How Open Is City of Mesa Data?? Transparency Via The Sunlight Foundation

US City Open Data Census

The first step in making data actionable is to make sure the data is easily accessible. Many cities, whether they have an open data policy in place or not, have work to do in terms of making datasets open and available online. Do an evaluation of where your city stands on releasing our landscape of datasets openly and work with your municipal partners to come up with a plan for making all of them open and available.
What is The Sunlight Foundation? http://sunlightfoundation.com/
Making government & politics more accountable & transparent
The Sunlight Foundation is a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that uses the tools of civic tech, open data, policy analysis and journalism to make our government and politics more accountable and transparent to all. Our vision is to use technology to enable more complete, equitable and effective democratic participation.

Our overarching goal is to achieve changes in the law to require real-time, online transparency for all government information, with a special focus on the political money flow and who tries to influence government and how government responds.

And, our work focuses on the local, state, federal and international levels.

Mesa, AZ / 2016
This is the overview page >> TAKE A GOOD LONG HARD AND INQUISITIVE LOOK
Does the City of Mesa still have work to do in terms of making datasets open and available online??
19 out of the 28 data sets HAVE NO DATA , no submissions and NO SCORE
7 data sets were submitted just 3 days ago and are waiting review:

• Budget
• Code Enforcement Violations
• Crimes
• Procurement Contracts
• Restaurant Inspections
• Spending
• Transit

http://us-city.census.okfn.org/place/mesa/2016

Review the guidance below and then submit information about your city's data here.
Any information about the ease with which you were able to find the data is worth noting in the additional comments field at the bottom of the form.
Screenshot of data chart for all cities at right.

Resources and Guidance
Review the list of datasets (found at the bottom of this page) and see if your city makes these datasets easily available online as open data.
These datasets serve as a construct of how to open local government data.
For more examples, see resources from Code for America and the Sunlight Foundation.
You should start by looking to see if your city has an open data portal.
If so, all of these datasets should be published there (if not, please indicate on the checklist).

Next Steps

Once you have an inventory together, work with your city partners to figure out what barriers stand in the way of making any missing datasets open and accessible online and discuss solutions to overcoming those barriers. Work with government to create a timeline tool or alerts for when data will be released.
If your city is making all this data available, now is the time to start thinking about what questions can be answered or problems addressed with these datasets.   
To take this project a step further, you can pick an issue area of particular concern to your city (crime or blight, for example) and do an inventory of all datasets related to that issue.
Then work with issue-area experts from the community to determine what potential value those datasets might have for addressing the problem, or what datasets are missing that would be particularly valuable.

Datasets

Dataset	Details
Asset Disclosure	Top-level government officials’ financial assets. (More info)
Budget	Municipal budget at a high level (e.g. spending by sector, department etc). This category is about budgets which are plans for expenditure (not actual expenditure in the past). (More info)
Business Listings	A directory of all licensed businesses in the municipal area, including key information such as: name, address, contact information, business type. (More info)
Campaign Finance Contributions	Amount contributed to each candidate and by whom. (More info)
Code Enforcement Violations	Building code inspection data surfacing reports on particular properties from code enforcement officials. (More info)
Construction Permits	Locations of issued construction permits. (More info)
Crime	City crime report data, preferably at a reasonably disaggregated level. (More info)
Lobbyist Activity	Actions of named registered lobbyists. (More info)
Procurement Contracts	The full text of municipal contracts with vendors, including amount, awardee (name, address), date awarded etc. (More info)
Property Assessment	Data about assessed property values. (More info)
Property Deeds	The recording of property sales, mortgages, and foreclosures. See your local Registry/Recorder of Deeds. (More info)
Public Buildings	Public Buildings: Locations of city-owned buildings. (More info)
Restaurant Inspections	Outcomes of food safety inspections of restaurants and other similar providers of food to the public. (More info)
Service Requests (311)	Non-emergency Service Requests: Non-emergency service requests, (that some cities request by dialing 3-1-1), such as: graffiti, non-working traffic lights, noise complaints, parking law enforcement, and potholes. Data should be at granular (per request) level. (More info)
Spending	Records of actual (past) municipal spending at a detailed transactional level, for example, at the level of month to month expenditure on specific items (usually this means individual records of spending amounts at a fairly granular level - e.g. $5-50k rather than at the $1m+ level). Note: a database of contracts awarded or similar is not considered sufficient. This data category refers to detailed ongoing data on actual expenditures. (More info)
Transit	Timetables (schedules), locations of stops, and real-time location information of all municipally run or commissioned transit services (buses, subway, rail tram etc). (More info)
Zoning (GIS)	The mapped zone (GIS) shapefiles of designated permitted land use in your city. (More info)
Web Analytics	Overall traffic stats, page-level traffic stats, site search logs, and browser-agent breakdowns from your city’s primary web property. (More info)

Mesa, AZ / 2016
This is the overview page >> http://us-city.census.okfn.org/place/mesa/2016
This is the overview page where you can see the state of open data across each key dataset.





http://us-city.census.okfn.org/