How To Help

As an all-volunteer effort currently, we need your help! We welcome your ideas for more data to present, as well as your help in gathering data and creating simple visualizations about it. Please review About This Site for how we operate.

Suggest New Datasets

We’re always interested in data. If you have ideas about other useful datasets that would be interesting to Arlington residents, please let us know! The most important thing is finding the data - so sending along a link to existing data, in any format, is the first step. It helps to briefly explain why a dataset is interesting or may be valuable to residents or to the town government.

Remember, we’re volunteers, so we won’t be able to find or do the work to publish every suggestion. But we are interested in helping publish data that many people are asking for, so showing how it’s relevant to our town and current conversations really helps focus our work.

Suggest a new dataset - and please include a link or starting point to find the data, and why it’s important.

Build Visualizations On This Data

The value in open data is that other people can build on our work. We aim to provide data in an easy to find and consume format, and look forward to what kinds of visualizations or stories you can tell about that data. Our work is licensed Apache-2.0, meaning that you can freely repurpose our work for almost anything you can think of!

Most of our data is provided as CSV files, which can easily be opened in your favorite spreadsheet, or can be accessed via data tools like Tableau, Google Data Studio, Canva, or many other tools.

All of our data includes links to the source it was drawn from in corresponding .json files that use DCAT-US Schema v1.1 standard for metadata. As the site grows, we will expand our data catalogs to include both data we publish (when it’s not in a consumable format at it’s source) as well as pointers to government or standards-compatible formats elsewhere.

Help Improve The Site

We’re always looking for volunteers to help build and maintain the site. If you’re experienced with GitHub Pages/Jekyll, open data standards, or open source data visualizers, please let us know if you can help.

In particular, help in updating any changed datasets from the town over time is appreciated.