Greeninfo Network An Inventory of Parks for Los Angeles County

Los Angeles Regional Park and Open Space District

GreenInfo team: Amanda Kochanek, Dan Rademacher, Gregor Allensworth, Tim Sinnott

Project years: 2019-2020

An Inventory of Parks for Los Angeles County 1 — LA Parks Portal

An Inventory of Parks for Los Angeles County 2 — Example of a park within the LA Parks Portal

Overview

What challenges is this project trying to solve?

With the passing of the 2016 Measure A (Safe, Clean Neighborhood Parks and Benches Measure) came a greater need to organize and inventory the various parks across in LA County.

What were the client’s objectives?

To create a system by which agencies and staff can manage and monitor parks and amenity to assist with their work.
To assist in the data management and organization end of staffs' work in an accessible manner.

Results

The creation of LAParksPortal, an easy-to-use online inventory system for use by more than 100 agencies in the nation's most populous county.

The Work

Background

Several years ago, GreenInfo helped with several one-time inventories of every park and park amenity in Los Angeles County. That work, done with PlaceWorks and the county, helped support the successful passage of 2016’s Measure A, the largest municipal park funding measure in U.S. history. Measure A was successful in part because it presented a data-driven picture of park need across the county, ensuring that funds went to those communities most in need. The Park Need Analysis that formed the foundation of Measure A also informed the measure’s requirement for an ongoing annual inventory of parks, amenities, and their condition. For that ongoing use, the county needed a more robust, easier-to-use full online system for the staff of local park agencies to keep their data current. We developed LAParksPortal.org to be that system.

Process

We began the project with extensive design research, interviewing staff at a range of small, medium, and large agencies to understand how they manage their park and amenity data now, and how the new portal can help them do their work more easily. Some of the key messages we heard: Help me see what is most important to me. Send me reminders of what I need to be doing to stay current in this system. And help me manage data in draft form, and review internally, before I submit it to RPOSD and publish it to the world.

With those needs in mind, we developed simple publishing workflow, a central Dashboard showing what’s outdated or soon to be outdated, and an opt-out email reminder system that sends weekly updates of what you need to pay attention to in the next 30 days to keep your inventory current. We also created a public-facing landing page map, which shows all the most recently published data, and allows anyone to see the range of parks, amenities, and inventory currency at a glance.

Along with the launch and adoption of the new portal, we created an extensive documentation page, with images and screencasts of different parts of the portal.

The application is built on the Django application framework, with a fully open source stack. The parks data is tied back to the California Protected Areas Database, which we manage, so that park edits in the inventory can help improve parks data for all users of CPAD.