Design study · Open data portal · California
Data made public, stories made clear
An open data portal concept built on the observation that publishing a dataset and communicating what it means are two different jobs, and most portals only do the first.
Concept only. Not an official City of San José open data portal.
- Open data portal
- Dataset catalog
- Narrative briefs
- AI-assisted lookup
- English and Spanish
San Jose Open Data Workbench — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
Open data portals are built for the small population who can already use a CSV. Everyone else — residents, reporters, community groups, council staff — arrives with a question, finds a catalog of table names, and leaves. The transparency obligation is met and the transparency goal is not, because a dataset nobody can interpret is not meaningfully public.
The approach
The catalog and the explanation ship together. Datasets stay fully searchable and downloadable for the people who want the raw table, and narrative briefs sit alongside them to say what a dataset shows and why it matters — which is what turns a portal from a compliance artifact into something a resident can actually use. AI-assisted lookup lets someone ask in plain language rather than knowing which table holds the answer. Both surfaces run in English and Spanish, since a bilingual city publishing transparency data in one language is publishing it to some of its residents only.
The result
A 219-page portal with a searchable dataset catalog, narrative briefs, and assisted lookup, in English and Spanish.
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