How Philly’s Chief Data Officer helped relaunch San Diego’s open data site

The City of San Diego relaunched their open data portal last month, boasting in a blog post about the new site’s flashy capabilities like automated data sourcing.

Behind the push for a spruced-up portal of open data is JKAN, a lightweight open data portal built in 2016 by none other than City of Philadelphia Chief Data Officer Tim Wisniewski.

“We can’t take ALL the credit for this new portal,” wrote Andrell Bower, who coordinates San Diego’s open data program. “We based our new portal on an open-source project by Tim Wisniewski, Chief Data Officer for the City of Philadelphia. The open-source portal he created, called JKAN, was instrumental in getting us up and running with our own version. (Thanks, Tim!!!)”

The hacker in black strikes again.

“It’s great to see this open-source project helping a city like San Diego achieve its open data goals,” said Wisniewski. “Their team has made awesome improvements to it, and their announcement sheds light on all the work that goes on behind the scenes of an open data program.”

Wisniewski, who became the City’s data honcho in 2014, also said he wanted to relay a message to readers of Technical.ly:

“You can also contribute to JKAN by coming up with ideas for new features or implementing them using a basic templating language.”

(If you really want to geek out about the platform, read Wisniewski’s interview with U.S. Open Data.)