezdelaosa]

Ignore the text in this comment and see this table instead please:

Who needs an archive in the city of Austin?

[Boards and Commissions meeting and agendas] (http://www.austintexas.gov/department/boards-and-commissions) TAXONOMY: date, document type, board

[Restaurant inspection scores] (https://data.austintexas.gov/Health-and-Community-Services/Food-Establishment-Inspection-Scores/ecmv-9xxi)

• popular (59k views) but unmanagable
• 29k lines of data with no way to search or filter
• there is a data visualization option but I can't figure out how to make it work for me
• no doc attached for each score, although I'm sure they exist somewhere
• is this open data portal a third party app?
• TAXONOMY: restaurant name, Zip Code, date, inspection score (0-100), location

[311 calls] (https://data.austintexas.gov/Utilities-and-City-Services/Austin-311-Public-Data/xwdj-i9he) TAXONOMY: description, method, date, status, location

Austin Fire publishes

• Risk And Service Delivery Analysis
• Fire incident reports (every couple of months) TAXONOMY: date, problem type, location

Austin Code Department publishes [complaints] (https://data.austintexas.gov/City-Government/Austin-Code-Complaint-Cases/6wtj-zbtb) TAXONOMY: address, status, description, outcome They have a bunch of other stuff too like short term rental locations and licenses haulers (same site).

Austin Animal Center publishes maps of found pets and dangerous animals

Traffic incident reports (https://data.austintexas.gov/Transportation-and-Mobility/Real-Time-Traffic-Incident-Reports/dx9v-zd7x) TAXONOMY: date, location

@toribr I think there is a lot of support here for various different use cases where location information and mapping capabilities would be important.

[gabrielaperezdelaosa]

Tim Ziegler has put together this list of public records reservoirs on austintexas.gov. None of them are hosted on Drupal This document incorporates dashboards, application/request management systems and other third party apps we won't be able to replace soon. I've focused on the users we could serve with the official documents database in this document.