Example uses
Four ways people use Open Data ATL. These are illustrative stories from our review personas — they are not interviews with real residents. Every feature mentioned works on the site today.
A city data official checks the numbers
A City of Atlanta data officer hears the site claim a publisher count. She opens the publishers page and sees the problem explained in public: the portals spell one office several ways, including typos, and the page lists the grouped publishers with every spelling linked to its records. She checks the APD crime layer next — its record count, its quality flags for impossible dates, and the flagged locations. Each flag links to the exact upstream query, so she can confirm the count herself.
A council staffer prepares for a meeting
An NPU staff member needs crime figures for a public meeting. He searches “crime,” opens the Atlanta Police incidents dataset, and reads that rows are offense records — one incident can have several offenses — and that counts alone do not measure neighborhood safety. He opens his NPU's profile page and gets the 30-day figure by offense type, a six-month trend, nearby parks and transit stops, and tract-level rent burden, each with a source link and a retrieval date.
A community organizer arms a campaign
An organizer wants rent-burden evidence for her neighborhood. The neighborhood page shows the share of renter households in the center tract paying 30% or more of income on rent — and says plainly that one tract is not the whole neighborhood and that the figures carry no margin of error. The chart data table gives her the same numbers as text she can paste into a flyer, with the source and date attached.
A resident asks a plain question
A resident with no data skills opens the home page on her phone. She types a question into one search box instead of learning what a dataset is. Ask answers “What is near 55 Trinity Ave SW?” in plain sentences — neighborhood, NPU, council district, nearby MARTA stations and parks, and rent context — with sources she can tap. When she asks when the bus comes, the site says honestly that it does not have live arrivals.
These stories come from our November 2026 persona review, which also produced a ranked list of the changes the site needs most. The review is in the project repository.