What Cities Just Put Online Screensaver
The What Cities Just Put Online screensaver shows datasets appearing across every Socrata portal at once, key-less from the discovery API. Socrata runs the data portals for a large number of American cities, states and agencies, and this one endpoint searches all of them together — permit logs, response times, salaries, and routinely the freedom-of-information requests themselves. It's free, runs in your browser, and ESC exits.
Live preview
Press ESC to leave fullscreen. Settings are saved in your browser only.
How the What Cities Just Put Online screensaver works
The saver reads the source described above and draws it on a canvas — no account, no tracking.
Datasets appearing across every Socrata portal at once, key-less from the discovery API. Socrata runs the data portals for a large number of American cities, states and agencies, and this one endpoint searches all of them together — permit logs, response times, salaries, and routinely the freedom-of-information requests themselves.
It refreshes on a schedule, so what you see stays current.
Colours can be changed in settings; nothing is stored beyond your own browser.
What Socrata portals are
Socrata is a software platform, acquired by Tyler Technologies in 2018, that provides an open data platform for government agencies. Cities, counties, states and agencies run their own portals on it, publishing material such as permits, incident reports, service requests and budgets. A shared discovery API lets one search cover datasets across all these portals.
A dataset in this context is a published table with a name, a description, the organisation that owns it and update timestamps. The feed here surfaces datasets appearing recently, so you see a snapshot of what public bodies are making available rather than a ranking of quality or popularity. Titles can be technical, or cryptic, because they are written by the agencies that publish them.
Recency is a weak signal. A newly listed dataset may be a brand-new release, a re-upload of an old file or a minor administrative copy, and some portals update records on a regular schedule without creating new entries. Whether the data is complete or accurate is up to the publisher, and each dataset's own page documents its columns and limitations.
A worked example
Datasets appearing across every Socrata portal at once, key-less from the discovery API. Socrata runs the data portals for a large number of American cities, states and agencies, and this one endpoint searches all of them together — permit logs, response times, salaries, and routinely the freedom-of-information requests themselves.
Settings & tips
- Accent and Background recolour the display.
- Every value on screen comes from the live source — nothing is simulated.
- Press ESC to leave fullscreen.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this real data?
- Yes — it comes from the source named on this page and is refreshed on a schedule.
- Is a key needed?
- No. This source is fully key-less.
- Is it free?
- Yes, and it runs entirely in your browser.
- Does a new listing mean new data?
- Not always. It can be a fresh release, a re-published older file or a copy created for administrative reasons.
- Who publishes these datasets?
- Individual governments and agencies, including cities, counties, states and public bodies, each running their own portal.
- Is the data checked for accuracy?
- Accuracy and completeness are the responsibility of the publishing agency, and the dataset's documentation describes its limits.