GreenInfo Network

CaliParks.org is a resource for anyone trying to find parks in California - particularly those who may not be frequent park goers and who rely heavily on a smartphone for their information. Not only is the application mobile-friendly (using responsive web technology), but it pulls photos from social media sites that are taken in individual parks and then shows users exactly where they were taken, to provide a clearer view of "what goes on here? who are people who use this park?".

GreenInfo provided its CPAD parks data for the original CaliParks application and was asked to update that data, but also to provide much more detailed information about the activities in each of the larger and the more-popular-on-social-media parks. This latter work involved researching 800 individual parks and ticking off whether each park had any of a list of 15 recreational activities (fishing, swimming, hiking, etc.).

In addition, GreenInfo contributed its urban recreational activities data set, which shows the physical locations of 8 types of recreation (ball fields, covered picnic tables, playgrounds, etc.) in all urban parks in the state - 13,000 separate point locations that were associated with all CPAD parks as attributes.

Combined with Stamen Design's handsome redesign of the application's interface, this new data provides a rich resource for those looking to find park and recreation opportunities.

In addition to the data work, GreenInfo and Stamen also collaborated on a system for ensuring that future data updates from CPAD remain connected to the CaliParks database of social media photos and other links.  This involved reworking of an element in CPAD to provide a persistent universal ID number, created out some complex programming.