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sac2050 |
About Sac2050 |
Where are we at? Where do we want to go? How are we going to get there? |
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Sac2050 is a project of Code for Sacramento. We’re building a diverse network of people and organizations collaborating to shape the future of the Sacramento region. We’re bringing together an inclusive community of young professionals, policy analysts, equity advocates, civic leaders, technologists, designers, makers, and dreamers who believe in the power of collective impact to accelerate quality of life improvements.
The Sacramento region lacks a shared vision for accelerating quality of life improvements and a platform to track progress toward measurable goals. We need better tools. Sac2050.org is an open platform for driving this change. We believe that it’s time to ask ourselves:
- Where are we at?
- Where do we want to go?
- How are we going to get there?
We hope that Sac2050.org becomes a civic operating system to set goals, measure progress, and show who’s doing what so that we’re not duplicating efforts. This will require a new operating model to make collaboration the new competition.
Inspired by the Blueprint process of the early 2000s that modeled future transportation and land use planning, Code for Sacramento is convening residents to set goals in all quality of life areas:
- The Economy
- K-12 and Higher Education
- Health and Families
- Public Safety
- Environmental Sustainability
- Transportation and Housing
Using open data, Sac2050.org will provide a curated user experience on any civic topic to answer the following questions:
- How are we doing?
- Who’s responsible?
- How much money are we spending?
- Where’s the money coming from?
- What are some current issues?
- How can I make an impact?
The topic could be public transportation, homelessness, high school graduation rates, teen pregnancy, economic development, etc. The goal is to aggregate this information across levels of government and sectors to understand how these issues are addressed at a systems-level.
The November 14, 2015 Sac2050 Quality of Life Civic Datathon is a half-day event to crowdsource key quality of life indicator data. That data will be used to create a dynamic dashboard (Sac2050.org) as a foundation for a regional conversation about where we’re at, where we want to go, and how we’re going to get there.
At the Sac2050 Civic Datathon, participants will be divided into teams based on their interest area. Each team will have a list of datasets to collect, clean, and publish. Participants do not need to have a strong technical background, but should have basic spreadsheet proficiency (e.g., ability to sort, filter, delete columns, save as CSV, etc.). Detailed instructions are available here.
In addition to participants who can assist with data collection, we’re interested in working with subject matter experts with strong writing skills to develop content and illuminate stories from the data. We’re also recruiting team leads with skills in cat herding to help organize the data collection process and ensure that participants are able to source their assigned dataset(s), along with providing minimal technical assistance.
Code for Sacramento will use the crowdsourced data to generate interactive, web-based data visualizations at Sac2050.org. We hope to develop Sac2050.org into a platform that helps our region transcend the short-term thinking that drives quarterly reports and annual budgets to develop a vision for the future that will empower the next two generations.
As a Code for America Brigade, Code for Sacramento is part of a national network of civic-minded volunteers who contribute their skills toward using the web as a platform for local government and community service. We enable local civic innovation and take an open source approach to solving community problems and improving the citizen experience.