One of the most important things we do for our customers is to automatically redact sensitive information within county records. This means spotting things like social security numbers and dates of birth, or the names of minors or victims in court records. By redacting the personally identifiable information within these records, counties are able to post them online, giving constituents greater access and freeing office workers’ time.
In a world where access is the norm, those who are inclined to can find interesting information in plain sight. That’s what Government Technology did in an investigation into opens records requests in San Francisco. It’s an impressive data set to work with as the city’s portal currently hosts more than 1,100 active data files.
One of these files examines the access of itself and all of the other files hosted on the site. This unpopular dataset (it’s only been downloaded 104 times as of this blog’s publication) contains 15 columns of data regarding each dataset’s daily performance. This creates a somewhat unwieldy document that currently sports 1.74 million rows, which could be why it’s avoided.
San Francisco certainly has a larger set of data than the average city will, and probably more than most counties as well. This breadth allows those pouring through the data, and subsequently governments looking to publish data, insight into what types of data the public really wants to see. This will allow them to home in on the types of data that will be most impactful for their constituents.
Government Technology looked at both the most viewed and most downloaded files. The most viewed data is a list of the city’s building inspection complaints and other popular lists included registered business locations and 311 cases. It’s understandable that these types of reports would trend more toward views than downloads as many more people would be trying to look up the status of an individual case than would be using the data in aggregate.
The top datasets by download featured a great deal of COVID-19 data with five of the top ten files reporting on things like testing, cases, and hospitalizations. The most accessed file though, is far and away the Municipal Transportation Agency’s Daily publishing of temporary street closures in Work Zone Data Exchange format. The report is published daily, and the format allows the data to be easily integrated into third-party applications like maps to provide users with up-to-date information. Seen in this light, it’s easy to see how this information could be downloaded so frequently.
Now, just because data is popular doesn’t mean that a county has the need or bandwidth to publish the data. Sometimes priorities for open records can be set at levels above local governments and they will have to be in compliance. Just this past month, Missouri’s Supreme Court enacted a rule that will allow wider access to court documents.
City and county officials can use analyses like this one as a start, but will have to consider the characteristics that make both the location and population unique. Some areas might be better served granting access to fish and game information while others are concerned with elections records.
If you’re posting records that may contain personally identifiable information, it’s important to engage in a redaction process to protect your constituents. And if you need help classifying, redacting, or retrieving data from your documents, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.