code4sac / event-2014-codeacross

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Sacramento Homeless Services Dashboard

A project to provide an interactive dashboard with data from Sacramento County's Homeless Management Information System

• Dashboard live at https://hmis-dashboard.herokuapp.com/
• Source database API: https://hmis-dashboard.herokuapp.com/api/source
• Data source here.

Readme contents:

• Context
• Tools Used
• Assumptions Used to Produce Charts
• Execution Instructions
  
  

Context

This dashboard was developed to help the community visualize the volume of homeless-related services, how many people find permanent housing through these programs, and the demographics of those who use the services. The data comes from Sacramento's Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), which is used by local homeless service providers within Sacramento County to coordinate care, manage their operations, and better serve those in need of homeless services (referred to in this dashboard as clients). As of early 2020, the most recent public data is through August 2019. The dashboard includes interactive charts that allows users to explore homeless services program volumes, outcomes, and participant demographics by year and program type. An explanation of assumptions made for chart plotting is included at the bottom of this readme.

Tools Used

• Initial ETL, exploration, and database build was via a Python Jupyter Notebook.
• Python app now used to clean and load data into database.
• Python modules used include SQLAlchemy, Numpy, and Pandas.
• Development and production database is PostgreSQL.
• A flask API serves the data from the database.
• Web page design uses HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, including Highcarts library.
• Web page hosted on Heroku app.

Assumptions Used for Producing Charts

Data included for those receiving homeless services from January 1, 2015 through August 31, 2019

• While there is some data in the dataset after August 2019, it appears to be incomplete and is not included.

Volume/Program Participation

• Total distinct clients and total program enrollments differ because of clients enrolling in multiple programs during a given time period. Distinct clients are meant to represent how many individuals receive services per year, and total program enrollment is meant to capture the overall load on the homeless services system. Total clients/ enrollments count clients who enrolled a program either during or before the given year and exited any time during or after the given year. For example, both a client who enrolled on January 1st, 2016 and exited in February 1st, 2016, and a client who enrolled in July 1st, 2015 and exited July 1st, 2017 would be counted in "Total Clients/Enrollments" for 2016; however, the latter client would be counted as active in 2015, 2016 and 2017.
• New clients/enrollments and clients/enrollments ended are straightforward counts of activity within the time period.

Outcomes/Program enrollees with permanent housing upon program exit

• For those who exited a program in the period, percent is calculated as the number of clients who exited to permanent housing divided by the total number of exits. Permanent housing is defined as Category 1 as defined in “Variables included in County Data” spreadsheet’s “Exit Destination” worksheet, and includes rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing.
• Clients are only counted once. If a client happens to have an exit to permanent housing and an exit in the same period to something other than permanent housing, they are counted as an exit to permanent housing.

Outcomes/Average time to permanent housing

• Time is calculated for those who started from street outreach, transitional housing, or day/emergency shelter and exited to permanent housing Category 1 (rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing).

Demographics

• Unknown categories are grouped together. For example, in Race chart, unknown includes categories ‘Client Refused', 'Data Not Collected', 'Client doesn't Know', and ‘NULL’.
• Counts show the total number of distinct clients per year, using the same method as described in Volume/ Program Participation above.

Execution Instructions for Local Development

1. Create a local PostgreSQL database named "sac_hmis_db".
2. Create a local .env file with your PostgreSQL username and password. See sample-env.txt file for format.
3. Use a terminal to navigate to the main folder and run set-up.py.
4. Run app.py.
5. Open your browser and go to the url http://localhost:5000/.

Project Leads

Graham Penrose & Scott Clark

event-2014-codeacross's Issues

day of - need volunteer to scribe in the afternoon

during the last half-hour or so at activity stand-ups

need cool name tags

Anyone want to make a template that we can use to generate cool name tags for attendees? Maybe a special name tag style for Code4Sac volunteers who are available for general questions/help/info etc?

Also need someone to coordinate printing of the name tags. I have tons of sharpies to go next to them.

need help making links to activity pages that work

it would be great to have one place for gathering/listing information about each activity. currently, the google docs on codeacrosssac.org are in place to help with that, but is that ideal?

there's just one landing page at codeacrosssac.org because i couldn't make workable links to other pages. if we generate enough content in the "Activity -" google docs like this one https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vMqu1IDxz322yWia5RHlrItBR7Qil2jL_yNdbBe8Oaw/edit
then could someone create a new page for us? there are page links commented out in the header of the index page, if someone wants to fix and use those...

Create google docs for data viz, infographics, big idea list

day of - set up volunteers needed

Anyone wanna join us at 0900 on Saturday to help get ready for the day?

We'll have coffee and treats :D

Shawn Harrison

Shawn is the owner of Soil Born Farms, and one of the advocates for the edible city concept. I thought it would be interesting to have him speak for a few minutes at the CodeAcross event, in regards to the project I am working on. Any thoughts? Here is a link to one of his TedX Sacramento talks..

http://youtu.be/CS1tT5_lunY

day of - need someone to own posting hashtags/wifi codes/links etc.

need volunteers for welcome station at event

From Laura - would anyone like to volunteer to help with signing up people who come & welcoming them & sharing the swag?

day of - ending with a call for action

How can we facilitate this at the end of our event here in Sac?

From CfA -
"always end event with call to action or next step ( this can be decided by organizers or the audience/ interactive experience)"

cleaned up data needs to be added to github

if you've been working on cleaning up data for CodeAcross, please add it to code4sac's github page.

we could organize them either with one repo per file.... or perhaps we could try multiple files of related data in the same repo. (i.e. if we have two types of parking data from the city... maybe just put one in the same repo.) let us experiment =)

day-of: Lunch at 1230

Thank you Kaleb for volunteering to handle "fancy" pizza for Saturday!

day of - snacks, drinks and supplies... last call?

I'm going to Costco tomorrow to pick up:

bottled water
sodas
breakfast pastries
paper plates
dry-erase markers

we have plenty of:
napkins
black sharpies
swag - CfA stickers, buttons, and other stuff that they're sending us more of

Kaleb's on pizza for lunch... what am I missing?

fix eventbrite button positioning in header

the eventbrite logo drops out of the yellow header ... space.. container.. whatever it is... when the browser window goes from wide to narrow.

why won't the links on the webpage work?

On the blue website for the CodeAcross Sac event, there are two github links in the lower left corner.

When I access the site at this URL code4sac.github.io/event-2014-codeacross/ the links work fine

When I access the site at this URL http://www.codeacrosssac.org the links don't work!

Is this a DNS thing? Any advice?