The Civic Knowledge Insights service is a Question and Answer website for social questions and data driven answers. The San Diego Regional Data Library will be using it to organize data questions from journalists, nonprofits, governments and social enterprises and to recruit volunteer analysts to answer the questions. Future Data Library meetings will focus on working on creating answers to the questions.
Please ask a question! This site is the best way for San Diegans who have data-driven questions to connect with the experts who are mostly likely to know, or be able to find, the answer.
Follow the #insights Slack Channel to get updates from the service: new questions, answers and comments. And, if you know something about a question, feel free to add an answer.
We’re setting up this site as a new direction for running Data Library projects, to make it easier for analysts to get engaged and work on questions that interest them, and to make it easier for the public to submit questions. The site is just getting started, but here are two examples of questions with answers:
- What seasons have the highest beach bacteria counts?
- What San Diego Neighborhood has the most noise complaints?
My vision for this service is that the Data Library will work with organizations in San Diego to introduce the site and get people comfortable submitting questions; we may even run lunch meetings with specific groups — such as City staff or Journalists — to generate questions. Then, the Data Library meetings will focus on working on interesting or high-voted questions. After getting answers, we’ll go back to group meetings to present the most interesting findings.
The service is also an interesting way to promote the City’s of San Diego’s open data portal, by submitting questions designed around open datasets that analysts can work on.