Infoshare – A Community Data Service

[lrodberg]

About the group

Infoshare, also referred to as the Infoshare Community Data Service (www.Infoshare.org or www.infoshare.nyc ), is a non-profit organization designed to bring together, in one easy-to-use system, dozens of local, state, and federal data bases describing the population, socio-economic, and health conditions in a local neighborhood. The website is free to be used, students and other individuals may use the website.

The key features of Infoshare are:

• Provides a comprehensive set of data indicators
• Presents data for small local areas as well as familiar larger areas
• Easy to use by students and citizen advocates, as well as researchers

Since the early 1990s, Infoshare has provided data to universities, medical schools, public health schools, government agencies, hospitals, health centers, community organizations, and others for educational, planning, advocacy, and fundraising purposes.

Infoshare provides data for a wide variety of geographic areas, allowing users to profile individual neighborhoods and compare selected features of local areas. Infoshare’s output is in the form of Excel spreadsheets and printed tables.

Currently, Infoshare is focused on New York City and, to a lesser extent, New York State, but it is open-ended and can be utilized for any geographic area with any geographically-identified data.
Infoshare was first developed in the early 1990s as a DOS-based, Foxpro database system. Between 1998 and 2001 it was transferred to the internet, and it has not been substantially modified since then. Its data is stored in SQL Server databases. Its interface is based on Microsoft’s .Net and Active Server Pages. (see graphic below)

Group leader/s

Len Rodberg – len@infoshare.org

Who we're looking for

• Interface designers
• UX / UI designers
• Data Visualization

Tools

Describe the tools that you are using.

• It makes use of a Windows server at the moment
• Technology is using .NET and javascript
• SQL Server backend

My focus is the front end, and would love to have folks to help out in designing and creating a modernized interface and create a mobile-friendly frontend.

Relevant Links / Information

Data source is mostly government agencies, census bureau, city planning, city government.

I want to resume getting data from HRA

This is the current architecture:

Where we meet

Working space areas.

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If you're an organization and you have an idea for a project, think about these questions before coming to the community:

What kind of technical project is this? (A website? An app? A mobile service? A campaign?)

Software Development, focused on improving the frontend of a current legacy website.

I am open to discussing remaking the website from the .NET framework to a more commonly used application.

What stage is the project at? (Ideation, implementation, or beta?)

It's already out, but is under a legacy system. Right now, we wish to modernize it and at the moment, we need to do the following things:

Step 1. Its interface should be modernized.
Step 2. It should be accessible as an app through mobile devices.
Step 3. Mapping should be added (it can produce maps if Maptitude is available)
Step 4. It should produce graphs of the data.
Step 5. Additional datasets should be added
Step 6. More geographic areas (e.g., New Jersey, Connecticut) should be added.

What is the problem you are trying to solve, and why is it a problem?

Modernization and extension of capabilities – like data visualization and mobile-responsviveness.

This is a free service and provides a digitized version of the data from various health agencies, so any help in making the site easier to use by students and other stakeholders is greatly appreciated.

Do you know of any similar solutions? And what was lacking in the solution?

PolicyMap provides a similar solution but with thousands of dollars of annual fees. It is not focused on any specific areas, while infoshare focuses on New York State at present.

[maribelortegac]

I'm in!!