Resident Web Use Research

This work-in-progress survey tool will make it easy to run, evaluate, and course-correct resident research surveys of internet use. Code for America has developed this process as parts of its Digital Front Door initiative, and included the results in our Oakland Phase 1 Report:

• Resident survey results showing channels of internet access.

  We believe that mobile-primary users are significantly under-represented in our sample, at least if the most reliable available national statistics are correct.

• Geography process describing how we correlated self-reported neighborhoods to Census geography.

  We asked each participant “What Oakland neighborhood do you live in?,” and allowed free-text responses so respondents could accurately describe their location. Values ranged all widely, from close matches to CEDA-defined neighborhood names, to council districts, zip codes, and large areas like “East Oakland.”

Technology

We are using a combination of data from Census Reporter’s API for ACS 5-year data, Google Docs for survey data storage, TypeForm for survey response gathering, and probably Turf.js and Leaflet for map display.

There will probably be a back-end written in Python and Flask.

Oakland analysis from October 2014 can be found in analysis-oakland-2014-10-27.

Help Wanted

We’ll be formalizing a few help wanted issues in the coming weeks:

1. Survey setup, connection between TypeForm and Google Docs, likely via Zapier.
2. Ways for residents to identify their location on a map without pinpointing it. Neighborhoods or tract groups would be best; zip codes are not sufficiently granular.
3. Visual representation of in-progress results with race/ethnicity/income correlations.

Percentage of Oakland population Hispanic or Latino, 2010 Census: