Roadmap: OpenGrid

This document describes the goals, vision, and direction of OpenGrid. With limited resources it is critically important that we focus our efforts in a disciplined manner. We simply can't do everything at once.

To provide direction and focus to the project, the core OpenGrid Team (EKI and City of Chicago) have started to meet about every six weeks to plan and retrospect for future and past releases respectively. The goal is to plan for the next sprint midway through the current sprint (e.g. if we are in the middle of dev period for v1.1.0, we will plan for v1.2.0). Each planning meeting will result in this document being updated with a roadmap for each release.

Below you will find our upcoming releases and a list of the tasks we will focus our development efforts on for that release. These tasks are categorized by priority as arranged within the milestones. As OpenGrid is open sourced and we welcome contributors outside of City of Chicago employees, please coordinate with @PriyaDoIT

For the most part, we would like developers to focus on the top priority tasks, before moving on to the lower priority ones. This is not to say that things will never be done out of order, but our priorities have been chosen carefully, taking into account dependencies between different tasks. If developers contribute new features outside the focus of the current release, it is likely that we will ignore their contributions until a later release. Work on bug fixes will always be given high priority.

Overview of OpenGrid.io

In January of 2016, Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) launched OpenGrid, a map-based application that provides residents with a way to visually understand complex municipal data. OpenGrid’s mission is to improve Chicagoans’ ability to meaningfully use open data beyond the capacity of current data portals. The program is easily accessible via any web browser on desktops, tablets, and phones.

The application is called OpenGrid for a reason: it is open-source. Since DoIT’s beginnings several years ago, open source programming has been a core principle of DoIT’s data and analytics work. That non-proprietary philosophy is also central to the Smart Chicago Collaborative, a civic organization that focuses on improving residents’ lives through technology, which helped sponsor OpenGrid’s development. Both DoIT and SmartChicago encourage other cities and organizations to replicate the application for their own use. The source code used to develop OpenGrid is available on this very own GitHub page. Here, programmers in other cities can freely take Chicago’s building blocks and design their own geospatial system that fits their needs.

Milestone: Improve Usability

Short Term:

• Printable Maps

Medium Term:

• Add Tour of Site

Long Term:

Milestone: Searching Improvements

Short Term:

• Zoom into Quick Search Results
• no underscores

Medium Term:

• Circumventing 6000+ data limit
• Performing a Quick Search with an Advanced Search

Long Term:

• Natural Language Processing
• Share Queries without copy/paste URL
• Indexing Filter Criteria in the Advanced Search

Milestone: Interactive Buildings & Street Objects

• Currently we are working on a catch-all road map. We are open for comments and suggestions, and will break these into more defined tasks as planning ramps up!

Milestone: Transit Data

Milestone: View data for a street, census tract, etc.