By Joseph A. Curtatone

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

At Somerville’s new Data Farm, you don’t need overalls. You don’t even need to leave your home to visit it. You just need a curious mind and a passion for your city. The Data Farm is online at www.somervillema.gov/datafarm, and on it you’ll find much of the city data we collect and analyze as we make decisions. From crime and crash data to pothole reports and building permits, the numbers we look at daily—and that I rely on daily—are there for you to explore too. I encourage you to take a look. We’ve set it up so you can stay there for just a few minutes or for hours.

If you’re pressed for time, or prefer to wade instead of dive, check out our Daily Dashboard. The first thing you’ll see is the temperature on the roof of Somerville High School, which I find appropriate because the Daily Dashboard essentially takes Somerville’s figurative temperature on any given day. On July 4, for example, the Police Department saw an uptick in noise calls (I think we can all guess why). We also noticed that people went to our website seeking information on trash pickups for the rest of the week. The dashboard is updated automatically every morning, so at City Hall we have a window on what concerns you – tree trims, street lights, sidewalks, rodents — and how we can respond to it.

You can also explore our Visual Budget. I’m well aware that not everyone considers our 251-page city budget book an exciting summer read, so the interactive visual budget makes it more fun to see where your tax dollars are going. You can, for example, see where your tax dollars have been going – to the dollar if you punch in your property tax bill – since 2011.

One thing I love about the Data Farm is that most of it is open source. This means that the data —and the code for much of the website itself—is meant to be shared. Anyone can harvest the data, analyze it, and draw their own conclusions or present it in a newer, perhaps more innovative way. Other cities are welcome to take our code for a short-cut to creating their own data sharing site.

My staff built the site in-house (integrating a few outside tools like the visual budget that we borrowed from Arlington and the 311 Explorer developed by the data innovation company Socrata). They got a little creative when making it. The splash page greets you with the image of an ear of corn—with kernels made of binary code. You’re encouraged to “dig” into the jokingly described “artisanal” and “locally sourced” data. But behind this light-hearted language is a serious message: The City of Somerville remains steadfast in maintaining transparency in government—and real-time data sharing is fundamental to that goal.

Much of our data is presented in the form of dashboards. “Dashboards” were originally devices meant to block things like mud and rocks from entering the front of a carriage and eventually cars, but they evolved into the control panels you now see in modern cars and, more recently, on computers. On our data dashboards, you can take control of your access to information on what makes Somerville a great place to work, play, and live, and we’ve got plenty of data for you to play with: demographics, maps of where liquor licenses are located, and our playing fields.

I have never been bashful about my commitment to data and open government. I firmly believe that you can’t manage a city without having quality, up-to-date data at your fingertips. But data is only part of the equation for how we can provide efficient, effective city government: another critical part is community engagement. We govern better when we make decisions with you.

So I hope you’ll explore our data farm and join us in making data-based policy. Think through what you see on the site, let us know what you see in the data, and let us know what datasets you’d like us to add. Just call 311 and we’ll start tracking your data requests and comments—or connect you to staff to discuss your ideas more in depth. Forgive me for the cheesy metaphor, but it fits: ideally we will work together to till the soils and gather the harvest of our data farm.