a public place for data portal issue tracking

[haileypate]

Concise description: As the City of Austin's Open Data Initiative gains momentum, the list of issues to address is growing. New projects and teams are taking shape and use digital tools to collaborate. How might we leverage these tools to publish the status of data portal issues/tasks/projects in a public place? And in real time?

Link (more details/brain dump/alpha) I don't believe in trying to force everyone to use the same collaboration tool... especially now that they all have decent APIs and the world has things like zapier. People document and share things better with the tools they know best.

I've used Asana for years, and now that I'm in my sixth week of working for the City of Austin, I'm starting curate a decently organized set of data about what I've done/doing/need to do. And I'm starting to use Asana more to collaborate more with other City depts and teams. It's all exportable via JSON, most is exportable to CSV, and the publishing API is pretty darn fantastic. But to public users, this content is not easily accessible or interactive.

What if we started pushing some of this content to GitHub issues? One place to start might be the asana project I use for tracking our tickets to Socrata:

There are a lot of options for integrating Asana and GitHub. One idea might be for me to create a "toGitHub" asana user and add it as a member to asana projects we want to published to the City's GitHub repos. Or tag them in a special way. Or whatever. Asana's awesome API docs can be found here.

Who will use/benefit from this project? Definitely City staff (like me) who want to keep the public "in the loop" on data portal projects/issues but never seem to have enough time to share the whole story. Hopefully civic hackers will benefit from having more timely information about what's up with the portal, what the successes/blockers are, etc. That way, folks can either chip in and help, offer feedback, or manage expectations. The City will benefit because the portal will get better faster as a result of our objective, transparent, smarter collaboration efforts.

Project Needs (dev/design/resources) People: Schemers, dreamers, iterative thinkers Next to do items:

1. Which of the current data portal projects would we want to start with? (i.e. issues reported to Socrata, public inquiry tracking, portal documentation needs assessment, etc)
2. What are the minimum UX features that should be included in the first iteration?
3. Explore how the asana project tasks items would map github issues

Status (in progress, pie-in-the-sky) Planning

[luqmaan]

To summarize

• You have a list on Asana where you keep track of issues you've reported to Socrata.
• You want that list of tasks/issues to be public.
• One solution is to setup a integration to forward the data from Asana to GitHub.

Am I understanding this correctly?

Have you considered setting up a repo and using the GitHub issues instead of Asana?

[decibel]

There's a plethora of issue tracking solutions out there; you're not limited to github.

[haileypate]

@luqmaan wow, I totally missed your message on this thread! Thanks for that follow up in September =) Yeah, we're going to try github for now while we get a better handle on our requirements. Thanks all =)

[luqmaan]

:tada:

[amaliebarras]

@haileypate can you post a link to this public issue tracker in the README? ❤️

[werdnanoslen]

Messaged @haileypate on Slack

[haileypate]

thanks for pinging me.. I don't know if there is currently a public issue tracker, so i'm not sure where to link to. i'm no longer working directly with the data portal on behalf of the city

[werdnanoslen]

do you know who a new contact might be that could respond to someone else that might take the lead on this project?

[mscarey]

Dataset suggestions are now public.