Building the data server

Imagine for a moment that you are working for the public works department of a major city. Throughout the day, citizens use their phones and computers to report problems via the 311 service (https://www.open311.org). You’ve been tasked with accessing the 311 data, building dashboards, and presenting them to various stakeholders within the city government. They will want to see how many of the various types of calls are made to the system, as well as how they are distributed across the city in various council districts.

Before we can build our dashboards, we’ll need to get some data. Luckily, many major cities make anonymized 311 data publicly accessible in many popular data formats, including JSON and CSV. For this exercise, we’ll be working with 311 data from the city of San Francisco. This data is available via their extensive data portal at https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Current-FY-Cases/iy63-pi3t.

To get started with...