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.
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With those needs in mind, we developed simple publishing workflow, a central Dashboard showing what's outdated or soon to be outdated, and an opt-out email reminder system that sends weekly updates of what you need to pay attention to in the next 30 days to keep your inventory current.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.
To support the launch and adoption of the new portal, we created an extensive documentation page, with images and screencasts of different parts of the portal. We'll also hold one or more training webinars in 2021 to make sure all agencies are on board and able to updated their inventories by May 2021.
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.
Results: An easy-to-use online inventory system for use by more than 100 agencies in the nation's most populous county.
Focus: Government Agencies,
Recreation,
Social Justice/Equity
Services: Interactive Solutions, GIS Services, Data, Applications Development, Web Mapping, Website Design, Design Research
Project Years: 2019-2020
