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Map of data points

Data & Analytics

Our Vision, Mission, and Goals

Vision

The City of San Rafael is a data-driven City.

Mission

Empower the City of San Rafael to use data and evidence to improve our operations and the services we provide, ultimately leading to more equitable outcomes and better quality of life and work for San Rafael residents, businesses, and visitors.

Goals and Priorities

1. Inform decisions with data and evidence

2. Strengthen data capacity and culture

3. Establish data governance

4. Increase government transparency

5. Build a foundational and modern data infrastructure

Our Work

What we do:

  • Data governance and management
  • Build data services for residents and staff
  • Solution design and delivery support
  • Data and evidence trainings
  • GIS
  • Software landscape research and evaluation

How we work - City of San Rafael Data Service Standard:

Our team creates data tools and services for staff and residents, such as the Open Data Portal and the Performance Metrics Dashboard. We call these tools Data Services. Data as a service is a method of curating and analyzing multiple data streams in ways that cast new light on problems, enabling solution-seekers in or out of government to gain insight and craft new interventions. Data Service Standards are best practices we use to ensure we provide high-quality, useful, and accessible data services. Our Standards are the following:

  1. Publish with purpose: Ensure the service is needed to make people’s lives better, advance city and community priorities, and create trust, transparency, and better government.
  2. Understand users and their needs: Empathy for all users leads to equitable outcomes. Develop a deep understanding of users and the problem you’re trying to solve for them.
  3. Inspire data users: Encourage evidence-based decision making by those inside and outside the government and build a community of data users.
  4. Make the service consistent and simple to use: Build a service that’s simple, intuitive and comprehensible. And test it with users to make sure it works for them.
  5. Build capacity across City Teams: Build capacity across departments, so multidisciplinary users can create and operate data services in a sustainable way.
  6. Make information accessible by everyone: Provide analytics services that everyone can use. And support other tools that enable everyone, particularly those who are marginalized, to access information driven by data services.
  7. Iterate and improve frequently: Start with a minimum viable product, and iterate over time. Take a lean approach to creating services.
  8. Create a secure service that protects sensitive data: Evaluate what data the service will be collecting, storing and providing. Ensure it is handled legally, ethically and equitably.
  9. Be transparent and accountable: Ensure anyone can access information about how data has been acquired, how it is being processed, and the positive and negative impacts of the service.
  10. Define what success looks like: Work out what success looks like for your service and identify metrics to understand what’s working and what can be improved.
  11. Choose the right tools and technology: Choose tools and technology that create a high quality service in a cost effective way. Minimize the cost of changing direction in future.

Public Data Sets

We have launched an Open Data Portal to expand the city data available to the public and foster a collaborative environment in San Rafael. This project contains several City datasets, including service requests, greenhouse gas emissions, City facilities, and GIS boundaries.

Below are links for exploring some San Rafael related data sets:

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