Austin Code COVID-19 Complaint Cases - Data Clean Up

[twentysixmoons]

What problem are you trying to solve?

TLDR; Cleaning up COVID-19 311 complaint data to uncover and understand business compliance trends. We want to create a shared community understanding that can further guide action.

The City of Austin has released open data about COVID-19 complaints. However this set is missing some key data fields such as:

• Type of business subcategory for the current "other" category
• Business Name
• Where the sources of the business name came from (either the address or the complaint notes or NA)

We are working to backfill about 5,000 rows of data AND request that 311 begin to regularly begin to document this data in their complaints about places of businesses moving forward.

Our intention is to get a shared community understanding of what major businesses across the region are responding to guide further recommendations for policy and immediate actions.

Who will benefit (directly and indirectly) from your project?

The Community Resilience Trust(CRT), City, Community.

CRT is a community group that has been meeting every weekday since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in Austin. The group has organizations and individuals that span across the community with a shared goal of creating equity in Austin and starting with the current pandemic.

So far the group has influenced the policy and position of various organizations and individuals and supported initiatives across the community. Projects from CRT aim to advocate for the best interests of the global majority in Travis County.

What other resources/tools are currently serving the same need? How does your project set itself apart?

The city of Austin's database is currently partially serving the need but does not include the desired rows. It's currently incomplete and there is some nuance on the release of new data collected and how it might affect small business.

Where can we find any research/data available/articles?

• Current city of Austin's database
• There is a presentation that can be shared with those interested in working on the project - Need to see if this is openly shareable
• We have already started the updated dataset but because of our intention to ensure we protect small businesses before releasing the data we are only sharing it with those that are helping hands.
• CRT Facebook
• CRT past email issues w/notes from daily calls
• Old CRT overview

What help do you need now?

We need some helping hands to get 5,000 rows of data updated.

What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?

Research. We need people to help clean the sets up first so we can then move to analyzing and creating a presentation of the data with something like Tableau.

How can we contact you outside of Github(list social media or places you're present)?

[email protected]
[email protected]
Open Austin Slack & Twitter - @VictoriaODell

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[twentysixmoons]

I'm submitting this on behalf of Janis Bookout and the Community Resilience Trust. I think I've captured everything we discussed but she can help flesh things out as needed. I just want to get the ball rolling 🧶

[twentysixmoons]

Just made a channel for this project! #project-crt-data on Slack

[twentysixmoons]

Project updates and chatter happening in #p-crt-data on Slack. @luqmaan has helped to add address data for businesses.

2 Data parties have happened independently and two additional folks have expressed interest in helping via Open Austin.

Here is a visualization shared in Slack done by a community member independently.
https://public.tableau.com/profile/amy.r.wu#!/vizhome/Ironviz_15960326515960/COVID-19ComplaintsinAustin

[twentysixmoons]

Update! We got a little funding to help get all the data actually cleaned up since that was where we were having trouble finding volunteers.

Details below

Seeking some folks for paid and volunteer work to join the CRT 3-1-1 COVID-19 Data Insights team! Our team training will be on November 11th from 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm.

🔗 Here's a quick link to the form to apply:
https://forms.gle/vwugR2Nn2FJHxMWc9

🔗 Here's a quick link to the blog post with additional details:
https://victoria-odell.medium.com/join-the-3-1-1-covid-19-data-insights-team-a2a2c7e03f01

Drop any questions you might have below