Project Roadmap

As we're just getting started, there's a lot of planning to do for building a proper data portal - alongside any smaller datasets we may start to publish as we get started.

What This Project Is About

• Providing a responsible, easy to consume, and standards-based open data portal
• Including reputable and canonical source links for all data presented
• Providing data sets that are simple to download and consume
• Including visualizations where useful
• Focused on Arlington, MA town government and directly related groups or issues

This Project Is Not About

• Politics
• Advocacy work, other than providing open data, open meeting law work, or related government transparency issues
• Hearsay, unofficial data, or any data that can't be directly and publicly sourced to an appropriate government or other organization
• Any SPI or PII data, or any data focused about specific individuals

While project contributors will exercise choice in which data sets they work to publish here, this site is not about politics or advocacy. The goal here is to provide the data in easy to consume ways for everyone. We expect many different groups or parts of town government may start to use this data.

Short Term Goals

• Choose GHPages remote theme
• Publish landing pages and starting FAQ
• Noodle on some simple datasets to publish focused on current events around school issues
• Build core community expectations, code of conduct, interest and skill areas, etc.

Architecture

• GitHub Pages on /doc for all primary landing pages or other static site infrastructure
• Provide at least CSV downloads for any data that makes sense to expose as tables; CSV provides maximum reuse even just to use as a spreadsheet.
• See also: Tooling ideas.
• See also: Data Sources ideas.
• What's the next things to consider as we build up?

Licensing

Everything produced here is licensed Apache-2.0 for maximum reuse for any purpose, by all. Various specific data sets may be copied under their existing licenses where required.

If project contributors vote, we may consider other similarly permissive licenses for cases that make sense (for example: any explanatory text about the site or data may better fit under CC-BY licenses).

Prefer to use tools, code, or other materials under permissive licenses wherever possible.

Formatting Standards

• Spaces, not tabs, set at 2.
• Respect widely-used language conventions in specific programming environments.