Open Data Specification + R Package for utility rate structures

[christophertull]

I know this is sort of last-minute, but if anyone is interested, I would love to spend some time scheming on a project that I have worked on to democratize the analysis of utility rate structures.

Right now the status of the project includes:

• the Open Water Rate Specification - an open YAML specification to publish water utility rate information in a machine readable format.
• RateParser - an R package to parse this YAML format and calculate water bills.
• RateComparison - an R Shiny dashboard to investigate the implications of a pricing change.

This sort of project is essential to enable the analysis of utility pricing schedules at scale in order to determine pricing equity, revenue stability, and how much prices encourage conservation. Right now most of this work is done in an ad-hoc, bespoke manner. Rate information is manually extracted from webpages and PDFs, then hard-coded into analysis scripts. Creating a machine-readable open standard (and libraries for making it useful) creates an abstraction layer to democratize this analysis.

This is my first time doing this sort of thing, and as far as the technical implementation goes, I have felt like I am in a bit of an echo chamber. I would love to chat with anyone who is interested. Possible discussion points include:

1. How to facilitate and encourage the use of this current standard.
2. Best practices on how to host a growing repository of rate structures and make it easily available. Right now they are all just stored in a Github repo!
3. Whether it is valuable or feasible to try to generalize this standard from just water rates to utility rates in general (water, electricity, telecom, etc?). I think the potential is there, but sometimes there is value in limiting scope.

[sibusiso16]

Hi Christopher. I trust you are well. I like your idea and I believe it has a potential to assist a lot of people in the utility space from water, electricity, refuse and property especially in the developing world. I'm from South Africa and I would like to participate in this with you. I'm a beginner in R and for now it's just a hobby for me as it's something I'm teaching myself on the side.