Code for DC’s Chris Given wants you to understand how DC invests in public works

Every year, D.C.’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer releases a Capital Improvements Plan. The Plan is generally more than 400 pages in length, and published as a PDF. But hidden somewhere in that PDF is a lot of valuable information on how the government plans to spend money on things like schools, roads, parks, homeless shelters and more over the coming five years.

If only all that data were accessible.
Chris Given, a member of Code for DC, got interested in the data, and specifically in knowing how investment in public works changes over time.
“My own entry point into this project was education, where there are stories like Duke Ellington High School, originally estimated to cost $70 million, now on track to cost $180 million,” he wrote in an email. But there was a problem: “With the data locked away in PDFs, it’s difficult to access and understand the big picture, and particularly how that picture has changed over time, apart from specific pieces that you have lived.”
So, about a year ago, Given wrote a scraper. And a few weeks ago, after circling back to the project once the Capital Improvements Plan for FY2017 was released, Given decided to go a step further.
“I realized that there would be value in creating a demonstration project to get folks interested in other potential uses for the data,” he wrote. So he ran his scraper through around 3,480 pages of PDFs from the past eight years, and created a tool that aims to make the data “easy, or at least easier, to explore.”
It’s called the Capital Improvement Tracker.
https://twitter.com/DataLensDC/status/755770947718746112
Interested in the progress of the NoMa parks rec centers project? Or the D.C. Public Libraries IT modernization project? Given’s tool easily surfaces information on a project’s status, estimated cost, total spent so far and more.
Given knows the Capital Improvement Tracker isn’t for everyone. “I mean, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s about funding for capital projects,” he wrote. It’s “pretty wonk-y.”
Still, he hopes some brave explorers will get use out of it. “I think opening up the data in this way creates the opportunity for others to start to poke around in search of interesting stories to tell,” he told Technical.ly in an email.
https://twitter.com/cmgiven/status/755559878735851520
Some stories will be found in the data itself, and others in the limitations of that data. “There are a number of District-wide projects that bundle smaller improvements into one, making it difficult to understand something like the geography of that investment,” Given told Technical.ly. He cited the $3 million “Repair and Maintain Curbs and Sidewalks” budget as an example of this.
But “even if I can’t answer that question with the data I have, I think raising questions can identify useful data that we don’t have and that folks could start to request or track down.” In other words, the very opening of this existing data will allow interested parties to ask better, more focused question when looking for additional information.
That’s certainly better than a PDF.
Explore the Capital Improvement Tracker here.