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/

Wake Up Mesa! - New Tools For The Urban Toolbox Tax Increases? Tax Breaks?

Boise, Denver, Greenville, Minneapolis, Nashville, and Pittsburgh are six of the many cities using a new strategy for economic development.
Rather than offering tax breaks to lure companies, these cities are creating walkable, vibrant, inclusive neighborhoods that are attracting residents and employers, supporting existing businesses, and fostering entrepreneurs.

We talk about this new approach in our most recent report, Amazing Place: Six Cities Using the New Recipe for Economic Development. The report takes an in-depth look at the development strategies at work in these six cities, and is designed to show communities everywhere how to create diverse and durable local economies that last beyond the lifecycle of any one employer.

As part of Tuesday’s kickoff for the new report, we hosted an online conversation about creating these amazing places. Participants heard an overview of the guide as well as a detailed discussion about development in Denver, Greenville, and Pittsburgh. A recorded version of the webinar is now available.

Watch the recorded webinar

	Click here to view the archived webinar
	Click here to download the presentation (PDF)

Joining the webinar were Geoff Anderson, President and CEO of Smart Growth America; Alex Hutchinson, Economic Development Specialist at Smart Growth America; Aylene McCallum, Director of Downtown Environment for the Downtown Denver Partnership; Nancy Whitworth, Deputy City Manager for Economic Development at the City of Greenville, SC; and Bill Flanagan, Chief Corporate Relations Officer for the Allegheny Conference on Community Development in Pittsburgh, PA.
Thank you to everyone who joined us for the webinar earlier this week, both as speakers and participants. To learn more about this new resource, download the full report.

Want more help creating an amazing place?

Food Hardship Nation-wide + Arizona

“Food hardship is a serious national problem that requires a serious national response,” said Weill. “It is crucial that the nation take actions that will dramatically decrease food hardship numbers. The cost of not doing so — in terms of damage to health, education, early childhood development, and productivity — is just too high. The moral cost of not doing so is even higher. . .
“It’s good to see progress, but the food hardship rate is still unacceptable,” said Jim Weill, president of FRAC.

“The data in this report represent an economic and political failure that is leaving tens of millions of Americans struggling with hunger, and this struggle is happening in every community in America. We must redouble our efforts to ensure no American is left behind.”

Despite Arizona officially recovering from the recession this year, millions of Americans live in households that struggle to put food on the table, according to a report, How Hungry is America?, released by the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC).

Key Findings:

• Nationally, one in six households reported they struggled to afford to buy food.
• Rates of food hardship in 2015 varied from a low of 8.4 percent in North Dakota to a high of 23 percent in Mississippi.
• 31 states had at least one in seven respondent households (14.3 percent or more) answer that they did not have enough money to buy food at some point in the past 12 months.
• The states with the worst food hardship rates are: Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. Of the 16 states with the worst food hardship rates, eight were in the Southeast.
• Of the 109 large MSAs surveyed, 93 had at least one in eight (12.5 percent or more) households affirmatively answer that they struggle to afford food.
• Arizona is tied with Missouri at No. 18 on the list for Worst States in the Nation for Food Hardships

“Progress is great, but families going hungry is still unacceptable,” said Cynthia Zwick, executive director of the Arizona Community Action Association (ACAA).  “Food hardship remains a very serious problem in Arizona and across the country that needs to be addressed quickly, efficiently and effectively on a collaborative basis.”. 
Quote from AZ Big Media

$75K UPS Grant to Develop Native Edge Online Platform

EINPresswire.com/ -- MESA, AZ--(Marketwired - July 01, 2016) - The National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development (the National Center) recently received a $75,000 grant from The UPS Foundation, which drives corporate citizenship and philanthropic programs for UPS (NYSE: UPS). The grant will be used to further develop the Native Edge, the National Center's innovative online platform designed to give Indian Country the edge in business.
"The UPS Foundation is honored to support the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development's efforts to expand and enhance the Native Edge," said Eduardo Martinez, president of The UPS Foundation and chief diversity and inclusion officer at UPS. "Our goal is to fund powerful programs that make a lasting difference to the global community."
Indian Country Today called the Native Edge a "Linkedin, Monster.com & Facebook for Natives." The online platform -- found at www.nativeedge.com -- features four components:

• The Hire Edge, which helps Native American business owners find employees, and job seekers to find potential employers. It also helps Corporate Diversity Recruiters to meet and exceed their diversity goals by matching them with Native American workforce.
• The Native to Native (N2N) Edge Community allows businesses to network with each other and initiate new relationships.
• The Training Edge, which provides business owners and their employees with interactive tools and training sessions to help in their professional development.
• The Procurement Edge, which is a database for both federal and corporate procurement opportunities, which also allows for Native-owned businesses to partner and team with each other.

Basic membership is free of charge, and includes access to the Hire Edge and N2N Edge Community. Access to the Training Edge and Procurement Edge is possible through a low monthly or yearly subscription fee.
"The National Center is incredibly grateful to have the support of The UPS Foundation as we continue to promote and advance the Native Edge," said Gary Davis, President and CEO of the National Center. "The Native Edge is already transforming the way Indian Country does business by providing both employers and job-seekers with an online platform to match skills and talent with the best jobs. The UPS Foundation's generous contribution will enable us to expand the platform's reach even further, opening up its benefits to an even wider audience. We look forward to continuing our strong relationship with The UPS Foundation in the years ahead."
In addition to the Native Edge, the National Center hosts the largest economic development event in Indian Country -- the Reservation Economic Summit (RES). RES brings together tribal leaders, elected officials, representatives from business, established or aspiring Native American business owners, and many more to learn, brainstorm, collaborate, and network in an innovative and motivational atmosphere. The next regional RES -- RES Oklahoma -- will take place from July 11-14 at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, just outside of Tulsa, OK. For more information about RES or to register for the event, please visit www.res.ncaied.org.
Established in 1951 and based in Atlanta, GA, The UPS Foundation identifies specific areas where its backing clearly impacts social issues. In support of this strategic approach, The UPS Foundation has identified the following focus areas for giving: volunteerism, diversity, community safety, and the environment. In 2015, UPS and its employees -- active and retired -- invested more than $110 million in charitable giving around the world. The UPS Foundation can be found on the web at UPS.com/foundation.
About the National Center: The National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development (NCAIED) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. With over 40 years of assisting American Indian Tribes and their enterprises with business and economic development -- we have evolved into the largest national Indian specific business organization in the nation. Our motto is: "We Mean Business For Indian Country" as we are actively engaged in helping Tribal Nations and Native business people realize their business goals and are dedicated to putting the whole of Indian Country to work to better the lives of American Indian people -- both now... and for generations to come. For more information, please visit www.ncaied.org.
The following files are available for download:

• PDF
• Screenshot of the Native Edge

CONTACT:
Lewis Lowe
lewisl@strategies360.com
202-333-2234

That Vision Thing > Pie-In-The-Sky ASU Downtown Mesa Campus

Cities: The intersection of people and place

The Takeaway

June 26, 2016 · 9:45 AM EDT

By T.J. Raphael (follow) 
Jane Jacobs, the mother of urban planning, warned the world more than a decade ago about grandiose developers peddling utopian urban visions.
This is one of the troubles with what I call the 'vision' thing," Jacobs said in 2004. "The vision thing is an idea that somewhere or other in the future is a golden age we should be working toward, and when we get it, boy won't that be great."

Now, Roberta Brandes Gratz, an urban planner and friend of Jacobs, is carrying forward that skepticism. She says that the buzz around “smart cities” presents an opportunity to think both enthusiastically and cautiously about the future of urban development.

Brandes Gratz is founder of the Center for the Living City and author of "We're Still Here Ya Bastards: How the People of New Orleans Rebuilt Their City.” She says that while the "smart city" may be the latest trend in urban planning, the fundamental building blocks of cities haven't changed.

 

Up-Ending Creative Place Making > A BIG QUESTION

Maybe it's just an old habit hard to break, but your MesaZona blogger likes to take a look at what's used to wrap-up an article or report or a proposal [or read an executive summary] before getting into the introduction or reading the main body of lines and paragraphs -or skipping around.
Let's go back to a number of posts about that ASU Downtown Mesa Campus Pie-In-The Sky Scheme : the problem?
It was an attempted done-deal way before the public got wind of it - A RADICAL TRANSFORMATION. Here's why 

In creative placemaking, inclusion is fundamental.
You don’t ask people for their feedback on something that’s already been made.
You ask them to start with you at the beginning.
How hard people will work to make sure that happens is an even bigger question.
If part of the goal is to create places that reflect neighborhood identities, isn’t it a challenge to ensure equity and inclusion?

Of course, people doing this work believe that everybody should be able to participate. But whether or not that happens is a big question. . .
It’s a place-based approach, so you’re working within a specific square mileage.
If, as an artist or community development corporation, you want to use creative placemaking to build cohesion in that defined place,
how do you constantly make sure you’re not missing people’s voices?

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Creative Place Making
LISC Our Stories 

By Lynne McCormack

As head of the creative placemaking program, Lynne, an artist by training, oversees LISC’s many projects that bring arts and culture into the work of comprehensive community development. Before joining LISC, Lynne served as the director of Art, Culture and Tourism for the city of Providence. For over thirty years, she has worked at the intersection of arts and community, forging partnerships that brought grants, festivals, employment opportunities and increased funding for arts-based development to the city. Lynne holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Or, at least, part of it. Last week, some 60 community developers, artists, public officials, funders and LISC staffers came together in Providence, RI to hash out the theory and practice of “creative placemaking,” which is becoming an increasingly integral part of community development work. In the interview that follows, Lynne McCormack, who joined LISC in October 2015 as director of creative placemaking for national programs and who spearheaded the meeting, answers some fundamental questions about creative placemaking. For starters: what the heck is it?
Read more at the above link

WATCH THIS > New Avigilon Appearance Search™ Technology – Reveal

Published on Jun 19, 2016

Views: 4,119

Avigilon Appearance Search video analytics technology is a sophisticated search engine for video data. It sorts through hours of footage with ease, to quickly locate a specific person or vehicle of interest across an entire site. Avigilon Appearance Search technology can dramatically improve incident response time and enhance forensic investigations by allowing operators to build robust video evidence and create a powerful narrative of events.

Connect with Avigilon
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Avigilon 'Appearance Search' transforms video surveillance Source: Avigilon Corporation Jun 29, 2016

VANCOUVER, CANADA, June 10, 2016 /CNW/ - Avigilon Corporation ("Avigilon") (TSX: AVO), provider of trusted security solutions, today announced it will preview the new Avigilon Appearance Search video analytics technology ("Avigilon Appearance Search") at IFSEC International 2016 ("IFSEC"), ExCel Centre stand G950, in London, United Kingdom. In concert with today's announcement, Avigilon has filed the first in a series of international patent applications covering Avigilon Appearance Search.
"Avigilon Appearance Search is a sophisticated search engine for video data," said Dr. Mahesh Saptharishi, Avigilon'sChief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President. "It empowers security personnel to quickly answer the critical questions – who, what, where and when – with decisive action."
Avigilon Appearance Search, Avigilon's newest video analytics technology, automatically analyzes video data from multiple sources to quickly locate persons, vehicles and objects of interest. Avigilon Appearance Search has been designed forAvigilon's complete line of video analytics solutions, and for existing customers to upgrade certain legacy products to benefit from this exciting new technology.
For more information on product availability, please contact http://avigilon.com/contact-sales.
Source: http://www.securityinfowatch.com/press_release/12226942/avigilon-appearance-search-transforms-video-surveillance

Published on Jun 30, 2016

Thank you for joining Avigilon at IFSEC International 2016. This year we featured Avigilon Appearance Search Technology and our revolutionary H4 Edge Solution Camera line. We also featured our latest video and access control solutions including the HD Pro and H4 Camera lines, HD NVR premium, our ACC ES HD recorder and the latest version of our Access Control Manager system.

Watch the show recap >> https://youtu.be/nvvXKqYoLf4