OpenDataPhilly catalog migrating to JKAN

[Robert Cheetham]

OpenDataPhilly Community,

I'm writing to let folks know that the OpenDataPhilly catalog will be migrating from CKAN to a new framework, JKAN, effective today. This is the type of technical detail that may not be very interesting to many of you, but in case it is, read on.

CKAN is an open source software framework designed for hosting open data portals. After a few years as custom software, Azavea re-launched OpenDataPhilly using CKAN several years ago. A lot of governments and other organizations use CKAN as an enterprise data portal. The community is fairly sizable, and it is actively being developed. However, staying on top of the latest versions, including bug fixes, patches, and upgrades, has proven to be complex and labor intensive. 

As some of you may be aware, Azavea has been maintaining the technology infrastructure for OpenDataPhilly on a pro bono basis, and spending 100-200 hours of software engineer and designer time every couple of years to upgrade the CKAN instance is simply financially unsustainable. In addition, CKAN requires a PostgreSQL database, Python, Django and servers to run all of the various components. We operate all of this using Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Azavea has been paying that hosting bill for more than a dozen years as well. Finally, because this is a database-driven web site with dynamically generated pages, it has more potential to be compromised from a security perspective; we fortunately have not experienced that, but it's a nontrivial risk to be assuming when the City doesn't financially support the effort.

So we've been looking for another solution for the past couple of years. Fortunately, a previous Chief Data Officer, Tim Wisniewski, had started a project a few years ago called JKAN. I won't go into the technical details, but JKAN is designed to have a much simpler technology infrastructure while also having many of the core features of CKAN. Over the past few months, my Azavea (now Element 84) colleagues have been working hard with Tim to develop a new version of JKAN and to migrate all of the data from OpenDataPhilly to the new platform.

This new version of OpenDataPhilly will be simpler, faster, much lower cost to host, and, because it will be a static web site, less risky to operate. In addition, because we're hosting all of the data and application components in a public GitHub repository, if you want to help make improvements, you can log issues and submit your own pull requests. 

And we aren't done. I frankly think we need to improve on the visual design. In addition, I think OpenDataPhilly may be the first open data portal in the world to use JKAN, so I expect there will be some bugs and glitches, and we ask for your patience as we work through them.

I want to thank the folks that have made significant contributions to getting the new OpenDataPhilly off the ground, including:

 * Bryan Quigley

 * Lydia Scarf

 * Claude Schrader

 * Tim Wisniewski

Best,

Robert

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Robert Cheetham

Element 84, Inc.

[Chris Alfano]

Thank you Robert and the Azavea team for all the work you've done over the years to maintain OpenDataPhilly!

This move is a brilliant collaboration and puts OpenDataPhilly in a great position to be even more sustainable and participatory for the next decade, bravo for pulling it together and seeing it through! We owe the whole crew a lot of thanks

[odph...@nym.hush.com]

Bravo!

En paz, 

Steve (and sorry for the misfired email before this one)

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