A Possible Approach to Crowdsourcing and

Displaying TIF Info Over the Web

Using some tools stitched together

Daniel X. O’Neil, June 1, 2009OpenGovChicago(-land) Meeting

Background• The idea of crowdsourcing TIF data came

up from the audience at the Hideout during a TIF panel

• It makes a ton of sense

• There is a Sunshine TIF ordinance, which may or may not make this easier or change the workflow

• But that won’t change the desire to understand and share

My example: the Archer-Western TIF

•It’s new (January 2009)

•I happened to research it when doing some other stuff

•The idea is that everyone can take a pet TIF and run with it

Tools• Versionista for monitoring Web pages

• Google News alerts to make sure we catch everything published

• Google Spreadsheets for collecting and displaying data

• Slideshare for publishing and storing documents

• WordPress for publishing the information and maintaining consistency across Web sites

More about WordPress

• Very powerful publishing platform

• Themes allow for distributing styles, look & feel, and some functionality

• But very few (any?) people use it to distribute site content structures across the Web

• Categories, content types, link lists, instructions on gathering content-- all of this can be included in a theme

• As we all learn more about types of data, we can share info in new versions of the theme

More about Slideshare

• Creates an embeddable file

• Great for SEO (in order to spread the amount and quality of information about a TIF

• Creates an OCR text version of the file

• Creates an RSS feed

• More distribution of canonical documents is good

More about Google Spreadsheets

• Creates an embeddable file

• Allows for lots of people to contribute

• Creates a sharable template for collecting info

• Provides some guidance to the City as to what’s important in collecting

Some Thoughts/Next Steps

• My instinct is to hope that these sites are flat (pure reporting/ repository of information)

• And let analysis happen in other places

• I guess we should decide if we’re buying into this platform

• Still have to talk about workflow for handling new documents