Calling all data nerds: OpenDataPhilly needs your help to get back to its prime

The team behind a longtime Philadelphia data project is calling on users to help improve it — and the city to help fund it.  

OpenDataPhilly, a catalog of publicly available datasets across Philly, is run by a small team of volunteers who have stayed committed to the site and its mission despite a lack of money and participants. The more people that contribute to its success, the more it can help Philadelphians get engaged with issues they care about across the city, they said. 

But there’s only so much this small team can accomplish as volunteers. With more help and financial support, the site could add features that make the data easier to find. 

“There are about [10,000] active users of the site a month,” volunteer Bryan Quigley told Technical.ly. “I don’t know what they use the data for, but I hope it makes it a little easier to be civically engaged and make Philadelphia better.”

It used to cost $25,000 to $45,000 per year in staff time and $3,000 to $5,000 in AWS hosting costs to maintain the site, volunteer and “godfather of open data” Robert Cheetham said. Now, it costs a few hundred dollars per year in hosting costs, which Cheetham pays himself, but that doesn’t include compensating people’s time spent working on it. 

In the past, charitable orgs like the Knight Foundation have given grants to support the project, but Cheetham found that it’s harder to get grants to maintain a project rather than to start something new, he said. 

“I wish the city would put in funding to maintain the system,” Cheetham said. “We’ve continued to do what we can to keep things running without and do so as we have time as volunteers.” 

OpenDataPhilly, one of the platforms where the city publishes its troves of data, aims to make that information more transparent, from tracking crime to understanding voter turnout. It was previously maintained by the staff at local GIS software company Azavea. The company was acquired by Element 84 in 2023, which deprioritized the project. 

Cheetham, who is the founder of Azavea, took the project with him when he was laid off at the end of 2023. Since then, he’s been working with a handful of dedicated volunteers to keep it going, including Quigley, a former Azavea employee, who continues to contribute to the project because he cares about the region and the tech, he told Technical.ly. 

Beyond just a data resource, for some of the volunteers OpenDataPhilly provides access to information in a way that builds community. Working on OpenDataPhilly is a way to give back to the city, volunteer Lydia Scarf said. 

“We have this sense that there’s a lot of people who really care about the project and are getting a lot out of it,” Scarf told Technical.ly. “But I want more and more people to feel like they can be active stakeholders of the project as well.” 

Losing key functions to stay afloat

Before the acquisition, Cheetham and his team made moves to make the site more cost-effective, secure and easier to keep up with. 

OpenDataPhilly used to be a CKAN site, an open-source data management system, allowing contributors to easily update and share information. However, the system relied on a lot of plugins that were time-consuming to sustain, Cheetham said. 

The team chose to move to a JKAN site, a lower-cost catalog that stores the links to data. The site is now hosted and managed on Github and using internal tools. These changes made the site more secure and easier to maintain, Cheetham said. 

“All of that means the website has no longer got a database behind it,” Cheetham said. “There’s no longer a dynamic programming language. It’s simply what’s called a static website.”

However, the transition came with some feature regressions, like the search function, Scarf said. 

Now, a lot of the work that Scarf and Quigley do involves coordinating with the city’s Office of Innovation and Technology and other orgs to manage pull requests. This means that when the city makes a change to one of the data sets on the site, OpenDataPhilly volunteers need to approve it.

Making these changes made the site more realistic to keep up with, especially now that it’s a volunteer project, Scarf said. 

“We don’t have a ton of maintenance to do. Besides that, that’s mostly how we’re keeping the lights on,” she said. “But there’s a lot to do to get us back to where we were when it was a CKAN site.”

A call for more volunteers to get back to ODP’s prime 

The OpenDataPhilly team has a vision for how the site could upgrade its usability, but they need more people to help make it happen. 

Scarf would like to see a more advanced search function and an updated user experience and design to make it more accessible to people who are using it for the first time, she said. 

“The priority in all of this development is around visibility and accessibility, making it much easier to comb through all of these datasets and see what’s in there,” she said. “But [also] to quickly find something that might be relevant to you.” 

The old site also had a function that tracked how frequently datasets were updated, which Cheetham would like to bring back, he said. He would also like to set up a system that periodically checks to make sure data sets are still available. 

Ultimately, Cheetham would like to see more data sets from more sources, like academic and nonprofit institutions. A similar mission is in the works at the Economy League of Philadelphia. The non-profit recently got a grant to develop a civic data platform that would make it easier to find and use data. 

Still, that level of collaboration requires a lot of time and effort. 

“There’s an infinity of things that could be done,” Cheetham said. “Without funding and only as volunteers, we’re going to chip away at it a little at a time.”