Envision Cambridge Mobile Engagement Feedback

Envision Cambridge is a community-wide process to develop a comprehensive plan for a more livable, sustainable, and equitable Cambridge. In 2016, Envision Cambridge staff embarked on a listening and visioning campaign to better understand how Cantabrigians view their city and imagine its future.

The Envision Cambridge Street Team collected this data using the project’s Mobile Engagement Station. The Street Team asked participants at various locations across the City and throughout 2016 to mark a large map of Cambridge with their favorite and least favorite places in the city, and where they would like to see future change. Participants marked these locations in green, red, and blue, respectively. Some participants also included comments next to their markings. The Street Team regularly photographed the map. Envision Cambridge staff than translated the markings in those photos into a geospatial dataset using GIS. This dataset shows participant responses that covered specific points. Note that all coordinates listed in this dataset pertain to the topic of discussion rather than the location of the mobile engagement station. For example, the Location column in this dataset might list Fresh Pond as the area in which feedback was collected, but if the feedback pertained to Central Square, then the lat/long coordinates will as well.

Querying over HTTP

Splitgraph serves as an HTTP API that lets you run SQL queries directly on this data to power Web applications. For example:

curl https://data.splitgraph.com/sql/query/ddn \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d@-<<EOF
{"sql": "
    SELECT *
    FROM \"cambridgema-gov/envision-cambridge-mobile-engagement-feedback-sx7w-cut7\".\"envision_cambridge_mobile_engagement_feedback\"
    LIMIT 100 
"}
EOF

See the Splitgraph documentation for more information.