About This Site

Welcome to ArlingtonMA.info, an independent data portal surfacing publicly available data about the town of Arlington, MA and comparable or nearby towns for comparison.

What This Website Is About

  • Providing a responsible, easy to consume, and standards-based open data portal
  • Including reputable and canonical source links for all data presented
  • Providing data sets that are simple to download and consume
  • Including visualizations where useful
  • Focused on Arlington, MA town government and directly related municipalities, groups, or issues

This Website Is Not About

  • Politics
  • Advocacy work, other than providing open data, open meeting law work, or related government transparency issues
  • Hearsay, unofficial data, or any data that can’t be directly and publicly sourced to an appropriate government or other organization
  • Any SPI or PII data, or any data focused about specific individuals

While project contributors will exercise choice in which data sets they work to publish here, this site is not about politics or advocacy. The goal here is to provide the data in easy to consume ways for everyone. We expect many different groups or parts of town government may start to use this data.

Future Plans

This website is not affiliated with town government in Arlington, MA, and is run by volunteers. We are collaborating with the town to obtain relevant data sets and increase the accessibility of information about local government to facilitate greater citizen engagement. Our long-term hope is that the town will capitalize on this work to build an official open data portal for the future, similar to Cambridge or Somerville.

All data is drawn from reliable government or other sources. We provide similarly-named .json files with dcat:Dataset metadata for every source, allowing integration with other data portals or visualization tools. Our dataset catalogs may include either data we publish (by copying/normalizing from another source), or will be pointers to data elsewhere.

See our Project Roadmap Wiki for more technical details about our architecture.

Please Contact Us with suggestions or improvements for the website!