Ester Tsai
M.S. Data Science @ Columbia University
Email: tsaiester@gmail.com
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Chula Vista Building Permit Data Dashboards
Project Overview
The overarching goal of this project is to help the city of Chula Vista carry out its Open Data Program. To narrow down our scope, two other students and I focused our effort on the building permit datasets provided by the Development Services Department (DSD). Our final product is a public web page with user-friendly dashboards for Chula Vista’s building permit data.
Example dashboard:
We want these dashboards to help homeowners and businesses make informed decisions. If this is done well, citizens can easily find the information they want online. Using data efficiently benefits the community and staff, and saves resources for the city.
At the end of the project, the team created a 22-paged “Open Data Project Report” for the Data Governance Committee. This report addresses how to standardize the creation process, from cleaning the data, to designing the dashboards, to publishing the dashboards on the website. This report also includes the Best Practices From Other Cities, such as San Francisco, New York City, and Denver, and it addresses some concerns raised by the judges after our Innovation Sprint Final Showcase presentation, such as “How often should we update the dashboards?”. We hope this document can help different departments make meaningful dashboards with their own data and present them to the public.