Open innovation-spring-2014-by-socrata

Knowledge for Everyone: The Open Data Institute

Alameda County: Reinvents Community Engagement

How Open Data Is Revolutionizing Health Care

6 Government Processes Replaced by Open Data

SPRING 2014

Building a Stronger Economy with Open Data

CHICAGO’S SUCCESS STORY

Dear Fellow Innovator,

I’m glad you picked up a copy of our third edition of Open Innovation. It’s packed full of examples of how the open data movement is growing quickly and becoming one of the most dynamic areas of technology today.

In our “Community Report” section, you’ll get to meet people who are bringing open data to more places, like the executives in Montgomery County who supported the creation of financial transparency apps that educate citizens on county budget data. You’ll also hear about Code for America’s successful startup incubator program and the Center for Medicaid and Medicare’s (CMS) innovative use of healthcare data. Finally, we highlight authors in the community with our new book review section and showcase a few members of the “Open Data Doers Club.” Any of the doers remind you of yourself?

“There’s an app for that.” We’ve all heard it and it’s becoming more and more true thanks to new public datasets made available by governments. In our “What’s App’ening?” section, you’ll find out how New York City encourages citizens to create apps that address the city’s toughest issues and you’ll get an overview of Socrata Open Expenditures™ and Socrata Open Budget™, financial transparency apps we designed with help from government finance leaders.

We cover practical topics in our “Smarter Government” section, such as questions to consider when writing your open data policy and how to host “internal hackathons,” like Alameda County, California does to educate staff and encourage engagement with the County’s open data program. And, if you’re interested in efficiency, you might like our collection of six government processes replaced by open data.

And, now to one of my favorite subjects: economic development through open data. In our “Open Data in Focus” section, you’ll read about Chicago’s success in creating new businesses and jobs, thanks to their open data portal. We also discuss the strategic value of data in government, spotlight how the United Nations Development Programme inspires data journalism, and highlight the Open Data Institute’s (ODI) work as an incubator of businesses based in open data.

For fun, we finish with a story about how art and open data can intersect by introducing you to Scott Kildall. This San Francisco-based artist is transforming geo-data from the San Francisco City and County’s (SFCC) open data portal into 3-D art called “Data Crystals.”

Please let us know how you like the magazine and what you think we should feature next. We want this publication to be a hub for the most exciting and inspiring innovations happening in open data and open government today.

Sincerely,

Kevin MerrittSocrata Founder and CEO

Editor-in-Chief Alida Moore

Contributing EditorsBridget Quigg Tim CashmanPatrick Hasseries

Design/Art DirectionCorey Smith

PromotionSteven Gottlieb

Published BySocrata83 S. King StreetSeattle, Wa. 98104

[email protected](206) 340-8008www.socrata.com

40 Growing Chicago’s Open Data EconomyBy Bridget Quigg

Subscribe to future issues of Open Innovation by going to www.socrata.com/magazine

COMMUNITY REPORT

4 Socrata Book Club

6 The Rebirth of Government Outreach: Textizen Brings Public Engagement into the Mobile EraBy Patrick Hasseries

9 Open Data Doers Club: American City-DwellersBy Patrick Hasseries

12 How Open Data Is Revolutionizing Health CareBy Joe Pringle

18 Montgomery County Collaborates on Open DataBy Ewan Simpson

WHAT’S APP’ENING?

21 New York City Asks Hackers to Solve Tough IssuesBy Bridget Quigg

24 Financial Transparency for Smarter Governments and CitizensBy Safouen Rabah

SMARTER GOVERNMENT

27 5 Questions to Ask When Creating Your Open Data Policy By Ian Kalin

30 Alameda County: The Gold Standard in Community CollaborationBy Alida Moore

37 6 Government Processes Replaced by Open DataBy Bridget Quigg

IN FOCUS

48 Why Governments Must Embrace the Strategic Value of Open DataBy Safouen Rabah and Tim Cashman

53 Knowledge for Everyone: The Open Data InstituteBy Alida Moore

58 How International Organizations Use Data-as-a-Service to Inspire JournalistsBy Eleonore Fournier-Tombs

JUST FOR FUN

61 Data Crystals: Scott Kildall and the Collision of Art and Open DataBy Alida Moore

SPRING 2014

mailto:info%40socrata.com?subject=

http://www.socrata.com

http://www.socrata.com/open-innovation-magazine/

BOOK CLUB

OPEN INNOVATION • SPRING 2014 54 OPEN INNOVATION • SPRING 2014

Beyond TransparencyOpen Data and the Future of Civic Innovation

Edited by Brett Goldstein and Lauren Dyson

The rise of open data in the public sector has sparked innovation, driven efficiency, and fueled economic development. Its transformative potential could shape the future of civic life and reinvent the relationship between residents and government, especially at the local level.

Beyond Transparency is a new anthology from Code for America, edited with former Chief Data Officer of Chicago Brett Goldstein. In this cross-disciplinary survey of the open data landscape, practitioners from municipal chief information officers to civic entrepreneurs share their stories of what they accomplished with open data. The book features essays from leaders including Michael Flowers, former Chief Analytics Officer of New York City; Tim O’Reilly, founder & CEO of O’Reilly Media; and Beth Blauer, Socrata Director of GovStat and former StateState Director for Maryland.

Open Data NowThe Secret to Hot Startups, Smart Investing, Savvy Marketing, and Fast Innovation

By Joel Gurin

Joel Gurin is Senior Advisor to GovLab’s Open Data 500, the first major study of American companies that use open data to build their business. In Open Data Now, Gurin applies his wide-ranging experience and two years of research to provide a comprehensive guide on the open data field. He describes the open data landscape for technologists, business executives, entrepreneurs, and ordinary citizens, providing insight into how open data is changing ideas about privacy, corporate responsibility, and government regulation

Open Data Now is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how open data is changing business, government, and society. Gurin describes how social media is shaping brand identity and reputation and how the new science of sentiment analysis is transforming marketing strategy. He also makes the case for open innovation in science, describing how some research institutions are sharing their data early on to promote discourse.

Socrata Book Club looks at the latest and greatest volumes written about government transparency, open data, and data-driven decision-making.

Open GovernmentCollaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice

Edited by Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma

Open Government is a collection of essays and case studies that lay out visions of a more democratic and effective government, achieved by making meaningful, structured data accessible to everyone. Contributors come from a wide spectrum, including a White House insider, the chief technology officer of a major city, and an activist hacker. The book presents a balance between hopes for the future and the realities that stand in the way.

“Open Government is a comprehensive compendium of the who, what, how, and why of the emergent national ‘Gov 2.0’ movement. It’s a must-read for all who care about transparent, efficient, and participatory government, which, by definition, should equate to each and every one of us in our capacity as citizens and voters.”

~Andrew Hoppin, CIO, New York State Senate

Smart CitiesBig Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

By Anthony Townsend

In Smart Cities, urbanist and technology expert Anthony Townsend takes a broad historical look at the forces that have shaped the planning and design of cities and information technologies from the rise of the great industrial cities of the nineteenth century to the present. A century ago, the telegraph and the mechanical tabulator were used to tame cities of millions. Today, cellular networks and cloud computing tie together the complex choreography of mega-regions of tens of millions of people.

In response, cities worldwide are deploying technology to address both the timeless challenges of government and the mounting problems posed by human settlements of previously unimaginable size and complexity. As technology barons, entrepreneurs, mayors, and an emerging vanguard of civic hackers are trying to shape this new frontier, Smart Cities considers their motivations, aspirations, and shortcomings while offering a new civics to guide efforts to build the future, one click at a time.

COMMUNITY REPORTBULLETIN BOARD FOR OPEN DATA COMMUNITY NEWS


COMMUNITY REPORT

THE REBIRTH OF GOVERNMENT OUTREACHTextizen Brings Public Engagement into the Mobile EraBy Patrick Hasseries

the Textizen team to take part in their 2013 Incubator program, which helps fledgling projects from the CfA Fellowship grow into independent business ventures. The Textizen team

set up a main office in San Francisco, where the CfA Incubator program is based. For the next six months, the team received intensive training

and mentorship, networking with leaders in the government technology industry, learning how to secure investors and manage business taxes, and using an endowment of $10,000

bestowed by Code for America to build and launch their business. Since its launch, Textizen has been used to poll citizens on a number of topics,

In 2012, the City of Philadelphia realized it had an issue with diversity and citizen engagement. Primarily older, wealthier citizens attended City meetings, and their feedback did not accurately

portray public opinion as a whole. To engage a more diverse base of residents, the City knew it needed to adopt 21st century methods of communication and asked Code for America (CfA), a non-profit organization dedicated to improving government with digital technology, for help. CfA was uniquely positioned to help Philadelphia in a fraction of the time and budget it would have taken the City through conventional channels. In its 2012 Fellowship program, Code for America challenged software developers and designers to come up with a solution. Within months, they developed the groundwork for a new service with the potential to benefit cities everywhere.

“It also significantly cuts down on costs and labor by eliminating the need to canvass an entire city or print out individual ballots.” The Philadelphia City Planning Commission piloted the new app in June 2012. News of the project’s success spread widely, and soon the Textizen team began to receive requests from government leaders looking to deploy the app in their own cities.

INTO THE CODE FOR AMERICA INCUBATORAs the 2012 CfA Fellowship neared its end, it was clear Textizen had evolved beyond its original scope. CfA invited

FROM CONCEPT TO PILOT CfA’s Fellowship answered the challenge with a marketing tactic that companies have used for over a decade: mobile texting surveys. According to the Pew Research Center, more than ninety percent of American adults have a cell phone, and most cell phones come with a basic texting plan. The Fellowship proposed that Philadelphia position calls to action in everyday advertising locations – billboards, websites, public transit vehicles and stations, etc. – and invite citizens to participate in quick public opinion surveys by texting in their answers. To help the City accomplish and track this new method of public inquiry, the Fellowship developed Textizen, a dynamic, web-based application. Textizen makes it simple for government officials to create public opinion surveys. The app pairs each survey with an auto-generated phone number to which people can text their answers. Textizen catalogs responses as they are sent in and provides detailed statistics on responses through its easy-to-use dashboard system. “We chose to use text messaging because it’s a technology that most people have and know how to use,” says Serena Wales, Chief Technology Officer of Textizen.

News of the project’s success spread widely, and the soon the Textizen team began to receive requests from government leaders looking to deploy the app in their own cities.

Inaugural run of Textizen: volunteers place ads in public places around Philadelphia, inviting passersby to text in their answers to public survey questions.

http://www.codeforamerica.org

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/06/cell-phone-ownership-hits-91-of-adults

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/06/cell-phone-ownership-hits-91-of-adults

https://www.textizen.com


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OPEN DATA DOERS CLUB: AMERICAN CITY-DWELLERSBy Patrick Hasseries

From government officials and software developers to everyday citizens going about their business, the power of open data impacts us all. In our new series, Open Data Doers Club, we introduce you to the people who make up the open data community to show how open data helps improve their lives. In this edition, you will meet common American public officials and urbanites.

CITY TECHNOLOGY PICKER-OUTERAlias: Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

You have a meeting with a dozen city leaders tomorrow to discuss technologies that could help agencies better convey information to the public. You know their objective is to improve performance, set smarter goals, and track progress toward those goals. You’ve already proposed creating an open data portal for the city, but that’s just the first step of making open data useful to your citizens. You are hard at work talking with your developer contacts, looking to other cities for examples, and scouring the web for possible solutions.

Chief Technology Officer, a performance measurement dashboard is what you’re seeking. Cities like Kansas City, Missouri are already using dashboards to track progress toward city goals and the performance of city services. Many have also used dashboards to identify service redundancies or gaps, share information between agencies, and show the public how the city is progressing toward key goals. So go ahead, do your research into performance measurement dashboards and walk into your meeting with confidence, knowing that you have at least one great solution to propose.

from roads and public transportation to mental health awareness. In one particular case, Chicago Public Schools used the app to ask city residents what types of school improvement projects they should prioritize. The school board had previously attempted holding surveys through conventional means such as meetings and letters to parents, but they received few responses. Textizen helped them distribute survey ads on local trains and buses through the Chicago Transit Authority. The

result was more than 2,000 survey responses, with 98% coming from unique participants. “By putting ads in everyday locations like billboards and bus stops, there’s a very high chance cities will catch citizens’ attention while they already have their phones out and are looking to pass the time,” says Wales.

Textizen has so far deployed to over a dozen U.S. cities, including Boston and Salt Lake City. Its engineers recently released support

for Spanish-speaking audiences and are working to expand Textizen for use in other countries and languages. The app is a strong example of how governments can reconnect with the public using technologies and services most people use every day. The company behind it demonstrates the success and valuable services that are born when software engineers apply their talents to improving government, especially when they’re backed by programs like the Code for America Incubator.

Textizen’s online dashboard reports up-to-date survey results through detailed statistics and visualizes them with rich, easy-to-

understand graphs. The dashboard also enables government officials to create new public opinion surveys and deploy them with ease.

https://opendata.socrata.com


https://kcstat.kcmo.org

https://kcstat.kcmo.org


COMMUNITY REPORTCOMMUNITY REPORT

CITY FINANCE FANATIC

The public meeting has just started. You shuffle through pages and pages of city finance data, getting everything in order for the big reveal. You’re going to demand to know why the city needs to raise taxes to pay for a new park when they could be diverting funds from redundant services and making expensive programs more cost-efficient. Then, clumsy old Jane from the PTA trips and spills her coffee all over your report. You watch in horror as the ink runs and your data disappears before your eyes. The beautiful graphs you spent all night making in Microsoft Excel are gone.

What calamity Jane has brought upon you and all the taxpayers of the city! Financially concerned citizen, what you need is open data. With financial transparency apps like Open Budget™ and Open Expenditures™, you could have saved hours of phone calls, financial analysis, and chart-making. Plus, you would easily understand the difference between capital budget and operating budget, and you’d see exactly where your government is spending money. Best of all, you could have shared this information with other citizens, safe from Jane’s klutzy sabotage.

RACKLESS SEATTLE CYCLIST

You maneuver from street to crosswalk like a graceful unicorn on figure skates. You are doing the dance of the bike commuter; you are a being that is half pedestrian and half vehicle—the pinnacle of urban transportation. The morning mist dampens your face as you breathe in the salty Puget Sound air. Unlike cars and buses, cycling is free, and calories are the only fuel needed to power your mission. You roll to a stop and as you reach for the Clif bar in your pocket, realization strikes: there’s no place to lock up your bike. Looking about, you wonder where the nearest bike rack is.

Seattle cyclist, open data is for you. What you don’t know is that there isn’t a bike rack within a three block radius, and the area you’re in is prone to bike thefts. But with mobile apps like Veloracks powered by city data, you can always find the bike rack closest to your current location. And with the Seattle Police Department publishing up-to-date crime data on Seattle’s open data portal, you can look up just how safe the area will be for your two-wheeled baby.

MISSED TRASH DAY (AGAIN) SUBURBANITE

While going about your business, the unmistakable beeping of a garbage truck echoes in the distance. Realization and panic arise. You forgot to take out the trash – again. Now you’re faced with three options: press the garbage down and try to make enough room in the can for another week, pull the garbage out and let its stench permeate your living space, or leave it outside and hope it doesn’t attract animals. In the meantime, your miniature dachshund, Schnitzel, is undoubtedly trying already to knock over the garbage and get to those chicken bones you threw away the other day.

Alas, unfortunate suburbanite! If only you’d known about open data. With apps like Recollect, you could have looked up your local garbage day and set yourself reminders. More than that, it would help you communicate with your local government about important city services. Your garbage would have been collected. Your family wouldn’t be complaining about the smell radiating out of the kitchen trash. And Schnitzel wouldn’t be revenge-chewing your favorite shoes. The good news is you have another opportunity to get this right – next week.

CITY DATA ACCESSIBILITY ADVOCATEAlias: Chief Digital Officer (CDO)

You sit at your desk reading email and listening to phone messages. The feedback is clear: citizens want easier access to government data. Government workers are overwhelmed by too many data requests from citizens. City leaders need a better way to garner public support and feedback for potential projects. It seems like conventional methods of communication are failing to serve at all ends. That’s why the city hired you, Digital Guru. It’s your job to find a solution to this communication barrier using new and innovative technologies.

Chief Digital Officer, the solution you should seriously consider is a cloud-based, publicly accessible data repository—also known as an open data portal. Government agencies can upload data they want to share with the public, and it would be readily accessible to citizens on any device with an Internet connection. City leaders could use the portal to address and engage the public masses. Everyone would win, and maybe, just maybe, they would finally erect a statue of you as the hero that ushered in a new era of civic engagement.

http://www.veloracks.com

https://data.seattle.gov

https://recollect.net



COMMUNITY REPORT

How Open Data Is Revolutionizing

Health CareBy Joe Pringle, Socrata Director of Health

The United States spends more than three trillion dollars a year on health care. Governments at all levels, in partnership with the private sector, are working to

improve the collection, use, management, dissemination, and reporting of health data – a project of a scope

equal to the Apollo Space Program. The emergence of vast amounts of new health data, and improved tools for using it, is occurring in parallel to a tectonic shift in the demand for that data. The health care industry is transitioning from an opaque, fee-for-service model,

where costs and transactions are based on the quantity of care delivered, to a more transparent and value-

based model, where providers are compensated based on value and consumers are better able to compare

providers in terms of cost and quality. These concurrent trends foster a rapid rise in the health data economy that will help transform health care and health policy.



THE EMERGING HEALTH DATA ECONOMYA second trend driving equally important changes in health care is the emergence of a shared layer of health data that all organizations and individuals can tap into. In some ways, health data is following the same path as open data in other sectors, where increasing amounts of raw and machine-readable data are being released into the public domain. However, some of the most valuable health data is patient-level data, which is private and subject to severe restrictions in how it can be shared

and used. For this reason, patient-level data is only being shared to approved entities. Both publicly available and privately shared health data will drive innovation in the form of reduced costs, higher quality, and better public policy.

Public sector health organizations have published data for decades, but it has generally been difficult to find, access, and use. Innovative efforts by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vastly improve the

Much of the attention on the current health data revolution is focused on both the

use of big data within the enterprise and the increasing availability of personal health data to consumers. Providers, payers, insurers, and other actors are rushing to build data warehouses and to implement a wide range of technologies to support enterprise data management, analytics, population health, decision-support, and business intelligence (BI) goals. Traditional health care IT vendors are adding big

data, analytics, and BI capabilities to their offerings. Electronic data is now captured at the point of care, and providers access clinical decision support systems in real time as they interact with patients. Payers use data mining and analytics to improve fraud detection and risk management. Wearable devices track and store health data, while increased consumer awareness of personal health records and data give individuals greater ability to make informed choices. All told, vast amounts of health data across these activities are being captured, stored, and accessed in new ways.

scaling up efforts to have providers report on quality measures. CMS reimbursement to providers will be linked to quality outcomes, efficiency and patient satisfaction under a value based purchasing (VBP) model. Data on quality measures is being shared to practitioners, health care providers, health plans, integrated delivery systems, purchasers, and others. The performance of providers

can be evaluated in an objective way, by comparing the quality and value of the services they deliver against the costs charged for those services. This is a given in other sectors of the economy but largely absent in the health sector until now. Third, we have a better understanding of community and health outcomes, which guides health policy and investment. More and more data about community- level

quality and utility of available health data. These efforts lower the barriers for researchers, developers, and entrepreneurs to build upon this data.

THE IMPACT OF DATA ON HEALTH CARE AND HEALTH POLICYThis emerging health data economy is driving a “learning health system” 1 where prices are more transparent; consumers, payers, and policy makers can compare quality and outcome. At the same time, research data is being shared in new and innovative ways. Both these changes impact health care and health policy in numerous ways. First, we are seeing an increased understanding of the cost of care. As the biggest single payer for health care in the United States, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is playing a leading role in making the costs of health care more transparent and easier to compare across geographies and providers. CMS releases aggregated data on provider charges and makes claims-level data available to approved entities for research. A number of states are establishing all-payer- claims-database (APCD) systems to provide comprehensive, multi-payer data to allow consumers, purchasers, and policy makers to understand the cost, quality, and utilization of health care for their citizens. Innovative companies such as Pricing Health Care, Health Care Bluebook, and others use these data sources to provide new tools for consumers and others. The media uses

1 Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2013.

the data to shine a light on disparities in costs in different communities. All of this is driving providers to compete on price in a fundamentally new way.

We are also seeing health care quality improve. As part of the shift away from a health system where payments are based on the quantity of care to a system based on value and outcomes, CMS and other payers are

Electronic data is now captured at the point of care, and providers access clinical decision support systems in real time as they interact with patients.

CMS Medicare Provider Utilization and Payments Data: CMS recently released a new dataset on Medicare Provider Utilization and Payments as part of an ongoing strategy to make the costs of healthcare more transparent and easier to compare across geographies and providers.

http://www.cms.gov

http://www.cms.gov

https://pricinghealthcare.com

https://www.healthcarebluebook.com

https://www.healthcarebluebook.com



health is being shared, allowing anyone to see and compare health outcomes across cities, counties, and states. Understanding how a community is performing with respect to health, and how it compares in terms of social determinants, costs, services, and other factors helps inform investment and public policy decisions. Leading health organizations at the state level, such as the New York Department of Health, New Jersey Department of Health, and California Department of Public Health are aggressively opening up state-level health data. In turn, intermediaries and aggregators, such

as County Health Rankings and other sources, use this data to help inform the public about how communities compare in terms of health. This leads to improved awareness and understanding of public health issues. Finally, health care and health policy research are improving. More data is coming in, which pushes more value out. The biggest value from the increasing availability and utility of health data comes from research on all aspects of our health system – think Human Genome Project multiplied by 1,000. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has long been a leader

in requiring the groups and projects it funds to create a plan for sharing the data they generate. In addition to its open health data activities, CMS makes privileged data, such as claims data, available to approved entities for research. Organizations are forming networks of all sizes to facilitate data sharing across traditional organizational boundaries. Much of this data is not open or shared publicly. Lowering the barriers for approved entities to access and use this privileged data vastly reduces the amount of churn for researchers to assemble the data they need, increasing the pace of innovation.

SIGNIFICANT CHALLENGES AND GREAT OPPORTUNITIES AHEADThe health data revolution is just getting started. Numerous opportunities remain to increase the supply of available data and make it easier to find, access, and use. There are, however, significant challenges ahead that must be overcome if we are to realize the full benefits for health care and health policy. First, we must improve tools and approaches for overcoming privacy issues. Health data is both extremely valuable and extremely private. Though sharing health data across organizational boundaries offers tremendous promise, maintaining the security and privacy of that data creates additional complexity. Aggregated and population-level data must be de-identified, and we must guard against emerging techniques that can be used to “re-identify” data using proxy identifiers. Sharing personally identifiable data (claims data, clinical data, etc.) requires an additional layer of technological and procedural infrastructure to protect it. This takes time and costs money, and we need improved tools for doing this better, faster, and cheaper to help the data flow more smoothly while maintaining sufficient privacy controls. Second, we must encourage researchers to share data. Researchers are recognized and rewarded for publishing papers, not their data. Releasing data can even be counterproductive for those researchers simply looking to maximize their own prospects for publishing future papers. Despite numerous efforts underway to encourage researchers to release their data, this is still a huge barrier to the free flow of research data. Finally,

we must encourage organizations to focus on interoperability and linking health data. We’re currently in the early stages of transitioning from an opaque, closed, and proprietary environment for health data to a more transparent and open environment where data is shared across organizational boundaries. The HHS Office of the National Coordinator is aggressively pushing health care IT vendors towards interoperability. This is a first step for simply being able to map electronic health records from one vendor to another. Health data publishers are sharing data in machine-readable formats and APIs that make it easier for entrepreneurs

to connect and repurpose it. A messy, overlapping array of “standards” discussions are taking place at all levels to better understand how we can harmonize the data. These efforts will require sustained involvement by key stakeholders across the health system.

IMAGINING THE FUTURE OF HEALTH DATALooking ahead, one can imagine a future where shared health data can be easily and securely accessed among individuals and across organizations. There are too many brilliant people working on leveraging health data

and too much value to industry and society to expect anything less than a revolution over the next decade. What will that revolution look like? Providers will advertise prices and tout their performance on quality measures so individuals and payers will be able to quickly and easily compare provider cost, quality, and patient satisfaction. More transparency and more choice will relentlessly drive innovation and competition. Voters will be able to understand how their community is doing with respect to health care inputs and outcomes, and will push elected officials and policy makers to optimize investments and public policy. Researchers will share data freely,

accelerating the velocity at which we understand what’s working, what isn’t, and how we can improve technology and practice. Health data captured at the point of care and in wearable devices will feed a real-time data layer that can be tapped by clinicians, public health officials, payers, and consumers to inform decisions at all levels. All of this innovation will be powered by health data being shared in new and innovative ways. For many reasons the health sector has been slow to harness the power of open data, but going forward it will have a transformative and immensely positive effect on health care and health policy.

As technology advances and medical records evolve from paper to digital, we enter a new future of health data, where this data can be easily and securely accessed among individuals and across organizations.

Numerous opportunities remain to increase the supply of available data and make it easier to find, access, and use.

http://www.countyhealthrankings.org

http://www.nih.gov

http://www.nih.gov

OPEN INNOVATION • SPRING 2014 19

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18 OPEN INNOVATION • SPRING 2014

MONTGOMERY COUNTY COLLABORATES ON

OPEN DATABy Ewan Simpson, Customer Success Manager

W hen people talk about municipal open data innovators, they

use names like Bloomberg, O’Malley, and Emmanuel. In Montgomery County, Maryland, some of the names commonly associated with open data innovation are Riemer and Leggett. In Montgomery County however, unlike in many other municipalities, the impetus for open data started in the legislative body. Councilman Riemer’s work in creating open data policy serves as a model for county council members across the country, showcasing how they too can play a role in democratizing data for their citizens. Councilman Hans Riemer, with support from County Executive Ike Leggett and members of the County Council, championed the County’s open data initiative, which began in 2012 and exemplifies the importance of creative collaboration between executive and legislative powers.

In his four years on Montgomery County Council, Councilman Riemer has been a staunch supporter of a citizen’s right to know what his or her government is doing. And his career has long been a study in understanding how technology can make an impact on government and legislation. “When I was elected as a councilmember, it was my mission to bring that intentional focus to help the County reinvent how we use technology,” he says. The Councilman was inspired by the work of Code for America, particularly the organization’s fusion of technology and civic change. He followed their work closely and decided that Montgomery County needed to hold a hackathon. “I began to research what it would take to hold a hackathon and I realized that before the hackathon, you

have to have quality data. I began to understand how fundamental open data would be to our success.” Councilman Riemer and the County Executive Leggett’s office, legislative and executive, quickly realized that not only could they

do this but that open data could make a big difference to citizens and government. The next step was figuring out how best get an open data program started. Riemer decided the County first needed an open data policy with muscle. The Open Data Act introduced a number of practices, including a department-wide data policy, a centralized repository for data, and an implementation plan. In response to this bill, Montgomery County launched dataMontgomery, their open data portal in October 2012. It serves as a central repository for a growing number of municipal datasets including 311 information, restaurant inspection, and permits.

The portal is expected to grow substantially within the next year. It is equipped with a series of

visualization tools that allow citizens to create their own maps and charts, API endpoints for developers and civic technologists, and social media tools that allow the County to capture suggestions and feedback. Montgomery County’s approach

In his four years on Montgomery County Council, Councilman Riemer has been a staunch supporter of a citizen’s right to know what his or her government is doing. And his career has long been a study in understanding how technology can make an impact on government and legislation.

https://data.montgomerycountymd.gov

WHAT’S APP’ENING?THE LATEST AND GREATEST IN OPEN DATA APPS


COMMUNITY REPORT

to open data has been thoughtful and thorough as Riemer describes, “We had to determine what our contribution would be to the wider open data community. We decided the best way to contribute would be by building a strong foundation.”

A hallmark of County Executive Leggett’s leadership and reputation for innovation, dataMontgomery, defines open data best practices. In addition to legislation with teeth, Montgomery County’s thorough approach to opening data includes citizen outreach, peer education, data inventory, evaluation and review. “Although relatively new, our open data program has quickly become a model for others. We realized that the best way to

implement the program, within our resource restraints, was to prioritize. To prioritize what data needs to be published and when, we went to great lengths to solicit input from residents, businesses, and our staff. This level of outreach and engagement around open data was unprecedented and really helped us de-politicize the process so that we’re just focusing on valuable, useful data,” says Dan Hoffman, Chief Innovation Officer. Another key to dataMontgomery’s continued success, according to project manager Victoria Lewis, is the ongoing commitment from participating departments and Montgomery County senior management, “dataMontgomery would not be as successful if we didn’t have the level of engagement and commitment that we see every day from our data owners and

executive sponsors. We needed to comply with Bill 23-12, but people here also see the many benefits of publishing data.” Moreover, Montgomery County continues to push the envelope

in open data innovation and will soon debut a series of financial transparency applications providing unprecedented visibility into how the county spends money and how the county is performing within the confines of its budget. County Executive Leggett’s model for innovation and transparency continues to reach new heights as the platform expands data availability, provides easy to use interfaces and contextualized views of data, and open dialogue with citizens and the civic technology community.

For Councilman Riemer, his commitment to open data and government transparency continues to grow. “One purpose of open data is to enable the citizen analyst to have a stronger voice,” he says. “Open data gets people more engaged in the decision-

making process and, finally, allows governments to provide better services.” He plans to further engage with other members of the open data community who are beginning their own programs.

H ow do you get the most out of an apps contest where eight million people are invited? When the City of New York began its BigApps competition in 2009, organizers wanted

bright minds to use the city’s data to improve quality of life in NYC. Over the years, they learned the best way to do so is to challenge those minds by connecting them with real civic problems and partners. Former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg initiated the BigApps competition well before most cities were considering open data programs. It had always been a joint effort between the Economic Development Commission (EDC) and the Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DOITT). Describing his vision, Bloomberg said, “If we’re going to continue leading the country in innovation and transparency, we’re going to have to make sure that all New Yorkers have access to the data that drives our city...catalyzing the creativity, intellect, and enterprising spirit of computer programmers to build tools that help us all improve our lives.” Director of OpenNY for the State of New York, and former Director of Research and Development for

NEW YORK CITY ASKS HACKERS TO SOLVE TOUGH ISSUES

BY BRIDGET QUIGG

the NYC DOITT under Bloomberg, Andrew Nicklin also played a leadership role at the beginning of NYC BigApps. He wanted to put the data to work. He adds, “Open data is not an end but a means. Just by looking at data you can’t know everything about what makes that data important as a foundation for economic growth.”

TOP TIER OPEN DATA PORTALInitially, New York City had a homegrown application for hosting public city data but moved to the Socrata platform in 2011 with NYC OpenData. The data on this

site has been the core of BigApps. It is one of the most attractive, comprehensive, and user-friendly open data portals in the world. Not only can citizens gain real-time access to public datasets via application programming interfaces (APIs), the data is organized into categories for easy searching. Images accompany popular datasets, supporting materials and guidance for developers are easy to find, and the site offers a Tumblr feed of stories about how data access is impacting the city.

Montgomery County continues to push the envelope in open data innovation and will soon debut a series of financial transparency applications providing unprecedented visibility into how the county spends money and how the county is performing within the confines of its budget.

“One purpose of open data is to enable the citizen analyst

to have a stronger voice. Open data gets people more

engaged in the decision-making process and, finally,

allows governments to provide better services.”

- Councilman Hans Riemer

http://nycbigapps.com

https://nycopendata.socrata.com


WHAT’S APP’ENING?WHAT’S APP’ENING?

All of these resources, interactions, and inspiration add up to the ideal home base for participants in the BigApps competition. “The real secret to success behind BigApps is marketing the competition so that it appeals to thousands of students and professionals with diverse talents and backgrounds,” says Seema Shah of HR&A Advisors, an economic development and real estate consulting firm producing the BigApps competition in 2014. “Whether you have a technical skillset or not, your life experiences are the most valuable assets you can bring to BigApps. Everyone in NYC understands the intricacies of civic life here -- and that’s why everyone should participate.” She notes New York City already has an active civic hacking

community, so the best strategy for BigApps is bringing new people into civic hacking. The competition’s website has done a better and better job over the years of encouraging participants to connect, share ideas, recruit new teammates, and track progress. In addition, BigApps offers some of the largest cash prizes in civic hacking. Beside tens of thousands of dollars in earnings, winners receive opportunities to further develop their products alongside local tech leaders, even receiving free office space and other resources.

THE MOVE TO “BIGISSUES”Widespread engagement isn’t enough for the BigApps team, though. Ian Fried, communications lead at the

Big Results from BigApps

2013 BigApps included 13 events, 120 projects, 54 eligible apps, 517 participants, 42 data providers, 7 winning teams

Founded in 2009 and has launched more than 300 apps

Has opened up more than 1,000 datasets to developers around the world

Focuses participants on real world civic issues for greater impact

BigApps teams have raised more than $8 million dollars in VC funding

Opportunities to win over $100,000 in prize winnings every year

EDC says, “The goal is to reward the best tech solutions to civic life in NYC. At its core, BigApps is a mission-oriented, industry-agnostic, citywide competition that believes in the transformative power of technology.” He points out that the first criteria for judging apps is, “Potential positive impact on New York City residents, visitors, and businesses.” However, in the early years of the competition, there wasn’t enough of a focus on garnering participation from small businesses, nonprofits, universities, cultural institutions, and other entities that contributed to supporting a vibrant civic life. In 2013, the BigApps team asked local leaders and various organizations to become partners and surface

specific, pressing local issues that participants could directly address and solve. The new approach, called BigIssues, allowed local businesses and organizations to sponsor work

on key civic issues where they have expertise. In 2013, the BigIssues categories covered the environment, the economy, lifelong education, and healthy living. Sponsors could coach teams, offer resources, and, ultimately, judge the entrants in their BigIssue category. Each sponsor created a page with guidance, access to data, and other information BigApps teams could use. For example, Pure Energy Partners stating in its BigIssues brief, “In NYC, we throw away more than 6.5 million pounds of food every day. This could fill up 24 subway cars. Or, it could be put to better use as fertilizer and clean energy.” Applicants were then challenged to get creative about this specific problem. In addition, these partner organizations often host hack days leading up to the main competition. Shah says adding in these experts helps to add a new level of credibility to BigApps, create buzz and increase broad-spectrum participation.

The grand prize winner for BigApps 2013 came from the “Healthy Living” BigIssues category. The app,

created by designer Wendy Nguyen, is called HealthyOut. It helps users find a healthy meal when dining out, anywhere in the city. Nguyen is a multi-time entrepreneur with

a background in public health and technology, Her $35,000 grand prize helped her build the app and its reach so that within a year it had become one of the top five most downloaded apps in iTunes’ Food & Drink category, and was being recommended by nurses, doctors, and nutritionists. That response is just the kind of uptake BigApps organizers sought by encouraging participants to address known issues.

The BigApps team considers the BigIssues program a success and plans to continue with it. “We’ll be addressing new issues in 2014, under a new mayoral administration,” says Shah. Just how much of an impact can open data have on the lives of New York’s citizens? Nicklin is optimistic. He says, “It will fall to the background and be a mainstay of how things get done. Government as API. It will be so integral in people’s lives it won’t even be noticed, such as health inspection information on Yelp when people look for a restaurant.” He adds, “We want the data to be where people need it.”

BigApps is a mission-oriented, industry-agnostic, citywide competition that believes in the transformative power of technology.

(Previous page and above) Participants and supporters attend 2013 NYC BigApps awardsceremony held at the IAC building in Manhattan.



Over the last few months, our apps team has been hard at work developing a suite of

financial transparency apps to help users understand the intricacies of government budgets and spending. In this edition of What’s App’ening, we look at two apps that are part of that suite: Socrata Open Budget™ and Socrata Open Expenditures™. These apps are the culmination of significant user testing and have been designed to be useful to finance experts and non-experts alike.

WHY FINANCIAL TRANSPARENCY MATTERSFive years ago, any government who made the choice to join the open data movement was seen as innovative. Now, publishing data is the gold standard of open government, but it must be more than a line item that government leaders cross off their transparency checklist. While publishing data publicly is a great start to making the most of the data collected, it’s also just the first step. In order for open data programs to have significant impact, the smartest governments publish raw data and provide ways citizens need to understand and use that data. This includes visualization tools, APIs to remix and reuse data in multiple contexts, and citizen-friendly apps to engage people in government processes.

Financial transparency apps demystify government finances and expand the conversation around budgets and spending. These apps

bolster public participation in governance. Government cannot call itself transparent just because it published a ledger of raw data, as few citizens understand how to consume financial data. Furthermore, many citizens are hungry to understand this data. Financial transparency demonstrates serious commitment to open government. A citizen armed with information about the budget is a citizen able to ask the right questions and understand her government’s priorities. In evaluating the apps that already exist for government finances, our team found none that truly helped people understand how budgets and spending work. We realized that most apps were not built for everyday citizens to use. To help government meet the needs and demands of its citizens, we set out to build a suite of financial transparency apps that examine government finances from the citizen perspective. We created two specific apps to address

transparency benefit citizens? A citizen armed with information about the budget is a citizen able to ask the right questions and understand the priorities of government. Engaged citizens, journalists, and other stakeholders demand this data.

When designing these financial transparency tools, Socrata worked closely with the technology and finance teams at Montgomery

County, Maryland to learn about government budget and spending data practices and obtained feedback from members of the local

financial transparency. The first, Open Budget™, allows citizens to understand everything that goes into a government’s budget. The second, Open Expenditures™, shows citizens how the government is spending funds.

SOCRATA OPEN BUDGET™Open Budget™ helps citizens and other stakeholders understand the operating budget, capital budget, capital projects, and the priorities of government. For example, a citizen curious about public safety budgeting can drill down into the funds allocated for Police, Fire, and Rescue and, from there, get specifics on the source of those funds. Open Budget™ allows users to follow the lifecycle of the budgeting process. Budgeting is a multi-phase process that can be confusing to the average citizen. Open Budget™ provides a snapshot of the budget, where it’s been, and what’s happening next. How does this level of budget

community to ensure the module objectives of empowering the public with financial data were met.

“We worked with Socrata to make sure we could educate citizens about how we budget and spend as we empower them with data. The apps are designed to move visitors through the entire budgeting process in an engaging way. All of the data is shown in dynamic charts and made interactive. It flows in a way that

makes very complex information easy to understand,” says data Montgomery Project Manager Victoria Lewis.

Financial Transparency for Smarter Governments and Citizens By Safouen Rabah, Vice President of Product

A citizen armed with information about the budget is a citizen able to ask the right questions and understand the priorities of government. Engaged citizens, journalists, and other stakeholders demand this data.

SMARTER GOVERNMENTHOW OPEN DATA IMPROVES GOVERNMENT



SOCRATA OPEN EXPENDITURES™Government spending is another area that can be confusing to citizens. Because citizens care about where their money is spent, conversations around government spending can be volatile, especially when spending is unclear. Smart governments committed to serving citizens have a strong incentive to help taxpayers understand spending. Governments also have an opportunity to help sophisticated data consumers, such as journalists and business owners, understand the data. Open Expenditures™ helps fulfill this mission by presenting spending data in a detailed, understandable way.

With Open Expenditures™, citizens can explore government spending

to where funds are allocated. For example, a user can view the relative amount spent on park maintenance, public art, school buses, and more. Citizens can also explore trends in spending over time, browse the data by government vendor to see which companies are hired by their government (for example, if their city hires the same firm for both road construction and maintenance), and browse the spending by specific payment to see the details around payments to vendors. This app also benefits businesses by offering insight into how their competitors are serving the government. Ultimately, this app recognizes that citizens have the right to see how the government spends their money in a format they can

understand, regardless of financial expertise.

Socrata’s suite of financial transparency apps expand the conversation around budgets and spending, and will bolster public participation in governance. These apps are designed to be meaningful to all audiences, ensuring all stakeholders will be able to understand where the money comes from, how it is allocated, and where it’s going. Making these apps available to citizens demonstrates a government’s commitment to transparency and openness.

Want to learn more? Visit socrata.com/products/custom-web-and-mobile-apps-government-data today.

5 QUESTIONS TO ASK WHEN CREATING YOUR OPEN DATA POLICYBy Ian Kalin, Director of Open Data

Since the dawn of the Internet, we have seen an evolution of online services as extensible technology platforms that enable users, application developers, and other collaborators to create value that extends far beyond the original offering itself. The same principles that have shaped the consumer web are now permeating government. Forward-thinking public sector organizations are catching on to the idea that, to stay relevant and vital, governments must go beyond offering a few basic services online. Some have even come to the realization that they are custodians of an enormously valuable resource: the data they collect through their day-to-day operations. By opening up this data for public consumption online, innovative governments are facilitating the same kind of digital networks that consumer web services have fostered for years. The era of government as a platform is here, and open data is the catalyst.

Our suite of financial transparency apps demonstrate clearly many aspects of government finances. For example, citizens can easily understand the difference between capital budget vs. operating budget, and can see itemized lists of government expenditures.

http://www.socrata.com/products/custom-web-and-mobile-apps-government-data




SMARTER GOVERNMENTSMARTER GOVERNMENT

P olicymakers seeking to frame a transparency and innovation program within a government often

have questions. As active participants in the era of open government, we hear their questions all the time. A common question is, “What should I include in my open data policy?” as is, “How do I know if my draft open data policy is good?” These are great questions with complicated answers, even for seasoned advocates who have been through the trenches of policy creation. There is no single way to create an open data policy. Imagine you are an architect and someone comes to you and asks you to design them the perfect house. You, the savvy architect, will ask: “What size house do you need? Do you have any children? Can you afford a fancy home downtown?” Open data policy works in a similar way. The definition of what is actually best depends on who you are, what you do, and what you are trying to achieve. With this context in mind, here are five key questions to consider when crafting an open data policy.

1. WHAT IS YOUR ROLE WITHIN THE ORGANIZATION?Open data policies usually come from legislators, elected officials, or government managers. Each of these stakeholders can choose from four buckets of open data policy types, including new laws, non-binding resolutions, executive orders, and internal regulations or memorandums. Every bucket is

not available to each stakeholder. Government managers cannot pass new laws by themselves. Still, others have more than a few options at their disposal. Elected officials can often issue executive orders, memos, and non-binding resolutions. Additionally, your seniority within your organization influences your ability to create impact with all types of tools. A memo from a President can go further than a resolution from a secondary advisory council. (Not that a President is necessarily more connected than a town council. In this context, they are just different in terms of scope.) Answering this question can help you determine which of the tools are available to you.

2. HOW DO YOU CHOOSE BETWEEN THE POLICY MODELS?Each model has strengths and weaknesses. Laws can be the most difficult to create, but they tend to have the greatest impact, particularly in terms of their ability to allocate public funds. Non-binding resolutions tend to have the least impact on government operations, or public benefit for that matter, but they are relatively quick and easy to create. Executive orders often have the power of law, and recent experiences (e.g. The White House and New York State) demonstrate that they can be extraordinarily detailed in terms of how public agencies should work together. Therefore, executive orders are often the most impactful. The big drawback to executive orders

is they tend to disappear when an administration ends. This is why many executive orders are often codified into full-fledged laws once an elected official reaches a twilight period. Internal memos can be effective, particularly when issued by a senior leader and paired with a previously issued executive order or law. Internal memos can also apply to the smaller government office trying to get started with open data and wants to make sure basic levels of privacy are protected in those early experiments. These tools have their own merits and should be considered based on the objectives and constraints.

3. HOW DETAILED SHOULD I GET AND DO I NEED TO FIND A BUDGET?Generally speaking, the longer it takes to issue a policy, the less valuable it is to include highly granular details. Technology moves faster than regulations. That said, good open data policies should not shy away from technical details if they want the overall program to be effective. Interoperability and standards are a major aspect of what makes these policies successful. Consider the San Francisco open data policy, which includes guidance for common metadata and the use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Without having to specifically walk through technical conditions like cardinality or JSON syntax, the leaders of the open data program can leverage those overarching guidelines

to better integrate data catalogs between city departments. Once you get to this stage of open data policy development, the question of money isn’t far behind. All open data policies, when well executed, lead to cost savings, efficiency improvements for governments, and even job creation. In a perfect world, open data policies would pay for themselves without any type of new investment. But the reality is that government procurement systems do not recognize cost savings the way the commercial sector does. Therefore, in order to spur faster activity and strengthen the level of support for open data, it is highly recommended that some modest amount of financial allocation be included in the policy, as long as it does not cause an extensive delay or even a blockage of the overall policy.

4. WHAT ARE THE BASELINE CHARACTERISTICS OF AN OPEN DATA POLICY?Every open data policy should include or be inf luenced by the following elements:

• High-level term definitions like “Data is…” and “Chief Privacy Officer shall be…”

• Statement on government’s responsibility to empower their citizens

• The need to embrace best practices from other sectors, such as leveraging new

technology to deliver improved government services

• Open data is rooted in American history (or at least some local, earlier transparency policy)

• Open data programs must protect individual privacy, confidentiality and security

For an example of a sample resolution or assistance in creating your own open data policy, download Socrata’s Open Data Companion Kit.

5. WHAT IF I WANT TO BE AMBITIOUS?Bravo! It’s difficult enough to get new policies issued, so you might as well include the bigger items if you are going to go down this path. Here are some of the major items we recommend, based on what leading government leaders have already delivered:

• Have an “open by default” policy foundation that builds on existing policies like privacy protection and freedom of information. Use detailed definitions: Open data includes… Oversight authority is…

• Create comprehensive, internal inventories, and then public catalogs online. Include ongoing volume and quality updates.

• Include common core metadata and use unique identifiers for datasets.

• Create an oversight authority with established ownership. Who needs to do what and who can hold them accountable?

• Mandate the release of new data, online in machine-readable and human readable formats, with minimal license restrictions on use and on a single, authoritative portal.

• Mandate systems for prioritizing data release and perform actions against a public and ambitious timeline.

• Focus on the citizen-customer and include a framework for public feedback.

• Provides some level of funding or resources to actually get this stuff done. With or without public funding, plan to leverage public-private partnerships.

• Integrate with “My Data” and “Big Data” programs.

Successful and impactful open data policy isn’t created in a day, or in a vacuum. By asking the right questions before you begin, you can determine the best course of action for creating your own open data policy. Of course, in addressing these five questions, you might end up with even more questions. There are resources available to help you. We at Socrata would love to help you get going.


Spanning the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay area in California, Alameda County boasts a population of more than 1.5 million residents, which puts the County on par with Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and just under Houston, Texas. The size of Alameda County isn’t what makes it remarkable, however. What’s most remarkable about Alameda County is its success in engaging with its citizens in a way that makes this large county feel more like a small town. Few communities are as involved with their local government as the residents of Alameda County. So, what is the County’s secret to community collaboration?

ALAMEDA COUNTY THE GOLD STANDARD IN COMMUNITY COLLABORATION By Alida Moore


SMARTER GOVERNMENT

“A lameda County has long had a commitment to collaboration, partnerships, and

community involvement, so much so that it has become an integral part of our culture,” says Susan S. Muranishi, County Administrator. This commitment means the County is constantly asking itself, “How can we better serve our citizens? How can we leverage technology to improve services to our residents? How can we engage our youth?” These questions

led Muranishi and Chief Information Officer/Registrar of Voters Tim Dupuis to explore the world of open data. “Our policy makers were very interested in data sharing,” Muranishi explains. “We’ve been talking about it for a long time. As the doors opened up, we realized we had a tremendous goldmine in the form of information we could make available to the public in a user-friendly format.” To quickly publish that data and make it accessible to citizens, Muranishi and Dupuis launched Alameda County’s



successful Data Sharing Initiative. Dupuis pushed the effort forward. “We knew open data was a key area we needed to explore. It was being spearheaded at the federal level by the White House and we wanted to get involved at the local level,” he says. “We started a committee around open data and data sharing amongst all County departments. We came to Socrata to tilt up our open data portal.” Muranishi was impressed by Dupuis ability to win leadership buy-in. “Tim was able to determine how to get value out of our data quickly. He convened department heads and made it a priority to help them understand why we were adopting this open data model. It wasn’t perceived as a threat because people can understand that the data is already available; let’s just make it easier and more accessible to our constituents and our community as well,” Muranishi says.

The community as a whole needed a way to share the data. The selection of the right portal was important, as well as the tools the portal provides. Alameda County has more than 100 datasets available on its Socrata portal, including crime statistics, restaurant inspection data, and even a bedbug dataset. “The portal allows users to filter down to find more information on what is most interesting to them,” says Dupuis. “A blogger took the restaurant inspection data, filtered down to the Taco Bell dataset, and featured that information in a blog post, sharing it with the community. This is something we at the County might not have had

the time or bandwidth to do, so we focus on delivering the data to the community to examine in a way that is interesting to them.” Muranishi echoes the enthusiasm for the data portal and explains how it led to the idea that would revolutionize the ways in which the County interacts

with its citizens. “The way the portal was set up opened our eyes to how we could use it,” she says. “We had all this data that was of interest to our citizens. We examined the priorities for our open data initiative and our next step was clear: it was time to run our first hackathon.”

APPS CHALLENGESEach Apps Challenge is a one-day hackathon where teams are formed to create apps from Alameda County data. Dupuis and his team invite participation from residents of all skill levels and age

groups, include professional and novice developers, high school and college students, senior citizens, and anyone with a passion for civic engagement, regardless of technical background. After a brief overview and a couple of keynote addresses from the sponsoring board member and a County representative, the attendees form teams based on interest specified as part of the registration process, as well as a brief “idea pitch” session. The first Apps Challenge was phenomenally successful. The event was held at Castro Valley Library in late 2012 and had more than 120 participants. “It was a learning experience for us,” says Dupuis. “The outcome was tremendous. We had about 25 app ideas at the end of the day.” The winning app was AC BookIt!, a clever mobile app that allows users to use their smartphones to scan the UPC code on any book to find out if that book was available in the Alameda County library system. Users can connect their library card to the app and, if the book is available,

the app will reserve it and give driving directions to the library branch holding it. “They were able to create this app in a day and it’s now available for download in the iTunes app store,” says Dupuis proudly. A team of students from Castro Valley High

School (CVHS) developed the second place app, ACPR Finder. “They took our park data and created a website that allows you to filter different criteria,” Dupuis explains. “Do you want to walk your dog? Have a fire pit? Play volleyball? Their app filters your interests and locates the best park and provides driving directions.” The

Apps Challenges allow the County to promote its open data. But more than that, they provide a venue to meet the youth of the community and show them what their government does, while inviting them to apply their skills to benefit the entire community. Dupuis and his team held the second Apps Challenge in the spring of 2013 and the third in the beginning of May 2014.

RETHINK AC In today’s world of technology, hackathons are a popular way to drive innovation. What’s unique about Alameda County is the dedication to collaborate not only with residents, but also with County employees. Once Muranishi and Dupuis saw the success of the Apps Challenges, they knew they could leverage that formula within the walls of the County. “It just made sense to do the same thing internally,”

(Top) Tim Dupuis welcomes participants to an acApps challenge. (Bottom) Tim Dupuis poses with the winners of the challenge after presenting the prize check of $3,000.

Socrata Product Lead Clint Tseng presents at an apps challenge. Many Socrata developers, engineers, and other team members travel all over the country to support local hackathons and events.

The first Apps Challenge was phenomenally successful. The event was held at Castro Valley Library in late 2012 and had more than 120 participants.


SMARTER GOVERNMENT

ALL ABOUT THE YOUTHOne common driver of the programs in Alameda County is the commitment to youth engagement. From the YLA and Apps Challenges, to a program called New Beginnings that focuses on job training for youth in the foster care system, the County is dedicated to teaching young citizens how to be civic engagement superstars. “It’s natural for us to involve our youth in open data because they are tech-savvy,” says Muranishi. “Many know how to code and they are all quite creative. We have plans to connect with other groups, such as Black Girls

of government, including it as part of both the Youth and Adult Leadership Academies. The Youth and Adult Leadership Academies are programs that give county residents of all ages the opportunity to learn about and discuss County programs and services. The Youth Leadership Academy (YLA) in particular also helps develop leadership skills and meet other students throughout the County. It is an award-winning program. Both academies now conclude with a mini-hackathon session in which participants are given a flipchart and 45 minutes to create an app idea on which they give a three-minute presentation. Teams have even been known to create mobile screen mockups to include in their presentations.

their own operating needs,” she says. Eighteen app ideas came out of the event. The County has already begun developing one, a calendar mobile app that gives public employees a central location to learn about County events. Employees originally had to go to specific areas of the website to find events. This app allows them to see all events in one place, improving efficiency. “What I liked with the internal event is that it allowed a dialogue between employees and department heads to share ideas,” says Dupuis. “It gave us the opportunity to encourage and recognize the creativity and energy our employees have around their work.”

Muranishi and Dupuis have brought the hackathon model to other areas

says Muranishi. “We have more than 9,000 employees -- what better way to get people engaged across departments and see what their ideas are? For Rethink AC, we focus on collaboration and invite people from different departments to work together.” The event is limited to 100 people and the first one happened in September 2013, with attendees representing a broad cross-section of all departments. Rethink AC is run just like the Apps Challenges. Muranishi remarks on the different perspective County employees are able to bring to the table. “We’ve been focused on government efficiency and transparency. Our employees came up with fabulous ideas because they work within the government, know the information clients and constituents are looking for, and understand

Alameda County has been awarded and recognized by several organizations for its innovation and dedication to civic engagement.

AWARDS

2013 Driving Digital Government – County

Government

Center for Digital Government

2013 Merit Award Recipient for Alameda County

Data Sharing Initiative

California State Association of Counties (CSAC)

2013 Best of the Web Award – 1st Place, County

Portal Category

Center for Digital Government

RECOGNITION

2013 Spotlight on Large Urban Counties –

Leadership in Action - Technology

National Association of Counties (NACO Large Urban

County Caucus (LUCC)

2014 Public CIO Magazine, A Visual Tour of a

Winning Website

Government Technology

2013 Apps Challenges and Citizen Engagement

Silicon Valley Leadership Group

(Opposite page) A group of students presents an app idea to the audience of the Apps Challenge. (This page) Apps Challenge attendees work on their app idea.

Open data promises to put public information to work, mostly through apps for easier parking, permitting, healthcare access, and more. What does all of this convenience mean for those working in government? In many government agencies, embracing open data has led to the automation of processes that once consumed thousands of staff hours and millions of tax dollars. The following is a quick tour of some of the processes replaced by open data. By Bridget Quigg

6PROCESSES REPLACED BY OPEN DATA



Code, Techbridge, and others working with youth to help develop job skills and training.” To further this mission, the County has a strong internship program. Recent summer interns were found via the first Apps Challenge. The team of CVHS students who created the ACPR Finder app enjoyed the process of learning about what happens at the county level so much that they became interns. “We have

a shuttle bus for our employees that serves the public as well,” says Dupuis. “Originally, the shuttle schedule was one sheet of paper. The interns were tasked with creating a mobile friendly website of that schedule paper. They went above and beyond with this project. They tied it in with Google Maps Street View and with the Google routing system so users can figure out their exact route. It combined a multi-mobile system.” Dupuis and his team work closely with interns, teaching them good coding practice, how to create an enterprise system, and even how to market their ideas, share vision, and get department buy-in. “As a result of his internship, one of the youth declared his major as computer science. His work with the County had an impact on his entire education and future career,” says Dupuis.

1. BUDGET REPORTINGRaleigh, North Carolina knows its citizens will ask for information about how tax dollars are spent. That is why you can go to its open data portal, data.raleighnc.gov, and find budget data in dynamic spreadsheets for the current and past fiscal years. The City also offers 140 visualizations of the data, addressing typical questions and requests for information from citizens. And, these charts and graphs are automatically updated each time the budget numbers change.

“[Open data is] a productivity tool for us so we don’t have to have a human being at the end of every question or every request for information,” says Gail Roper, Chief Information and Community Relations Officer for Raleigh. “It benefits the taxpayers that

LIGHTNING FAST INNOVATIONPeople often assume it takes years to see this amount of success from an open data program. Alameda County proves that innovation, dedication, and collaboration drive success, not years. The County launched its open data portal in July of 2012, just under two years ago. In that short amount of time, the hard work of Muranishi, Dupuis, and team has driven the

entire County forward, setting it apart as a leading innovator and thought-leader within the United States. The County’s success is on par with New York City and Chicago and has earned recognition, accolades, and numerous awards. [See sidebar]Dupuis has been recognized by the California County Information Services Directors Association (CCISDA). He and his team have developed a white paper on how to run a successful hackathon and Dupuis has been asked to present at the next CCISDA conference. To demonstrate his knowledge, Dupuis will be running a mini-hackathon at the conference. For now, Muranishi and Dupuis remained focused on learning more about how new technologies can serve County residents. They’ve learned the ropes of social media, leveraging Facebook

for event promotion, Twitter for live-tweeting hackathons, and Pinterest to curate all the ideas that are born of these events. Dupuis even has Google Glass and is already identifying ways in which wearable tech will impact the landscape of government work.

To anyone newer to the open data movement, or just beginning to lay the groundwork of an open data initiative, Alameda County serves as the gold standard of how to be phenomenally effective in a very short amount of time. In the spirit of collaboration, Muranishi and Dupuis share their advice to those who are taking their first steps into open data. “It’s a matter of being committed and open to innovation and change” says Muranishi. “Alameda County is fortunate because we have executive buy-in. Our leaders have embraced open data and encourage us to push the envelope in regards to government transparency. It’s a priority for us to engage with all of our stakeholders including our constituents, clients, and community. The open data initiative is a win-win for us – the community has access to our data and we, in turn, have engaged and encouraged them to use that data to help the County improve services and be more efficient and effective,” she says. Dupuis agrees. “Having that leadership support opens up the opportunities for our team to be creative. We know we have to do this because our leaders are asking us to do this. We have the opportunity to be creative, learn new things, and it’s worked out to be a catalyst for new ideas as a whole.”

To anyone newer to the open data movement, or just beginning to lay the groundwork of an open data initiative, Alameda County serves as the gold standard of how to be phenomenally effective in a very short amount of time.

https://data.raleighnc.gov



we’re not having to provide staffing at a level we’ve had to in the past because of the technology.” Other cities are either developing or already using real-time budgeting apps, like New York City’s Checkbook NYC 2.0 application or Boston’s CheckBook Explorer.

Raleigh’s “Citizen Experience” Goals:Listen to Raleigh, NC’s Gail Roper talk about her vision of 24/7 self-service government.

2. CAMPAIGN FINANCE REPORTINGBefore the City and County of San Francisco (CCSF) launched an open data portal in 2012, its leadership promoted the idea that the portal would be a “one-stop destination for all approved City data.” The CCSF Ethics Commission embraced this idea by uploading automatically, nightly, all campaign finance information it received from candidates leading up to its fall 2012 elections.

Steven Massey, Information Technology Officer for the CCSF Ethics Commission, not only worked

to move all campaign finance data on to the SFCC portal, data.sfgov.org, he had it then automatically publish to user-friendly, embedded charts on sfethics.org. “We’ve gotten really good feedback from the community about these charts, since they are much easier to read than our PDF financial reports. Now, when people call in, you direct them to the site and you’re done,” says Massey. Prior to posting the data regularly, Massey says the campaign finance data was most valuable to reporters and made it into the newspaper quite a bit. Now it’s in demand from a broader audience of citizens, like students and researchers.

San Francisco Saves Time:Read the whole story the Ethic Commission’s automation of campaign finance data sharing.

3. SNOW PLOW UPDATESWhat annual event can people in Chicago most rely upon? The arrival of winter snow storms. This chilly reality makes driving extra hazardous until snow plows appear. Since citizens have a strong interest in snow plows and their progress, the City decided to field fewer phone calls and feed real-time snow plow location updates through

their open data portal to a web and mobile application.

Chicago has a page on its open data portal called Chicago Shovels with a variety of data-driven features, like information about a mobile app for taxi sharing called Taxi Share Chicago and an app for finding food and shelter called iFinditChicago. Local civic hacking leader Derek Eder, owner of civic app and data visualization company DataMade, has even created his own snow plow tracking application using the City’s data. “We have this website we created called ClearStreets, which gathers GPS data from the city about snow plows. We plot the path of where plows have been,” Eder explains. “You can find out if your street has been plowed yet and if so, when.”

4. PATENT DATA REPORTINGPeter Threlkel, Director of the Corporation Division for the Oregon Secretary of State, needed a way to post data from Oregon’s small-scale trademark program online in a searchable database. As he says, “People used to have to call us or submit a public records request and every month we’d give them a copy of the database and all the images that we had on CD-ROM.” Threlkel wanted a more automated approach.

He looked at some custom solutions from IT vendors, and one bid he received proposed the State build a one-off, customized $500,000 system. That approach was too expensive for such a small program. Fortunately,

he realized that the State’s open data portal could host and serve the information. As a result, the database is now online, up-to-date, API-enabled, and easily searchable, holding trademark data dating back to 1920, with Tiffany & Co.

$500,000 Saved with Open Data: Watch our State of Oregon video case study about moving daily request for information to the state’s open data portal.

5. ENVIRONMENTAL DATA REPORTINGMany government agencies publish annual reports. Expensive to produce, print, and ship, these paper-based reports are often hundreds of pages long, take thousands of hours to create, and are out of date by the time they are completed.

Washington State’s Governor’s Salmon Recovery Office (GSRO) had a report due every two years that took six months to produce. The data was reported in a variety of formats and only offered as “roll-ups” on a limited number of species and locations. “I wanted to move to something less

expensive, more frequently updated, and more accessible to the public,” says Kaleen Cottingham, Director of the Recreation and Conservation Office, which manages the GSRO.

By using the State’s open data portal to host the data, the GSRO team made the report accessible online and created embeddable charts and maps that could be shared and updated automatically every time new information came in. The new digital report allows citizens, students, and researchers to view more highly-detailed, raw data by species and tributary. The response to the improved report has been outstanding, including more school-aged children looking at the data and scientists around the world reviewing and analyzing the data more easily.

6. FOIA REQUESTSChicago’s open data program predates the majority of those in the U.S., and has benefited from strong leadership support from Mayor Rahm Emanuel. As a result, the City has had the opportunity to not only streamline processes, but measure the results.

In a recent report “Open Data Annual Report 2013,” the City of Chicago announced that by making the data available on its open data portal, its Department of Public Health (CDPH) has experienced a 65 percent drop in the number of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for environmental records over a nine month period. Though the exact numbers of staff hours and resources saved was not reported, this shift is clearly a time and money saver.

Chicago’s report goes on to state that it will continue to study which data is most often requested via FOIA and work to place those datasets on the City’s open data portal, data.cityofchicago.org.

LIMITLESS POSSIBILITIES FOR AUTOMATION AND EFFICIENCYSince government agencies hold so much useful information - permit requests, tax revenue numbers, public pool schedules, school test scores, crime statistics, public parking prices, and more - millions of citizens seek out information from them every year. Open data has created the opportunity to pull that process away from the phone or static PDF and automate it. Citizens are empowered to use the data while staff are free to work on other tasks and process improvements.

What other processes have been or should be replaced by open data? Send your stories to [email protected].

http://www.checkbooknyc.com/spending_landing/yeartype/B/year/115

https://data.cityofboston.gov/checkbook/2013

https://data.cityofboston.gov/checkbook/2013

http://www.socrata.com/webinars/open-data-cx-creating-great-citizen-experience




https://data.sfgov.org

http://www.sfethics.org

http://www.socrata.com/case-study/set-it-and-forget-it-saves-san-francisco-staff-time/




http://taxisharechicago.com

http://taxisharechicago.com

http://ifinditchicago.wordpress.com

http://datamade.us

http://clearstreets.org

https://data.oregon.gov/Business/Trademark-Description/7ryy-etch

http://www.socrata.com/video-case-study-oregon-webinar-2





http://report.cityofchicago.org/open-data-2013.pdf

http://report.cityofchicago.org/open-data-2013.pdf

https://data.cityofchicago.org

mailto:blog%40socrata.com?subject=


GROWING CHICAGO’S OPEN DATA ECONOMY By Bridget Quigg

Derek Eder stays busy. In one week he’ll work with nonprofit groups, a city leader on the other side of the globe, data journalists

investigating city policy, and artists creating installations inspired by data. His business is booming. What’s his specialty? Open data. Eder is among a growing group of Chicago developers and researchers who have discovered new revenue streams thanks to Chicago’s open data portal. Some build apps, some provide policy insights, but all of them send an invoice when their work is done. “The goals for our open data program include transparency, accountability and economic development. We like to see businesses take the data we publish

and put it to work,” says Brenna Berman, Commissioner and Chief Information Officer at the Department of Innovation and Technology for the City of Chicago. Eder agrees. “I make my living either developing products with open data or teaching others to do so. Chicago has a robust civic hacker community and the city is very involved in supporting it,” he says. One of those key supporters is Tom Schenk, Director of Analytics and Performance Management for the City. He’s easy to meet in person. Simply attend one of the city’s weekly Open Gov hack nights at startup hub 1871 and you’ll likely see him there. Schenk was active in the local civic hacker community before he worked for the city. “We have the best developer

http://www.meetup.com/OpenGovChicago/

http://www.meetup.com/OpenGovChicago/

http://www.1871.com


community in the country. That community exists thanks to constant access and clear communication between the City and its developers. And, Chicago is fortunate to have strong leadership from Mayor Rahm Emanuel,” says Schenk. He points to Chicago’s Open Data Executive Order signed into law in 2012 which states, “the timely online publication of public data will empower Chicago’s residents...to participate in government in a meaningful manner, to assist in identifying possible solutions to pressing governmental problems, and to promote innovative strategies for

social progress and economic growth.” “Chicago started early with a strong commitment to open data and now businesses and projects are emerging that rely on machine-readable, public data,” says Schenk.

Which ambitious companies are putting open data to work? Find out about five organizations that are defining the space and the innovators moving them forward.

1. DATAMADEFor Apps and Open Data Education DataMade emerged out of Chicago’s civic hacker community. In 2011, founder Derek Eder started working on civic technology as a volunteer for open government and open source technology collaborative Open City, the group that hosts Open Gov Hack Nights for Chicago area hackers. Some of their most well-known and popular apps include Chicago Lobbyists, Clear Streets, and Second City Zoning. In 2012, Eder started DataMade, offering custom visualizations, civic apps, and training for people to work with open data. Since then, Eder has taken on a business partner, Forest Gregg, and hired a full time employee, web developer Eric van Zanten. The DataMade team only takes on projects that hold to its “Three Os”: open data, open source, and open government. Eder says, “We want to deepen and sustain the impact of civic technology.” Their formula is working. DataMade has about fifteen clients right now, ranging from DePaul University to Macoupin County, IL to the Chicago Sun-Times. Eder says he owes much of his success to the hard work put in by the open data team at the City of Chicago. He points out that open data needs to be released by every agency at the City of Chicago and there has to be somebody assigned as an open data officer for each city agency. “The fact that the


City continues to invest in resources and people like Tom Schenk and his team to go out and find data to release, and continue to maintain the open data infrastructure, strengthens the City’s open data portal,” Eder says. He wants to see more companies coming out of the open data hacking community, turning it from “a community of enthusiasts and people doing this stuff part-time to people trying to make new businesses or doing consulting like DataMade does,” he says. Now that open data is Eder’s full time gig, he spends more and more time giving people advice on what to do with their community to make it more like Chicago, from a government and policy perspective. But, he’s not done with creating more businesses based on open data in Chicago. “I think there is a ton of potential to grow something even bigger here in Chicago,” says Eder. “The nature of our community is an open one. We share technology and we share ideas. And, a lot of the stuff that is applicable in Chicago can be applied to other cities like New York and vice versa.”

2. PURPLE BINDERIn Service of Others How do caseworkers keep track of the hundreds of services available to their clients? Imagine a large, purple,

three-ring binder, stuffed with papers, some dating back to the 1990s. That is what Purple Binder founders Joseph Flesh and Declan Frye discovered one day and what inspired them to find a better way to centralize social services data. Flesh and Frye recognized a strong need they could

build a business around. “A lot of social workers have spent a lot of time to gather information for their clients. They’re excited that someone has stepped up to put the resources they need to serve their clients in one place,” Flesh says. And, their work has already pointed them towards other opportunities, such as improving healthcare delivery. Flesh offers the example of a homeless man who leaves the hospital and needs not just shelter, but also mental health support or help acquiring medications. “We want to connect the worlds of healthcare and social services. They’re part of the same continuum of care for many people. We’re making it much easier for healthcare organizations to keep patients healthy,” says Flesh.

Civic innovation enthusiasts at the 2013 National Day of Civic Hacking in Chicago.

We want to connect the worlds of healthcare and social services. They’re part of the same continuum of care for many people. We’re making it much easier for healthcare organizations to keep patients healthy.

The nature of our community is an open one. We share

technology and we share ideas. And, a lot of the stuff that is applicable in Chicago can be

applied to other cities like New York and vice versa.

http://datamade.us

http://opencityapps.org

http://www.chicagolobbyists.org



http://secondcityzoning.org

http://purplebinder.com


Currently, Purple Binder is running a hospital pilot at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) hospital, and about 2500 social workers across Chicago use their service. They’re starting to expand outside of Chicago with a project at the City of Pomona, California. Frye recalls a success story from their early days, saying, “It was the summer of 2012, right after we’d launched. A lot of my time was spent cold calling caseworkers and trying to get the word out. I called one and she said, ‘Oh, I’ve heard of Purple Binder. I use it. Just yesterday I had a woman in here with a newborn baby who needed diapers. I found out that there was a church three blocks away giving away free diapers. I wouldn’t have known that without Purple Binder.’”

The company employs four people on its core team, as well as a team of researchers with social services

experience. And, the team is contributing data back to the City of Chicago about which services are provided through which grants. “We’re creating this data ecosystem

that is giving data back. What we took in as grants data, we’re giving back as services data,” says Frye. Purple Binder is also supporting efforts by the United Way to standardize data used for its 211 human services hotline. When asked how he feels about his work, Frye is passionate. He says, “People I went to college with are building technology to share pictures of cupcakes. When I talk to social workers in Chicago and they tell me that they’ve used Purple Binder, it’s really satisfying.”

3. ROB PARAL & ASSOCIATESFaster Problem Solving

Rob Paral has been in the business of social services policy consulting in Chicago for 15 years. But, his career began 25 years ago. He works primarily with governments, philanthropic foundations, and not-for-profits, doing demographic and GIS work to help them understand the populations they serve. “In the old days, people like me wrote 30-page reports all the time, but today things are leaning towards apps that are user-directed and interactive,” says Paral. The City of Chicago is one of his clients. Paral’s work for them has changed since open data came along. Right after Mayor Emanuel was elected in 2011, Paral was hired to create a


website showing Chicago residents where arts resources and festivals were located in their community. He remembers making one-off requests, by phone and email, to agencies for data. “Sometimes you had to cajole the person on the phone to give you the information,” says Paral. Compare that to a more recent project he’s leading for the State of Illinois, the City of Chicago, the United Way, and the Chicago Community Trust. He’s creating a map mashup to show where human services are delivered in a city, such as childcare, healthcare, and domestic violence counseling. Rather than make one-off requests by phone for data, he’s able to use the city’s open data portal to extract up-to-date human service contracts information. “For a public policy researcher, you’re moving away from that transactional one-off request, agency by agency, which was very time consuming. It could kill a project because it took so long to get information. Open data makes projects more feasible. The half-life of projects is a lot faster now,” he says. Paral cares about the quality and quantity of human services government provide. He’d love to get his hands on even more data. “Open data is still nascent. It needs more government agencies to participate. The City of Chicago is a star among cities in the quantity, scale, and scope of their data,” says Paral.

4. CARTOGRAFIKAArt Made with Data Adam Jentleson and Jose Alarcon met at University of Illinois at Chicago in the Urban Planning and Policy program. They both took Geographic Information Systems (GIS) classes and became interested in mapping. Before a study session in late 2011, Alarcon showed Jentleson a framed map of buildings in Chicago he had created and hung on his wall. He’d marked his building. It was art. “I thought it was an amazing idea. It opened up the floodgates,” says Jentleson. The team began making maps for family and friends as low-cost gifts, and soon they were getting commissions for fresh designs from cities as far away as Amsterdam and Hong Kong. Jentleson and Alarcon bring in data from various sources, like OpenStreetMap and city open data portals. They create their own spatial data if a client’s requested geographic features are unavailable, which they eventually intend on sharing with the open data community. “For Chicago maps we use a lot of the open data, specifically the building footprints. Same goes for other cities with portals like New York and San Francisco,” says Jentleson. They then use design software to finish off the maps, adding colors and gradients. Once the pair completes a commission

Open data is still nascent. It needs more government agencies to

participate. The City of Chicago is a star among cities in the quantity,

scale, and scope of their data.

Purple Binder team members meeting at their offices in Chicago (left to right): Director of User Experience Benjamin Bertin, CTO Declan Frye, and President Joseph Flesh.

http://www.robparal.com


they sell it again on online craft marketplace Etsy. “It’s a side business right now. We make 75 percent of our revenue on Etsy and 25 percent from new commissions,” says Jentleson.

During the day, Alarcon works as a senior GIS analyst for an intergovernmental agency called the

South Suburban Mayors & Managers Association. Jentleson works at UIC, using his skills in the public health sphere to investigate how the physical built environment impacts childhood obesity rates and tobacco use. What’s next for Cartografika? More maps, certainly. But, the team also is finding work as consultants doing geospatial analysis for real estate development firms and other companies. “We’re planning to expand our scope of services. Right now, it’s mostly art for walls.”

5. SMART CHICAGO COLLABORATIVESupporting New Business If the Chicago open data community is the playing field, the Smart Chicago Collaborative is home base. For example, it currently supports or employs DataMade, Purple Binder, and Rob Paral & Associates. It even gave DataMade office space at 1871 for the first 10 months of its existence. Co-founded by the Chicago Community Trust, the McArthur Foundation, and the City of Chicago, Smart Chicago aims to use technology to improve the lives of Chicagoans. More specifically, they focus on access to the Internet, digital skills, and data-oriented content for residents. In doing so, they incubate new companies and fund projects that use the City’s open data.

Executive Director Daniel X. O’Neil wants companies in Chicago to produce civic technology products that citizens can’t live without. “We focus on companies. We’re moving towards more of a product focus, than a project focus, by thinking about business models from the start,” says O’Neil. To support their goal of creating useful products, Smart Chicago maintains a civic user-testing group of 800 Chicago residents. “We’re listening to people. We want to find out what they like and don’t like about the civic products, then make products that appeal to them,” says O’Neil. And, O’Neil and team truly seek to support the creation of organizations rather than grow their own group. “Our model is to have a very small staff (just three of us) and support the Chicago data ecosystem with the rest of our budget,” says O’Neil. He believes there is infinite space to grow in the civic data technology field. And, he credits the City of Chicago with working hard to release data and interact directly with its civic hackers. “[The City] publishes a lot of data and Tom Schenk is a huge force in the local data ecosystem. He’s always around and always available.”

What are some of the latest open data companies springing up in Chicago? Smart Chicago consultant and open data activist Chris Whitaker has started a new business

called CivicWhitaker, while open source software developer Karl Fogel is continuing to produce open data products for government. O’Neil and the Smart Chicago are ready to support them both.

MORE NEW BUSINESSES ON THE WAYChicago’s trend towards entrepreneurship in the open data civic hacker community is one that locals hope continues. “We have a lot of room to grow. There is a lot of product development to do still and we need more companies and individuals to participate in the civic innovation sector of

the technology industry here in Chicago,” says O’Neil. Where will he find these new leaders? You’ll likely find O’Neil, Schenk, Eder, and others at the weekly OpenGov hack night at 1871, inspiring the next generation of open data entrepreneurs.

Cartografika art created using GIS data provided by the City

of Chicago (left) and the City of Boston (right).

We have a lot of room to grow. There is a lot of product development to do still and we need more companies and individuals to participate in the civic innovation sector of the technology industry here in Chicago.

Chicago hackers celebrate together at the 2013 holiday party hosted in Preston Bradley Hall at the Chicago CulturalCenter.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/Cartografika

http://cartografika.net

IN FOCUSHIGHLIGHTING KEY PLAYERS AND TOPICS IN OPEN DATA


WHY GOVERNMENTS MUST EMBRACE THE STRATEGIC VALUE OF OPEN DATABy Safouen Rabah, Vice President of Product and Tim Cashman, Senior Content Strategist

Governments today face a series of formidable challenges that demand new ways of thinking. Budget constraints, mounting pressure to increase efficiency and reduce costs, and the mandate to provide more visibility for citizens into planning and decision-making processes are somewhere near the top of the list. Yet, embedded in these obstacles are enormous opportunities for governments to increase the value they provide to a range of constituents—from citizens and community leaders to businesses and academic institutions. More emphatically, the public sector has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redefine its place in society as an enabler of innovation, a champion of social and economic progress, and a model of how to get things done.

Historically, governments have gotten mired in thinking that no issue is beyond their purview; that it is government’s job to support an ever-expanding menu of programs and

projects, regardless of how well they might be equipped to provide them. Donald Kettl called this approach “vending machine government.” In this model, citizens pay taxes in return for one-size-fits-all services. As we have all seen, this purely transactional, mechanical mode of government does not work. There are


IN FOCUS

many reasons why. Here are just a few. For one, it assumes government, even with the help of a select number of vendors, is capable of providing all of the answers to meet the needs of our increasingly complex world. Second, as a closed system, it limits innovation; it incentivizes proprietary solutions that are costly to develop and administer, and which are inflexible to change. Third, it demands almost no leadership or accountability from government and invites little public participation. Finally, related to all of these points, it is completely out of step with our modern way of life. It runs counter to the thriving shared-services economy that each of us participates in every time we book a reservation through Airbnb, use Lyft to get a ride, or look something up on Wikipedia. So if the vending machine model of government doesn’t work, what does? How should government

reframe its role in an increasingly interconnected, digital world?

GOVERNMENT AS INNOVATION ACCELERATORIf the modern economy has one central lesson, it is that being a connector and a catalyst is a really useful thing. Malcolm Gladwell, who is generally ahead of his time, wrote more than a decade ago in Tipping Point that connectors “link us up with the world,” bringing diverse resources together to generate new ideas and solve problems faster. This is an important lesson for governments to internalize and it is diametrically opposed to the vending machine model. Connectors do not promote one-to-one, transactional relationships; in fact, they go out of their way to broker conversations and relationships among people from vastly different circles. This much

is clear. But how can government organizations best fill the role of coordinator? What resource can they bring to bear to facilitate connections, illuminate new approaches to familiar issues, foster collaboration, and drive better decision making? Forward-thinking government leaders have discovered that the data their organizations collect as part of their daily operations—311 requests, building permit applications, restaurant inspection reports, and an increasing volume of data from sensor networks—can be an extremely powerful connecting agent. When thoughtfully collected and contextualized, these data elements form high-resolution pictures that can help unlock innovative solutions to age-old problems. In short, these leaders recognize the enormous strategic value of open data. Further, they have embraced the idea—ahead of their peers— that one of the most

IN FOCUS

important functions of government in the twenty-first century is as an aggregator and disseminator of the high-impact, public information at their fingertips.

Solving urban problems creatively is another area where open data is creating new opportunities for innovation. For example, the Mayor’s Geek Squad in New York City applied some standard statistical techniques and nothing but open data to solve the mystery of the grease-clogged sewers from restaurants that dump cooking oil. A process that would otherwise take an army of inspectors and months of investigative fieldwork was supplanted by more clever use of publicly available data. By reimagining the role of government as a provider of valuable data and data services, these future-oriented leaders are helping to transform the way government actually works. The alternate model of the data-driven government yields benefits across the following four areas.

Economic DevelopmentGovernments all over the world, at the local or national level, are looking for creative ways to stimulate economic activity. Several government innovators are realizing the untapped potential of taking a catalyst role in the data economy. McKinsey, in a seminal global study (October, 2013), estimates the open data economy can unlock $3 trillion in annual economic value in the areas of Education, Transportation, Healthcare, Consumer Finance, Oil

and Gas, Electricity and Consumer Products. They estimate that the potential value would be divided roughly between the United States ($1.1 trillion), Europe ($900 billion), and the rest of the world ($1.7 trillion). CapGemini, another global consultancy, estimates that the aggregate economic impact from applications based on open data across the EU27 economy is approximately €140 billion annually. If that feels too ‘global,’ consider the findings of The Wall Street Journal in a recent article titled “Open Data a Boon for Entrepreneurs,” which looked at the impact of open data on cities in the U.S. The Journal found that while the rate of new business formation declined nationally

between 2006 and 2010, the rate of new business formation in Seattle – an open data city and a Socrata customer – rose 9.41 percent in 2011, compared with the national average of 3.9 percent. Other cities where new business formation was ahead of the national average include Chicago, Austin, Baltimore, and South Bend, Indiana. All of these cities have vibrant open-data programs.

Quality of Life for ResidentsTake a look at your iPhone, or Android device and consider the beautiful array of apps you use every day. You might see Yelp, Google Maps, Uber, Zillow, and the odd Angry Birds game (for the kids, of course). While you may not see a government app, several consumer apps used by hundreds of millions of people every day, use open data to enrich their service and help people like you better connect their digital lives with the news and events taking place in their local communities. For example, Yelp uses restaurant inspection data to add a government health score to its restaurant ratings. If you live in New York City, you may use donteat.at to warn you before you go into a

restaurant that is about to be closed. When you are looking for a house, or a place to rent, you may use Zillow, a notable example of a technology startup flourishing on open data. That company established a successful business by creating a living database of homes across the United States fed by a range of sources, such as county records and tax data. Open data fuels quality-of-life innovations in

Governments all over the world, at the local or national level, are looking for creative ways to stimulate economic activity.

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/open_data_unlocking_innovation_and_performance_with_liquid_information


IN FOCUSIN FOCUS

ways only a government-as-a-platform business model can enable. Would government have thought of creating Asthmapolis (now PropellerHelath) to help asthma and COPD patients use open data to manage their condition? Would government have created consumer apps like Porch (for finding a local building contractor), OPower (to help lower your energy bill), or BillGuard (for tracking your spending and preventing fraud)? It isn’t likely. However, government did not have to “create” these services. It just needed to supply the data.

Data-Driven GovernanceImproving governance, or simply the way government works, is one of the key strategies enabled by open data. It starts with a fact-based decision making framework. Beth Blauer likes to say that gut-based decisions are unnecessary in the era of abundant data, and can be quite dangerous. Data-driven governance should lead to improved performance and accountability. The adage “what gets measured, gets done” should encourage more government leaders to set clear, measurable goals for their organization, and rigorously track performance against those goals. Improving governance does not always mean using available data more efficiently. Sometimes, crowd-sourcing new data can create insights that were impossible to collect just a few short years ago. Consider for example, Cycle Atlanta. The app uses your phone’s GPS to record your routes in real-time, allowing the City of Atlanta to know which routes cyclists prefer. The app will also allow users to report

problems along their route, such as potholes, obstructed bike lanes, etc. The information collected by the app will be used by the City of Atlanta to make strategic improvements to bicycle infrastructure.

Operational EfficiencyBy moving their information-sharing infrastructure to the cloud, government organizations can also reinvent processes, retire aging systems, and scale programs more easily. Through consolidation and re-use of IT assets, increased self-

service access to information, and a reduced system maintenance burden, government organizations can save millions in technology and staff costs. A recent study by CapGemini found, “open data and access to real-time information saved over $1 million for the city of San Francisco in the US. The city’s Chief Innovation Officer announced in June 2012 that access to real-time transit data resulted in 21.7 percent fewer SF311 calls. This decrease in call volume resulted in

savings of over $1 million a year.” CapGemini goes on to cite another example. “Openness also aids in cutting down on public expenditure as public bodies are made more accountable for financial discrepancies. For instance, in California USA, the state transparency portal (that cost around $21,000 to implement) saved the state over $20 million when visitors identified unnecessary expenditure. The savings came after visitors to the site noticed an audit that showed that many of the vehicles in the state’s fleet were not needed,” the study says. Most recently, the City of Chicago in their

open data annual report, found one of the city’s agencies saw a 65 percent decline in FOIA requests as a result of implementing a proactive open data policy.

This vision is not a utopia. Forward-thinking mayors, governors, county administrators, and federal agency leaders have already started to bring this vision to life. Scaling this movement is the next phase. And it is already under way.

KNOWLEDGE FOR EVERYONE: THE OPEN DATA

INSTITUTE By Alida Moore

I f you ever get the opportunity to visit the Open Data Institute

(ODI) in London, stop by the vending machine. While you might be tempted by the potato chips and other snacks, don’t bother searching your pockets for spare change. This vending machine, created by Ellie Harrison in 2009, scans BBC news and is programmed to dole out snacks if, and only if, its search function picks up a keyword related to the recession. “You can’t buy a snack from the machine. You have to wait until the recession gets worse,” says Gavin Starks, founding CEO of the Open Data Institute. “We had the budget announcements recently and it dumped its entire contents to the floor,” he chuckles.

By moving their information-sharing infrastructure to the cloud, government organizations can also reinvent processes, retire aging systems, and scale programs more easily.

http://theodi.org

http://theodi.org


IN FOCUSIN FOCUS

The ODI was founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt and exists, in part, to explore the different relationships we can have with data. In the case of the vending machine, that relationship manifests in a very physical way. According to the website, the ODI is “catalysing the evolution of open data culture to create economic, environmental, and social value. It helps unlock supply, generates demand, creates and disseminates knowledge to address local and global issues.” And truly, the ODI has established itself as a force to be

reckoned with. “We are in a unique moment in history,” says Starks. “You’ve got a number of different pieces coming together, from top-level political support driving a data agenda, including the G8 Open Data Charter signing, Open Government Partnership, and initiatives emerging around the world, plus interest from companies who want to produce or consume open data. You have interest from research communities who have been sharing data for years, and the fusion of that interest with grassroots organizations that have been setting the scene for open

data culture for the last 10 to 15 years,” he continues. “It’s really an exciting time to be coordinating and acting as a catalyst for open data culture.”

The main idea driving the mission of the ODI is that open data belongs to the citizens of the world. To fulfill this mission, the ODI gathers world-class experts to collaborate and innovate on new ideas and trains its teams to mentor anyone who wants to learn more about and engage with open data. For Starks,

his commitment to open data culture began back in 1993, in one of his first paid research gigs. “I reviewed all of the audio software on the web,” he remembers. “Going back quite a long way, I’ve been very involved with getting information shared freely on the web.” From his time at Godrell Bank, where he shipped massive amounts of data for scientific research, to his participation in setting up Virgin Media, Starks has been involved in data in some shape or form for more than 20 years. As CEO of the ODI, Starks hopes to

continue the good work of bringing open data to the entire world.

NOTEWORTHY BEGINNINGS In his letter in the 2013 FirstYearBook, Starks credits his exceptional team for the organization’s remarkable first year. “Transparency as a public good is an excellent foundation. We have demonstrated potential for improved public-sector efficiency and economic growth. Over 40 companies have joined as members, initiating projects and opening up their own data. [Our team has] welcomed over 3,000 people from 30 countries to our Shoreditch offices. Over 130 people from 11 countries took our courses. We reached over 100,000 people online.” Of course, all great leaders look back not only at success, but also at lessons learned along the way. Starks is no different. The level of inbound interest in 2013 surprised him. “It was far and above what we expected,” he says. “Based on that interest, we could have set up offices around the world but we didn’t. We said, ‘Let’s create an international franchise to amplify what’s already there.’ The organizational design of that franchise was done entirely in the open. We collaborated on open legal documents with the potential franchise partners to develop the framework itself.” The outcome of this endeavor? They created 13 ODI nodes in nine countries in just three months.

Starks attributes the international interest to open data itself, saying, “I think this interest is part of a general transition to open data culture. When

(Top) Punchcard Economy by Sam Meech: Large-scale knitted data visualization that incorporates contemporary data about working hours within the ‘digital’ economy, collected via a virtual punchcardon the project website. (Bottom left) Pink Sheet Method by Thickear: investigates notions of exchange and trust invested in sharing information,as well as the validity and limitations of data analysis over time. (Bottom right) Pillars of Hercules by James Brooks: 10 fictitiously constructed telephone call logs as A4 printed sheets, where the various embassies have been recorded hypothetically conversing with each other.

The main idea driving the mission of the ODI is that open data belongs to the citizens of the world.

Vending Machine (2009) by Ellie Harrison: An old vending machine is reprogrammed to release free snacks only when search terms relating to the recession make the headlines on the BBC News RSS feed. Visitors are welcome to take the snacks as-and-when this happens.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-data-charter-and-technical-annex

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-data-charter-and-technical-annex

http://www.opengovpartnership.org

http://www.opengovpartnership.org

http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/180723796?access_key=key-1tz03k608gh39wd20pj7&allow_share=true&escape=false&show_recommendations=false&view_mode=slideshow


IN FOCUSIN FOCUS

not just as a technology solution, but how it can influence and affect your day-to-day life,” Starks explains.

Starks is attuned to the influence of open data culture. He remembers the web world of the late nineties. There were a large number of organizations developing multidimensional websites to see who could gain traction. He envisions a similar cycle of innovation in the world of open data. “Over the next decade, we’ll see the emergence of really innovative companies. We will see these companies and other organizations and people doing things we never envisioned,” he says. “It’s going to be a period of great excitement, with more stormy days where the political wheel gets lost in the weeds on certain areas but then will get picked up again. Looking over a long horizon, I see this emerging on the same scale as the web,” Starks predicts. No matter what happens on the road to a more transparent world, Starks knows one thing for sure. “We have a responsibility to make open

data easier and to demonstrate its value with stories of how open data can be cheaper, more accurate, and generate additional benefits. It is up to us, and all who are passionate about the possibilities of open data, to tell these stories.”

This is all anonymous data; personal data is not open without informed consent. “This project helped the developer community engage with the information and develop a prototype,” says Starks. “It engages communities outside the organization as well.” With a successful first year under his belt, Starks looks forward to increasing the impact of the ODI in 2014.

THE ROAD FORWARDStarks is keen to extend and build upon the success of the ODI’s first year. 2014 is about scaling that success. A large part of this plan includes collaborating with the different ODI nodes in a research and development theme around Smart Cities. This is a common theme for development and addresses a common set of issues. Starks also hopes that 2014 will see great legislative strides in the open data movement. “We hope to see the policy rhetoric put into action. We don’t underestimate the distance we must travel to manifest this into day-to-day

operations. One of the key outputs for us is to tell powerful, evidence-based stories. We’ve set ourselves a target of creating a new story every three months to bring this space to life and ensure everyone can understand the potential applications for open data,

this momentum builds from multiple dimensions, it signifies that we are approaching a tipping point where ‘open by default’ will, in fact, become the default. We still have a really long way to go in getting there and there’s actually a huge amount of behavior change and institutional procedures that have to be adapted, but momentum is building. If the mid-90s web was the Web of Documents, we are seeing it transition to become a Web of Data,” he explains.

Part of the ODI’s formula for success relies on it partnering with other organizations that are looking to innovate in the new emerging open

data space. The ODI partners with companies looking to consume open data as part of their business or looking to produce open data. Starks remarks on the systemic shift taking place regarding open data and business. “Traditionally, when businesses find value, they believe that protecting that value means not sharing information. Actually, there are so many examples where opening that information leads to a stronger business because you develop a larger ecosystem of providers around you, which allows you improve the quality of your products and services. The ODI looks for companies that understand that perspective and want to work out how to develop business

models around that, companies that seek to open up information and learn what systems and processes need to be put in place to make that happen,” he says. All the programs done at the ODI are collaborative and all the outputs are open. “In working with partners, we try to identify what their needs are. In some cases we provide training, in other cases we provide joint research programs, and in others, it’s been a sponsor relationship to help raise visibility on their own activities,” says Starks. These partnerships help expand and transform open data culture. One ODI partner, Telefonica has done a trial opening up some footfall data from their mobile network.

Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji (YoHa translates to English as ‘aftermath’) have lived and worked together since 1994. YoHa’s graphic vision and technical tinkering has powered several celebrated collaborations establishing an international reputation for pioneering arts projects.

(Artists from top) James Brooks, James Bridle, Paolo Cirio, and Sam Meech.

Transparency as a public good is an excellent foundation. We have demonstrated potential for improved public-sector efficiency and economic growth.

http://blog.digital.telefonica.com

IN FOCUSIN FOCUS


By Eleonore Fournier-Tombs Online Communications Manager, Human Development Report Office

We often think about data as a binary concept – open or closed, transparent or

opaque, everything or nothing. The reality, in international organizations in particular, is this construct does us no good. Many of us are in the data services business. For decades, we published data tables in reports and books, disseminated them by fax and later by email, and uploaded spreadsheets online before moving on to databases and data platforms. The technology continues to evolve and improve, and we adapt our publishing and distributions methods based on those improvements. But, data has

always been core to our efforts to shine the light on human progress and better inform development policy and discourse worldwide. Therefore, to ask whether our data is open seems like asking whether we exist at all. In our work, data transparency is not the question. Instead, we are focused on delivering information to the largest possible audience in as many formats as possible—while providing a good user experience, one that invites people to come back to our site time and again for the latest research, news, and more.

Our office, the Human Development Report Office (HDRO), was created to produce the Human Development Report, which is produced within the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and includes the Human Development Index (HDI).

How International Organizations Use Data-as-a-Service to Inspire Journalists

Since our inception, our sole mission has been to advance the richness of human life around the world. At HDRO, we intentionally look beyond GDP growth to evaluate the progress of nations and the well-being of their citizens. We look at progress in

terms of human development. This encompasses many aspects of life that matter to people, from life expectancy rates and education levels to how much freedom people have to shape

public policy and share information. We think this broader set of measures is a better gauge of the quality of life, degree of choice, and amount of opportunity in a society.

Each year, we compile a collection of socioeconomic indicators on themes such as health, education, the environment, equality, and trade. From those, we calculate a series of indices aimed at providing an overview of the state of human development in the world. The Human Development Index ranks countries

according to their level of human development, and accompanies the Human Development Report, an analysis of development priorities such as climate, growth in the South, and vulnerability. Through the work of the United Nations, and its agencies, we now have an abundance of data. For example, UNICEF monitors the wellbeing of children, UNESCO compiles education data, WHO maintains data series on health issues, and so on. In addition, international organizations sometimes gather data in the form of global surveys, such

as the My World 2015 survey, which asked over one million citizens around the world what their priorities were for development policy, in order to inform the Post-2015 development agenda.

IMPROVING ACCESSIBILITY TO DATAWhen it comes to open data, our key concern is not so much whether the data exists or whether we have the political go-ahead to publish it – considerations that often come up when discussing open data at a

Since our inception, our sole mission has been to advance the richness of human life around the world.

Eleonore Fournier-Tombs (far left), Online Communications Manager for the United Nations Human Development Report Office, joins Amie Gaye and Mary Ann Mwangi in briefing students from Vienna University.

http://hdr.undp.org/en


http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home.html

http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home.html

http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/hdi

http://www.unicefusa.org

http://en.unesco.org

http://www.who.int/en/

http://vote.myworld2015.org

JUST FOR FUNOPEN DATA MAKES COOL THINGS HAPPEN


IN FOCUS


DATA CRYSTALS: SCOTT KILDALL AND THE COLLISION OF ART AND OPEN DATA By Alida Moore

Open data has been the catalyst for new technologies that improve government services to citizens. In fact, the open data movement is so widespread that it is beginning to permeate the world of art. Scott Kildall,an artist based in

San Francisco, California blends art, technology, and open data in a new project he calls Data Crystals. His Data Crystals are sculptural representations of datasets -- three dimensional data visualizations born through code. Each sculpture, created from data available on the San Francisco open data portal, models a dataset mined by Kildall. How did Kildall bring his art to the world of open data and why? We spoke with the artist, who was happy to share his passion for art, technology, and open data.

FROM CODE TO SCULPTUREIn the mid-90s, when the world was taking its early steps into exploring the Web, Kildall taught himself how to write software code, and for many years developed educational multimedia software for job training and language-learning. After several years, feeling the beginnings of burnout, Kildall shifted his focus from technology to art. “It was a gradual shift,” he says. “I took many adult-education art classes and then, in 2004, enrolled in graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Art and Technolgy Studies department. I arrived with technical training and raw ideas and during that time, solidified my conceptual

national level. Rather, we strive to improve accessibility by focusing on design, cross-platform compatibility, machine-readability and search, in order to allow more and more users to discover the data and make use of it. When UNDP joined the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) and consequently began publishing its budgets and expenditures on the Socrata platform, we jumped at the possibility of being part of this open data initiative. Joining the Socrata platform would enable us to increase the accessibility of UNDP’s datasets, and would also, we hoped, allow us to provide a better experience for our users. Datasets are really only useful when they are used.

We receive approximately 18,000 unique visitors to our website every day. And we know that our audience continues to grow beyond the academic and international policy community. We strive to provide

opportunities for everyone to interact with the human development data we publish in unique and interesting ways. Increasingly, through improvements to our HDRO site, which include the ability to access our data via API for the first time and to more easily embed and share data visualizations, we are reaching a much broader community of users. Academic researchers have always been a big part of our audience. Now, we are seeing daily engagement from developers, data journalists, and citizens on the ground in countries worldwide. Because the data we provide through our website is more accessible, more easily filtered and searched, and displayed in a variety of contexts, we can use it to tell a more complete story than ever before. And this has led to a growing sense of local ‘ownership’ of the information as a powerful advocacy tool. The country profiles that we publish are a great example of this

trend. The more we contextualize and visually display human development indicator statistics in areas like health, sustainability, and income, the more citizens and local leaders are able to engage in meaningful dialogue on these issues, elevating public debate above a narrow focus on basic economic indicators.

For the HDRO, the growth of the open data movement in recent years is an exciting trend. Technology is right at the center of this trend. With the tools we now have available to us, we can put the data we collect into the hands of more people in formats that are more meaningful and sharable. Our focus has not changed. From the start, we have sought to measure human development in terms of its impact on individual lives. The difference is that we now communicate that information in a much more compelling way, in a way that engages users and so motivates change.

The United Nations Development Program launched the 2013 Human Development Report in a machine-readable format for the first time ever this year. HDR.UNDP.org allows users to view the state of human development in the world on an interactive map and other features while also having the ability to create their own visualizations of the report’s data using the Socrata platform.

http://www.kildall.com

https://data.sfgov.org



JUST FOR FUNJUST FOR FUN

practice.” After graduating in 2006, working for several years on new media projects, and then working at the Exploratorium from 2012-2013, Kildall was presented with an interesting opportunity. Autodesk, one of the leading 3D design and engineering software firms in the world, runs an innovative Artist in Residence program, to which he applied and was accepted. Kildall’s work at the Exploratorium involved working in collaboration with researchers and scientists to developer exhibits involving scientific data visualizations. “For

example, I worked with datasets around plankton in the San Francisco Bay, real-time tide data, and collaboratively created exhibits for wide public interaction,” Kildall explains. “When my fixed-term postion was nearly up, I knew I wanted to contiue working with data as a material for my artist practice. I approached the Autodesk Artist-in-Residency program with the idea to create three-dimensional visualizations with algorithms that I would develop. Autodesk gave me the funding and support with full access to their state of the art 3D printers to create my sculptures.”

ARTISTIC ALGORITHMS Working with scientists at the Exploratorium taught Kildall that sometimes the data you want isn’t readily available. So when it came to his new project, he had to find a new data source. “I began researching municipal data available on the San Francisco Open Data Portal. City data speaks to its urban residents because they have a daily relationship with the environment they live in.” Kildall started his project by downloading CSV files to see what data was available. Next, he wrote several algorithms to help visualize that data. “The idea behind Data Crystals is to give a physical form to specific data such as construction permits, incidences of crime and art commissions in San Francisco.” he says.

How did Data Crystals get its name? “The prints look like crystalline structures,” Kildall explains. “Imagine a geode; the crystals inside are built on top of each other, competing for space. The Data Crystals are like gems, you can hold in your hand.” When it comes to 3D printing, size matters. Three dimensional prints are limited by time and cost. According to Kildall, to print something the size of a fist can take about 20 hours and $100. “Realistically, I can’t print large scale 3D visualizations.” Kildall’s presentation of each crystal is simple. He uses a thing guage stainless steel, wire on top of wood base to mount the delicate forms. He says. “A Data Crystal becomes a display object; it invites you to look around it from different perspectives, casting

shadows from multiple viewpoints.” In other words, Data Crystals provides a new way for us to interact with data.

One might wonder why it’s necessary to have a 3D visualization of data. The answer is simple: for creative possibility. “The question I’m asking with this project is: what does this data look like?” Kildall explains. His project goes beyond using data to tell a story and explores the data itself. “It’s not just about telling a story but also discovering what form the data will take. What I enjoy most about coding is the unpredictability. When I test my 3D-model generating algorithms, I can iterate, refine and experiment with each crystal. In this way, I see myself as a modern-day data miner.”

THE FUTURE OF OPEN DATA IN ARTNo matter where he goes next with his Data Crystals project, Kildall is now a committed member of the open data movement. He recently participated in his first hackathon. “That experience and this art has made me realize how many possibilities exist within open data. I’ve always been committed to transparency and sharing. I see data as an invisible material surrounding our daily interactions, which informs how we interact with the world. Now we are trying to harness that data and learn what we can do with it creatively.”

Scott Kildall on Twitter: @kildall

(Top) Crime Incidents in San Francisco for a 3 month period; 35,000 data points, x and y are lat/long, z is time. (Bottom left) Current Construction Permits in San Francisco; 1000 data points, x and y are lat/long, z is time, size of cubes correspond to number of housing units for each permit. (Opposite page) Total San Francisco Civic Art Collection, 750 data points, x and y are lat/long, z is operates as spatial stack

After several years, feeling the beginnings of burnout, Kildall shifted his focus from technology to art.

http://www.autodesk.com

http://www.instructables.com/group/air/

http://www.instructables.com/group/air/

http://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/east-gallery/tidal-memory

https://twitter.com/kildall

Subscribe to future issues of Open Innovation by going to www.socrata.com/magazine

October 2014Washington, D.C.

We are excited to announce our first annual Socrata Customer Summit!

This October, we’ll bring together some of the world’s most innovative, creative, and engaged open data pioneers. Join us as we build relationships, discuss our community’s inspiring open data work,

explore Socrata’s roadmap, and celebrate our successes together.

For more details, watch the Socrata blog.

http://www.socrata.com/blog