For this exercise, I have chosen to map tree planting requests submitted through the City of Berkeley’s 311 open data portal. I am indebted to Geoff Boeing for much of the code I used to process the data and prepare it for mapping, and for designing a very fine basemap (shown below).
My data contain 341 geolocated 311 service requests, dating back to August 26, 2014 (by happenstance, the same day as my own New Graduate Student Orientation). I have chosen to depict open tickets (unanswered tree planting requests) as small blue circles, and closed tickets (tree planting requests that have been answered – hopefully in the affirmative!) as larger green circles, themselves resembling trees.
Clicking on each point will show its street address, its ticket status, and the date the request was submitted. I would like to learn more about why tickets remain open vs. are closed. A cursory inspection suggests that older tickets are more likely to be closed, but this is no surprise. It would also be interesting to know how the 311 tree planting request system is integrated with Berkeley’s mail-based request system.