San Antonio has undergone remarkable changes in the past 50 years. In terms of population, the city population has grown from 654,153 (Rank 15 – US) in 1970 to 1,532,233 in 2019 (Rank 7 – US; Rank 2 – Texas).
This population growth has led to an increase in events, infrastructure, maintenance activities, and data. The day-to-day operations of a large and growing city like San Antonio generate incredible amounts of data on education, economics, transportation, housing, health, crime and much more. This gathered data becomes an essential resource to city leaders assessing the varying needs of their communities.
Staying on top of the needs of a large metropolis demands data vigilance – discipline to watch important indicators and the tools to make them easy to read and easy to reach. Our city has taken large steps toward being informed and transparent with the open data initiative. They have made the data that they are using to monitor important aspects of our city available to all of us through modern web interfaces. E.g., the service calls that are being placed every day are now available for viewing online. The charts above display summaries of that data for all of the San Antonio Council Districts. The charts are interactive (reading left to right) providing more detailed information about the types of 311 calls in the middle and right-hand charts. There are two ways to initiate the interaction: 1) Click on one of the columns from the “City of San Antonio District Overview” chart, or 2) Select the “Council District” text box in the Query Parameter Prompter and pick one or more of the Council Districts from the drop down menu. By selecting a data point in the middle chart, “City of San Antonio Service Calls”, the “City of San Antonio Service Call Breakdown by District” chart will respond providing data for the selected day.
Special thanks to Benjamin Koch, Frank Dixon, Jr, Michael Gotcher, Roderick L. Barnes, Sr., and Mike Smith for making this blog post and dashboard happen!
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| Roderick Barnes has worked for federal and private industry crafting business intelligence solutions since 1993. Over the past 20 years he has served at BIF implementing web apps with integrated BI. |
Mike Smith has over 35 years of helping to plan and deploy solutions for both federal and private enterprises. He works with BIF to help our development teams leverage agile to deliver solutions. |
