U.S. City Open Data Census

The first step in making data actionable is to make sure the data is easily accessible. Many cities, whether they have an open data policy in place or not, have work to do in terms of making datasets open and available online. Do an evaluation of where your city stands on releasing our landscape of datasets openly and work with your municipal partners to come up with a plan for making all of them open and available in 2014.

Review the guidance below and then submit information about your city's data here. Any information about the ease with which you were able to find the data is worth noting in the additional comments field at the bottom of the form.

Resources and Guidance

Review the landscape list of datasets (found at the bottom of this page) and see if your city makes these datasets easily available online as open data. These datasets serve as a construct of how to open local government data, for more examples, see resources from Code for America and the Sunlight Foundation.

You should start by looking to see if your city has an open data portal. If so, all of these datasets should be published there (if not, please indicate on the checklist). If not, your city may still have a repository of datasets stored on their website somewhere. If you can’t find those, try doing an Internet search for the datasets.

OpenPrism is a tool that aggregates many of the open data portals datasets out there, you can use it to compare your city’s datasets to other cities, as well as to see what data other cities provide that your city doesn’t.

In some cases, the city is not the entity responsible for a dataset (for example, in Tulsa there is an independent authority responsible for the transit system). That’s ok, we still want to know if and where those datasets are published. Be sure to note if it’s a non-city entity publishing the data.

If your city publishes all of these datasets as 'open data', give each other a round of high-fives! Then design/prototype an app or integration that would make this data useful for citizens.

Next Steps

Once you have an inventory together, work with your city partners to figure out what barriers stand in the way of making any missing datasets open and accessible online and discuss solutions to overcoming those barriers. Work with government to create a timeline tool and/or alerts for when data will be released. See New York City’s Open Data Dashboard and Philadelphia’s use of Trello for inspiration on creating a timeline.

If your city is making all this data available, now is the time to start thinking about what questions can be answered or problems addressed with these datasets. Take a look at what other cities are doing with key datasets. Are there lessons to be learned for your city?

To take this project a step further, you can pick an issue area of particular concern to your city (crime or blight, for example) and do an inventory of all datasets related to that issue. Then work with issue-area experts from the community to determine what potential value those datasets might have for addressing the problem, or what datasets are missing that would be particularly valuable.

Share Your Findings

Now's the time to share what you've learned! Complete the U.S. City Open Data Census for your city with the datasets listed below, so that the U.S. municipal open data community can learn from each others' best practices.

Datasets