Build data visualizations for Austin Animal Services!

[haileypate]

Concise description. What problem are you trying to solve?: The website coordinators for Austin Animal Services want to create new, dynamic data visualizations to replace the old, static graphs and reports on their website. Now that the Open Data Team is publishing many years' worth of raw outcomes data (fresh updates every hour!), we have an exciting opportunity to show off Animal Services' amazing work, ATX style!

Link (more details/brain dump/alpha) Please see links in section above. Also, a very basic prototype (by Hailey, ha!), developed with live data using Tableau, can be viewed here. But we can do better!!

Who will use/benefit from this project? Austin's official Animal Services Department will use these visualizations to report key operational indicators to the public. High quality visualizations could become featured content on the City's public website. If your content is chosen for publishing, we will credit you and show off your mad skillz on the City's official website!

Project Needs (dev/design/resources)

The designer or developer needs to utilize data published at data.austintexas.gov to produce visualization(s) that:

• will update automatically to reflect the most current data available (upon manual page refresh is fine)
• shows how live cat/dog outcome rates trend over time
• shows how cat/dog outcomes vary by age group and animal type
• shows how cat/dog intakes change over time (& also vary by age group and animal type)
• is simple, easy to understand, and with clear&transparent methodology
• can be embedded on our Drupal site

Tools may include HTML/CSS/Javascript, although we would consider embedding content created on third party platforms such as Tableau and Socrata. Bonus points for D3/C3!

Hailey from the City of Austin Open Data Team will provide definitions for business terms (publicly via GitHub to those interested) and help developers get questions answered by staff at Austin Animal Services and Public Information Office.

Status (experiment, alpha, beta, official) This placeholder will be published by Feb 25, 2016 so the public can view the latest stats. Otherwise, current status is Experiment.

[mateoclarke]

:dog: :cat: :bird:

[kcwoodfield]

I'm interested in this project. I've experience using d3 and have a few ideas.

[haileypate]

@kcwoodfield awesome!! when can we chat? i'm hailey.pate at austintexas dot gov

btw i started working on a little ETL project for this here

[capndave]

I have a bit of Tableau experience and would be happy to play around with/fancy up that prototype if you want, let me know!

[mateoclarke]

Hey @haileypate, we're cleaning up the project-ideas repo. Have you been able to connect with anyone interested in this project? What's the status?

[thebestmensch]

I'd love to take the helm for this, but @haileypate is unresponsive. Can anyone intro me to the relevant employees at Austin Animal Services and Public Information Office?

[mateoclarke]

@JMensch, Hailey's not at the City anymore. Have you tried reaching out to Ruben Garcia? Ruben.Garcia@austintexas.gov

He is listed as their department's open data liaison: https://open-data-manual.readthedocs.io/en/latest/current-liaisons.html

[thebestmensch]

Thanks @mateoclarke! Reaching out to him now.

[nikkiclark]

@JMensch if you're able to get ahold of Ruben, I'd be interested in helping with any design needs.

[capndave]

James - I can help on that if you want, lemme know

On Jul 20, 2017 2:42 PM, "James Mensch" notifications@github.com wrote:

I'd love to take the helm for this, but @haileypate https://github.com/haileypate is unresponsive. Can anyone intro me to the relevant employees at staff at Austin Animal Services and Public Information Office?

— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/open-austin/project-ideas/issues/47#issuecomment-316809186, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AObnZZT0FOsEulhXwuAfaYKl8jfkVcCWks5sP62qgaJpZM4HdawY .

[laurenschroeder]

Hi! I work with data and visualization in D3. This project sounds interesting and I'm looking for something to help push forward now. Let me know if it's still active!

[thebestmensch]

Had a conversation Ruben and I'll be taking point on at least this data viz project for Austin Animal Services. Thanks to everyone who reached out to volunteer their help, I'll reach out to you if and when we need it!

@mateoclarke, I'd prefer to expose the resulting public data visualizations under the Open Austin org umbrella, can you please contact me regarding that?

[mateoclarke]

@JMensch, for sure. @werdnanoslen is the current Projects Lead for Open Austin and should be looped in as well. Are you in our Slack org yet? Here is the sign up if not. I think it would be good to spin up a new channel in Slack to discuss.

[werdnanoslen]

@JMensch I sent you an invite to join our Github org. When you accept that I can give you access to the repo. I can help you all put together a blog post when you're ready to share.

[twentysixmoons]

Hey @JMensch I've been cleaning up the repo. I know we talked about your interest in animal services. Has this gone anywhere? Are you working on something independently?

Trying to figure out the best way to tag/close this issue.

[thebestmensch]

Sorry @VictoriaODell, I should be better about updating this.

We corresponded with Ruben Garcia (Open Data Liaison of Animal Services) and delivered a new data viz dashboard to his specifications.

We also published a write up.

Ideally the relationship would've continued and resulted in more mature tooling and ultimately insights, but he has since stopped responding.

[twentysixmoons]

Hey @JMensch. Just following up to see if there's been any change in the relationship. ATX Hack for Change is coming up and might be a good opportunity to explore building out more?

http://atxhackforchange.org/

[thebestmensch]

Hey @VictoriaODell! Unfortunately Ruben and that office is still generally unresponsive. We've instead chosen to focus our efforts on organizations that are ready to act as a partner and equipped to implement and disseminate solutions.

That being said, if there's someone else I should be talking to over there I'd be happy to start the conversation back up again!

I'd also be happy to talk to you about getting involved with hack for change in whatever capacity would benefit OA and the community the most!

[mscarey]

Wow, this is an inherently dramatic project (who wouldn't want to stress out over a dashboard showing whether kittens are about to be euthanized?), and it's in a field where Open Austin had a related successful project with Cute Pets Austin. And we have continuously updated data on the city data portal, right? Is the problem just that the city doesn't want to host the visualization? What if we had a different animal welfare organization interested in partnering on the project?

[thebestmensch]

who wouldn't want to stress out over a dashboard showing whether kittens are about to be euthanized?

I'm actually afraid to know this because it would end up with me adopting SO MANY KITTENS.

we have continuously updated data on the city data portal

The portal exposes basic intake and outcome records that are refreshed at least daily, which sufficed for the scope of this project.

Is the problem just that the city doesn't want to host the visualization

The work stopped because the person we worked with on the project, Ruben Garcia, stopped responding to our emails. I've attempted to reach out to AAC a few times since then and never received a response. The original intent was to deliver PDF reports and host the real-time dashboards ourselves.

We ended up using the reports in an educational article here.

What if we had a different animal welfare organization interested in partnering on the project?

Do you mean another organization that we'd work with to construct similar reporting, or bring in someone that has more bandwidth to send emails into the void that is AAC?