I am submitting a California Public Records Act, CPRA request for the non law enforcement E911 realtime map data to be published on the County of San Mateo's Socarata Open Data portal.
The County's Open Data portal (web site) is hosted on Socrata, a cloud based Open Data service used by the State of California, the Counties of San Francisco and Alameda.
This request is for the E911 realtime map data to be uploaded to the County of San Mateo's Open Data portal as timely data stream.
This information is currently publicly published by the County of San Mateo on www.firedispatch.com.
This request is to republish only data that the County is already publishing on the Internet. No additional data is requested.
The reason I am submitting a CPRA Public Records request is that there is no clear procedure in the County to evaluate the publishing of realtime or regularly updating County public data to the County's Open Data portal.
Many issues need to be resolved:
The County's CPRA request procedure provides a formal framework to address these questions.
By requesting data already published publicly, the issues about what can be publicly released and associated privacy issues have been resolved.
This allows the county to focus on issues surrounding publishing data as Open Data. Free to be searched, filtered, displayed, downloaded by the citizens of San Mateo County and the general public.
If you are looking for a reason to deny this request, realtime feeds are excluded because they are considered "Rolling requests" for future-generated records.
But denying the request will not resolve the issues surrounding the County publishing Open Data and gets request for new datasets.
California's version is called:
California Public Records Act: GOVT. CODE §§ 6250 - 6276.48
Similar to a Freedom Of Information Act, FOIA.
Important clause: § 6253:
Caveat: realtime feeds are excluded because they are considered "Rolling requests" for future-generated records