The term open data brings to mind images of next bus apps and geeks poring over data sets about potholes, but advocates say the next phase could go far beyond the smartphone — changing the way cities and governments tackle big problems and even how they work together.
Experts see increased collaboration and universalized standards as upcoming steps to take open data’s recent success stories to the next level — and keep moving it toward its next act, which could involve addressing issues as complex as climate change, education and public health.
Story Continued Below
“I want to focus on … developing open-data standards — we only have a handful that we’ve established on cities. And to get a little bit futuristic, we can start abstracting the city. If we start putting a lot of these data sets online and [application programming interfaces], you can almost build an operating system on top of it,” said Jay Nath, San Francisco’s chief innovation officer.
The open-data concept is simple: Cities have a wealth of data — from crime stats to maps to transit schedules to financial databases — and a need for creative ways to use it. Citizens have ideas, programming skills, research inquiries and just plain curiosity. By putting the data out there in a useful format, cities can harness the best and brightest minds of the online world.
In January, San Francisco announced a partnership with Yelp, New York and Philadelphia that will make all of the city’s restaurant inspection data available within the popular review site — a project made possible by developing an open-data standard for health scores. Now, the group and Code for America are hoping to use the standards to make it easy for any city to come online with them, with scores for Boston and Chicago coming soon.
The federal government, which has been a leader in open data, also has been active in universalizing standards. In February, the White House published a set of API standards for comment and collaboration on GitHub, a popular site for code sharing that boasts more than 3 million members. The city of Chicago also late that month put five of its data sets on GitHub, joining six other cities, three counties and two states on the site. The move takes cities away from their own data portal sites to a space where developers and governments can collaborate directly.
The chief open-data officers for Boston, an early leader in the field, say their hope is that cities now joining the game don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
“We don’t want everybody to be solving the same problem in different places; we really want to leverage the successes and expand the scope of the solution and the collaboration,” said Bill Oates, Boston’s chief information officer.
Nigel Jacob, co-chairman of the Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, agreed: “If other cities are working better, that’s good for us too.” He added that Boston is now a technology provider to other cities and to the state of Massachusetts.
Cities are already beginning to adopt a “my code is your code” attitude. Boston, which this winter declared a public health emergency because of the flu, reworked Chicago’s flu shot app for its own use. The previous winter, Chicago took Boston’s Adopt-a-Hydrant app and redeployed it as an Adopt-a-Sidewalk app for snow shoveling.
The Adopt-a-Hydrant app, added to GitHub in 2011 by Code for America, has also been deployed successfully in Honolulu, where locals found it particularly useful for tsunami sirens.
“People would steal the batteries in them, and it was a real hazard,” said Jen Pahlka, executive director of Code for America. “In some cases, it’s only about 200 people [who] have adopted fire hydrants, … but collectively, it makes everything safer and costs nothing to the city government.”
Another example is the Open311 API. While many cities independently explored different ways to open up nonemergency government lines, such as reporting burned-out streetlights or graffiti, Open311 is a project managed by Code for America’s Civic Commons that standardizes the API for digital 311 services, and more than 30 cities worldwide have deployed it, including Chicago and early adopters Washington and Baltimore.
Despite its high-tech sheen, experts say the real impact of opening up government data is as old-school as democracy: It increases transparency and accountability, offers an economic advantage and, most important, gives citizens a feeling of ownership over their communities.
“I think technology has created a level of immediacy and has deepened the relationship between citizens and government through social media channels,” Nath said. “There’s obviously a real-time feedback loop about what’s working and what’s not working, and on a very literal level, people can actually say there’s graffiti in their neighborhood and take a picture of it and tweet it, and we’ll respond.”
Cities are also increasingly being asked to solve the big problems, and open-data advocates say the next phase of the movement will be tackling those issues.
“Mayors across the country are being asked to address problems that we used to think of as national problems — climate change and health — so there’s more and more being demanded of them and less and less resources there, and that math doesn’t work unless you think of new approaches,” Pahlka said.
Nath points to the Yelp app, which he says could have meaningful implications for food safety.
“When there is access to information, there’s a reduction in food-borne illness,” Nath said.
Chicago Chief Technology Officer John Tolva sees the movement already evolving.
“We’ve kind of moved beyond the app-contest model — we’re continuing to do them, we get offers to sponsor contests all the time and they are fun — but when we look back on the history of open data, we’re going to see those as what laid the social foundation for something much more sustainable,” Tolva said. “We’ve moved into a more productive and more hybrid mode of working with developers. … It’s about people from outside city government feeling like they can change it from without.”