For those interested in government open source and open data, registration for the 2019 DKAN Open Data Summit is now open.
The three-hour event will be held in tandem with Drupal GovCon on Tuesday, July 23, 1-4 p.m. ET, at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C. The agenda includes an overview of key open data concepts, case study presentations and breakouts.
Registration is free, but you must register for both Drupal GovCon and the DKAN Open Data Summit.
Kin Lane offers insightful commentary on what went wrong with the open data movement, and why it failed to live up to initial exuberance and expectations.
Particularly pointed are his comments on open data portals, which haven’t innovated much on user experience since the first iterations created by private and nonprofit organizations. Kin doesn’t talk about the poor experience of data portals, but I think a substantive part of this failure is open data movement’s inability to capture the imagination and interest of the design community.
“Today, there are plenty of open data portals,” writes Kin. “The growth in the number of portals hasn’t decreased, but I’d say the popularity, utility, and publicity around open data efforts have not lived up to the hype.”
Secondarily, a truly sustainable, open community of open data leaders never materialized. Harvard’s Civic Analytics Network and GovEx are available, but largely inaccessible to the broader community.
Kin’s opinions are a little more anti-entrepreneurial and punk rock than mine, but it’s hard to have experienced the energy of bright technologists at the early stages of the open data movement and — seeing where it stands today — not think it’s all now extremely incremental in realizing its true potential.
Hopefully, those who consider themselves open data leaders will take the time to meditate on Kin’s thoughts and use them to reinvigorate the next iteration of the movement.
Read more: Why the Open Data Movement Has Not Delivered as Expected
Hudson Hollister (Photo: The Data Coalition)
Hudson Hollister is a pioneer and hero of the government open data movement. As he steps down from his role as executive director of the Data Coalition, Hudson reflects on the organization he founded and shares his insights, appreciation and advice to the open data community at large.
First, open data is part of the regular business of the federal government now, in a way that wasn’t true in 2012.
We see this change in the increasing visibility of chief data officers like Mona Siddiqui at U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Kris Rowley at General Services Administration, and Dan Morgan at the Department of Transportation. Five years ago, CDOs, if appointed at all, were in charge of designing application programming interfaces for external stakeholders. Today, CDOs are part of the management team, and their work is more about organizing data for internal use.
Second, federal agencies better understand the need, now, to transform their documents into standardized data to reduce the costs of reporting and analytics. We are seeing bigger, more ambitious data standardization projects at the White House, in grant reporting, and in financial regulation.
Third, the phrase “open data” is not at all trendy any more! All these new roles and projects aren’t always tagged with that phrase. Which is fine by me–it is much better for our government and our society if open data management is just management, period.
I am so proud of passing the DATA Act of 2014, the nation’s first open data law, directing the entire federal executive branch to begin reporting spending information as a single, unified, and public data set. When I started the Coalition in 2012, there was strong support for the DATA Act in Congress, but subtle opposition in the White House. If our Data Coalition members hadn’t supported such a vigorous campaign, the law would never have been enacted in the strong form it was. And I’m proud of the Data Coalition’s work to continue to support the transformation of spending information–which is by no means complete.
The DATA Act was our first beachhead. We have made good progress since then with the Financial Transparency Act (open data for all federal financial regulatory reporting), the OPEN Government Data Act (default policy in favor of open licenses and open formats for all government information), and the GREAT Act (open data for all federal grant reporting), all three of which have moved forward in this current Congress. And we have made progress in the agencies too. Just last week the Securities and Exchange Commission finally adopted the Inline XBRL format for corporate financial statements–which means a single, human- and machine-readable filing, a huge step forward for investors and markets. We pushed for Inline XBRL for over five years.
In 2016, we spun off the Data Foundation as a separate think tank. That is important to the Coalition’s campaign, too, because the Foundation provides in-depth research on the need for governments to standardize, share, and use their data. Research supports reform.
Finally, I’m proud of the Data Coalition as a trade association. We have more members now–nearly fifty–than at any other time. Trade associations must do three things for their members: help them grow their businesses, provide a seat at the policy table, and set a vision of change that is philosophically appealing, good for the world. Our growth shows that the Data Coalition is doing this for data companies.
I hope earnestly that the Coalition will continue to empower data companies to make our government more and more efficient and transparent. The next executive director will have a chance to find new ways to do that.
Last week, feeling nostalgic, I looked at the first slide deck that I used to try to convince IBM to join the Coalition, in February 2012, right after I had resigned from my Congressional staff job to start this thing. I hadn’t opened the file in over six years. I was shocked to see that the slide deck contained almost all of the policy ideas that we are still working on–open data for spending, open data for grant reporting, open data for regulatory reporting. Those projects are not done, and the Data Coalition will need to keep pushing them, but a fresh leader can certainly find new battles to improve government, beyond my old ones.
There are so many public servants inside and outside government who are trying to make it easier to standardize, share, and use data. Almost always they could earn more notoriety or more money working on some other issue, or some other job. Data standards can be a boring, dry, thankless topic. (The applications that arise after standardization are thrilling, but only after years of spadework.)
Some of these public servants are well-known for other reasons, like my former boss, Congressman Darrell Issa; Senators Mark Warner, Ben Sasse, and Brian Schatz; and Reps. Derek Kilmer, Carolyn Maloney, and Randy Hultgren. But their open data work gets lost amidst other battles.
Others are very quietly changing the world: Katy Rother at the House Oversight Committee; Seamus Kraft at Article One; Kristen Gullickson at the House clerk’s office; Rebecca Williams at the White House office of the CIO; and the DATA Act team at the Treasury Department, led first by Christina Ho and now by Amy Edwards.
It has been the same since I first joined the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a decade ago this month: standardize data first. All of the flashy stuff will be much easier after that. Hashtag blockchain.
Don’t let political battles, even the really important ones, ruin the opportunity to build our democracy with civic tech! Every opportunity to get a reliable government data set standardized, published, and then protected by vigorous, frequent use is a win.
Photo: Angie Quirarte
Angie Quirarte is a behind-the-scenes hero for the state of California, leading on issues such as public sector workforce recruitment and retention, public data, creating a user-friendly government, improving internal government processes and more.
I grew up in humble beginnings and benefited from public services that I now work on to improve.
The morning of September 11, 2001 I was at the Mexican border with my parents and two younger brothers. The uncertainty of the promised American Dream was worth the risk of leaving our lives and family behind. I never imagined myself working in government; but now that I am here, I realize that this is where you can honestly make a difference.
I found my way to public service through the Capital Fellows Program as an Executive Fellow in 2013 after graduating from UCSB. As an Executive Fellow I was exposed to the highest levels of state government and worked on policy issues that strive to make government better.
I didn’t think I’d stay in Sacramento after the fellowship, but the work and the mission made me fall in love with public service.
I was recently promoted as the new Assistant Secretary for Digital Engagement at the California Government Operations Agency (GovOps). The Agency oversees the departments with functions that make government run, including technology, procurement, and the state civil service workforce.
Within the Innovation and Accountability team at GovOps, I primarily work on policy and pilot programs that help create tomorrow’s government today by delivering better digital services, promoting the use of data to drive decision-making, and putting Californians and users at the center when designing technology projects meant to serve them.
Over the last few years I have focused on building and sustaining the open data program for the state and most recently helped coordinate the creation of the new Department of Tax and Fee Administration within a span of six weeks.
My role is to identify pockets of innovation, pilot, implement and iterate!
Open data has slowly evolved at the state level. When I first started no one knew what open data was or why it was important. The world was fastly publishing data and I was working on steering the state in the same direction.
As I learned more about our departments and what other governments were doing, I realized that the important thing wasn’t how many datasets we could publish. What matters is the quality of the data and what one does with it.
With this in mind we highly encourage and guide that departments that publish data onto data.ca.gov must also have civic engagement. This not only validates the value of the data, but also creates a collaborative environment where government can partner with others to solve common problems.
I hope to apply more of this for the future of open data in California. We have to democratize the access of data to the people affected by programs that aren’t using it to drive positive change.
NxtGov is a network of public servants and partners that know government has the potential to work better for its people.
I founded NxtGov to bring pride into the profession of public service and recruit the next generation of government leaders. We provide a safe space for change agents that want to connect with others and provide professional development opportunities and community engagement events. We consult government agencies on things they should consider when recruiting and training the next generation workforce and actively coach students on the benefits of working for the state and recruit and onboard them into the state workforce.
NxtGov matters because we break the silos of government and empower our members to become change agents in their departments. We make a difference by identifying key issues affecting our workforce now and bringing decision makers to the table to address the problems as the arise.
The Eureka Institute is a hub of the Innovation and Accountability team within GovOps.
We established the Eureka Institute to make sure that government has a space to constantly innovate. Our focus lies on innovating government by developing programs, pilots, training and tools that develop our people, improve our processes, and leverage our technology to drive better program outcomes.
Within Eureka we have the CA Statewide Leadership Academy, the CA Lean Academy, and CalData which includes the open data program. These programs are changing the way the departments operate and that matters because the Eureka Institute allows government to adapt to a changing world.
While most people would think that innovation comes from fancy technology and robots, I’ve come to learn that innovation is just another word for adaptation. Government bureaucracies must adapt their business operations in a changing world so that people can work collaboratively and leverage tools to better prepare for the government of the future.
I am surrounded by many individuals at all levels who inspire me on a daily basis.
Working in public service you encounter people of all backgrounds, and I have a long list of people I’d love to recognize, but one of the most influential heroines is my boss and GovOps Agency Secretary Marybel Batjer. She was recently named as one of Governing’s Public Official of the Year, and she deserves the recognition. I’ve been fortunate to witness many leadership styles over the last few years, and she stands out for her kindness and ability to dive in. I strive to learn from her leadership and kind demeanor. Marybel constantly reminds us that we are here to serve the public.
Government has very few true open source open data options, and DKAN is one of them.
For those passionate about cultivating a more sustainable, open source oriented open data community, the first DKAN Open Data Summit is scheduled for August 1, 2017, in Washington, D.C.
DKAN Open Data Summit will be held in tandem with Drupal GovCon, and you must register for the latter to attend the former.
DKAN currently powers several federal, state and local government open data platforms, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the state of California, Louisville and many others.
(Note: CivicActions is the lead organizer of DKAN Open Data Summit. See disclosures.)
Image via District Match
Azavea Product Specialist Patrick Han and Product Manager Stephanie Thome share how Cicero’s District Match app makes it easy for nonprofits to mobilize their constituents to contact their elected officials.
The District Match web app lets you upload spreadsheets of addresses and match them to elected officials and legislative districts in bulk.
Finding information for the right elected officials is surprisingly hard, especially when you need to do it for hundreds or thousands of addresses. Manually matching your spreadsheet of constituents to their legislative districts and elected official contact information at the state, local, and federal level can take days and even weeks.
District Match automates bulk address-to-district matching in minutes instead of days. The web app also pulls from our extensive database of elected official information, which includes office addresses, emails, phone numbers, and even over 12 social media accounts per official.
With this spreadsheet of elected official and district data, you can now target outreach campaigns to the right lawmakers to scale your advocacy efforts.
Our database started as a project for a small nonprofit in Philadelphia that wanted to help its members reach their elected officials. Since then, we’ve been expanding our coverage and developing solutions for nonprofits to more easily advance their missions.
District Match draws on the Cicero database, which covers legislative district and elected official data at the local, state, and federal level. Our team of data analysts and research specialists update the database daily to capture the latest election results and elected officials’ contact information. Currently, we cover 9 countries and more than 150 of the largest local municipalities and counties in the US. Here’s a link to our full data availability.
Unlike other district matching services, we match based on address-level data rather than ZIP code, which can be inaccurate given that many ZIP codes include multiple legislative districts.
The app is simple. Simply:
In order to support individuals, nonprofits, and advocacy organizations with dwindling budgets, we’ve made District Match as inexpensive as possible. Pricing is based on the number of addresses matched, and the data chosen. Projects start at $25. You can use our pricing calculator to check out an estimate here: bit.ly/DMpricing
Photo: Code for America
Okay, I admit it: Even as a champion of open data, I find that it’s often mundane to view data on a portal. Simple lists of datasets — and even the maps and charts you can create — don’t truly show the intrinsic value of data that’s been freed to benefit communities.
To really capture the meaning and potential of such data, you need people to bring data to life — in the form of local collaborations, news stories, and apps that provide the audiences you’re trying to reach with easy access to information and services. It takes people, not portals, to leverage data to improve the usage and delivery of services; raise broad awareness of issues; and inform local and statewide policymaking. For example, leveraging health data from California’s health department’s open data portal to create stories about measles-immunization rates for kindergarteners in the Golden State. Reporters and advocates harnessing this information brought this story to life.
Data just sitting on a portal can’t do that.
And all of these people who seek data for their work need to connect with each other. An advocacy organization in Fresno may want to learn from similar work being done in San Diego. A nurse at a health clinic in downtown L.A. may want to partner with a researcher at USC who’s got expertise with health data. An epidemiologist with the California Department of Public Health may want to team up with staff at local health departments.
As open data efforts statewide expand and mature, the need has become clear for data stakeholders to collaborate in these and other ways. To help address this, the California Health & Human Services Agency (CHHS) has initiated a project — tentatively dubbed the Data Commons — to help Californians make effective use of publicly available data.
This initiative, which is funded by the California HealthCare Foundation, had its roots in outreach work conducted through the California Health Data Project; I was involved with this effort, which was aimed at encouraging local use of data from the CHHS data portal. The California Health Data Project has helped bring together innovative leaders from CHHS, local governments, and, most importantly, communities — healthcare providers, civic hackers, and advocacy groups — to ensure the state’s valuable health data is finding its way into the hands of people and organizations who can put it to good use.
During an event last year sponsored by the California Health Data Project, we had an “A-ha!” moment. At this Code for San Jose meeting, a volunteer technologist who was eager to improve his community with his technical chops commented that, while it’s great to see all these data being released, how does he — that is, someone who has no experience in health — know what to build from data that’s been made available? It’s true that he can’t rightly expect to have the subject matter expertise to know what to create, but what if he easily could pair up with a doctor who’s on the front lines of providing care, each contributing their own expertise to build data tools that can make a difference in San Jose. That’s an organizing concept around the Data Commons that CHHS wants to build.
The project, still in its formative stages, is a team effort involving CHHS, Purchia Communications, and CivicMakers. They’re all eager to gather input as this project evolves, so stay tuned for specific ways you can contribute. In the meantime, fill out this form to express your interest and join the project email list.
Source: data.cityofdenton.com
Earlier this year, OpenGov acquired the open data company Ontodia, enabling the government technology company to expand its smart government platform to include an open source open data platform.
Open Gov’s CEO Zac Bookman shares how OpenGov the company’s new open data solution will impact public administration – including how governments engage with citizens such as civic developers.
OpenGov is the world’s first complete, integrated cloud solution for public sector budgeting, reporting and open data.
At OpenGov, we help agencies, cities and counties build more efficient and transparent government by transforming three key areas:
Budgeting and strategic planning require coordination, data and buy-in. OpenGov helps agencies understand trends with multi-year insights into expenses and revenues, build budgets in a smart and streamlined manner using a single platform, and explain the budget’s goals and tradeoffs to stakeholders in real-time.
To operate effectively, governments must adhere to strict budget constraints. OpenGov helps them do so by comparing expenditures and revenues by department and across funds, so governments can make data-driven adjustments to the budget as necessary. We also provide the tools to explore and analyze nonfinancial performance metrics such as 311 calls and police response times.
OpenGov builds trust between governments and citizens and lets elected officials monitor agencies’ performance. We do this by providing residents with quick answers to their questions, empowering journalists with instant access to the data they need to tell accurate stories, and eliminating ambiguity around things like wages and funding by providing accurate financial information.
Earlier this year, we acquired Ontodia, the leading provider of open data. Ontodia runs on the popular open source open data tool, CKAN. Thanks to this acquisition, we have been able to develop a first-of-its-kind tool called OpenGov Open Data, which integrates with the rest of our smart government platform. The tool is designed to work for governments of all sizes.
Open Data lets governments connect budget and performance data with census data, FBI crime data and financial data from over 3,000 counties and 36,000 cities. It simplifies the ability to collaborate with other governments and agencies and allows elected officials to access performance in real-time.
It is also designed to helps residents, businesses and journalists easily access information they need, increasing public trust and facilitating civic action.
Yes. At the 2016 Code for America Summit, we announced Denton, Texas, as the first city in the country to fully implement the OpenGov Open Data solution since the acquisition and that Maricopa County, Arizona, will be launching the OpenGov Open Data platform for its more than four million residents early next year.
The Dallas-Fort Worth suburb, Denton with a population just over 100,000 – had previously released its data in PDFs and other formats that were hard to read and repurpose. As a result, the city’s tech community could not build applications; residents could not easily access a central location to search for data; and potential businesses could not quickly assess Denton’s economic condition.
Our open data experts have worked closely with Denton city officials to upload numerous datasets that span a wide array of metrics to its data portal. Today, the city empowers residents and businesses with 71 machine-readable datasets that range from the city’s demographic indicators to its upcoming building projects.
Denton is leading the way in embracing the power of technology to improve our cities, and we look forward to working with more cities across the country to make governments more transparent, accessible and efficient.
Open Data at its core is meant to be open. It is the public’s data.
If you use a proprietary platform you are locked into certain APIs. This limits the ability for the data to work with outside apps, websites and other systems and, therefore, limits the ecosystem that can use this data for a myriad of purposes
We have designed our tools to work for governments of all sizes, from small towns to major metropolises. While other tech companies have chosen to focus exclusively on large-scale projects, OpenGov recognises that all governments – both big and small – can benefit from greater collaboration, transparency, and innovation.
You can learn more about OpenGov at opengov.com or on Facebook or Twitter.
Photo: White House
Having access to timely and comprehensive election data is fundamental to democracy. Knowing when and where to vote, as well as what your ballot options are is critical to being fully informed.
Google’s Civic Information API, in partnership with the Voter Information Project and The Pew Charitable Trusts, makes this data easy for third parties to access and build applications on.
At ProudCity, we’re now leveraging this data for a new app, ProudCity Vote. ProudCity Vote makes it easy for anyone to quickly add comprehensive, timely voting and elections information to any website. Adding ProudCity Vote is free and easy as copying and pasting embed code onto any website page.
For example, see how San Rafael, Calif., is using ProudCity Vote.
As many in the open data movement have noted, open data for the sake of open data is less useful than providing it in context of the user experience. We’re excited to take this data and bring it directly to the residents of every city in America.
Photo: Esther Vargas
This is part five of a five-part series that looks at successful strategies we at OpenDataSoft have seen our clients and others use to foster innovation and align their smart city and open data goals. The full series is available as a free PDF download.
The concept of what constitutes a “Smart City” has evolved quite a bit over the past 10 years. From early visions of sweeping citywide digital overhauls and the global automation of everything from trash pick up to transportation, cities are now focusing on smaller scale projects; they are testing ideas with pilot programs, and attending to low-tech and even no-tech options for meeting their goals of safe, healthy, sustainable, and vibrant communities.
But while there is much technology that can be sifted into must-have, nice-to-have and maybe-someday categories without a negative impact on smart city advancement, there are a few basic pieces of technology cities will need in order to extract value from the real-time data that has already begun to flow through smart cities.
One is an open data platform that can provide data access to citizens, researchers, developers, city staff and city ecosystem partners (who should also provide access to their data to these same communities).
While they are many options for hosting such data, the rise in real-time data, whether from pollution meters on lamppost, GPS locators on mobile phones, usage data from water meters, or video feeds from security cameras, requires application programming interfaces.
APIs are software code interfaces that allow software applications to exchange data and services. In the context of smart cities, they enable a secure, reliable connection to continuously updated data for developers who want to build web or mobile applications, for researchers or analysts who want to plug city data into existing applications such as business intelligence software, for IT staff at other government agencies or ecosystem partners who want to integrate a city’s data with their own (see the helpful article “Open Data & APIs: Collecting and Consuming What Cities Produce”).
As developing and maintaining custom APIs can be complex and time-consuming, the wisest course for cities is to choose an open data portal natively designed to automate the generation and maintenance of standards-based APIs. To deliver maximum data value and make processes as efficient as possible for data consumers, it is also very helpful if the APIs generated can support queries, range settings and manipulations like mathematical calculations so users can extract only the data required, in the form needed.
Unfortunately most open data portal solutions were designed to handle static, infrequently changing content like spreadsheets and reports, not large real-time, streaming sensor data. Conversely, most platforms specifically designed for Internet of Things (IoT) data and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) data were not designed for use as open data portals. Some governments and open data portals have tried to bridge this divide by coupling standalone IoT platforms and open data portals, or by developing new add-on systems for existing open data portals. At present, these efforts introduce complexity and performance costs that hamper their use. This should change over time, however, as the demand for easy, cost-effective open access to smart city sensor data increases.
Another must-have is easy data visualization and dashboard-building tools. Visualization in the form of charts, graphs and maps is very useful for helping human beings make sense of all kinds of data, and it is absolutely essential for big data collections of the type produced by real-time sensors and captors.
The value of visualization in making data meaningful and accessible is well understood by the Town of Cary. During her keynote speech at Triangle Open Data Day, Cary Town Council Member, Lori Bush was very clear about a primary goal of the town’s Open Data project: storytelling. “We started talking about Open Data a long time ago. We were constantly asked, ‘what’s the value of an Open Data program’?” said Bush. They knew easy data visualization was key, and Cary Chief Information Officer Nicole Raimundo was very pleased to have found in their open data portal “a tool that really allowed us to realize that storytelling aspect. We can embed visualizations on the homepage, which is critical because that’s where most of our citizens are going to go.”
Cary’s data storytelling is showcased through a dedicated section on their open data portal’s homepage. The Data Stories section comes with a data visualization, accompanying text, and a link to associated datasets. This gives a richer context and a clearer story to what the city wants to communicate. In addition, portal visitors can easily create and share their own data visualizations, putting them in the driver’s seat as they seek the meaning behind the facts and figures.
This focus on making data accessible and meaningful for humans is fully aligned with the evolving nature of ‘smart cities.’ The transition underway from a technology-centered to a human-centered view of the smart city is casting a new spotlight on the promise of open data, from transparency and trust to citizen engagement and open innovation.
Accordingly, it’s only natural that cities are increasingly seeking to align their Open Data and Smart City strategies, and they are exploring solutions that can help them ensure that citizens and application developers have ultra-simple access to all the useful data a city produces. This includes the sensor data upon which many of the most engaging and transformative web and mobile-based applications will be built.
There is no doubt that high-tech digital transformation can have enormous impact in helping cities meet the environmental, social and economic challenges of population growth in a world of increasingly strained natural resources and a changing climate. However, even with the most technologically sophisticated solutions, success depends on making residents true partners in defining what ‘smart’ means for their community, and enabling their participation in shaping their city to fulfill that vision. And that means a smart city is first and foremost, an open city.
Read all five strategies on the GovFresh website, or download the complete five-part series as a free PDF download.
