Welcome back to the PolicyViz Podcast! A special episode this week–a panel discussion, as it were, about open data. This conversation was sparked by a presentation I gave at the 2015 Socrata Customer Summit about the need to make open data not just machine readable, but also human readable. So I invited four people doing interesting work with open data to have a chat:
David Eads, data reporter and web builder at NPR
Chris Whong, civic hacker and web developer with a background in urban planning (note: featured image on this week’s episode is from Chris’s Urban Scratchoff project)
Sharon Paley, Deputy Director of The Johns Hopkins University Center for Government Excellence
This is the first time the show has had this many guests, so please let me know what you think. Too hard to keep track of all the voices? Just right? Anything else I can do to improve? Let me know in the comments below or on Twitter. And please be sure to rate the show on iTunes or your favorite podcast provider.
Links
Center for Government Excellence at The Johns Hopkins University
Center for Government Excellence labs
Getting Started with Open Data guide
I liked this episode’s format, it really made me think about things.
I listened a few days ago, so my apologies if I get something crooked.
The part of the conversation where Sharon points out how difficult it is to find funding for public data is really the crux of the matter.
As a citizen I would rather localites focus on doing things rather than gathering data on what they are doing. I live in an area of the country where the infrastructure is either old, not connected to anything, or *gasp* on paper files. We can’t get a bond through to start providing public transportation, let alone something most voters can’t understand like open data.
In my opinion the goal should be the long game of automated data reporting in new systems and making the data that is already collected digestible. I don’t think it needs to be fast or detailed for regular citizen access. David’s (or was it Chris’s?) desire for fast detailed data is specific to his role as a Data Journalist, seeking data in unique ways is one of the skill sets of his industry – if his industry wants better data they should build the systems to extract and translate the data from legacy civic systems.
Jon, thank you for providing a forum for such an interesting discussion.
Greg, thank you for listening.
As I mentioned on the podcast, part of the importance of open data is it shares what those inside of government are using to govern – how they decide what things to get done. This involvement also works when systems are paper based.
Doing this can build a powerful argument for improving systems – hopefully building them with the community. Often this is digital transformation, but sometimes it is just a better evidence-based improved process.
Andrew
When governments properly collect and analyze their data, better service delivery and more efficient spending can result. But before they get to those ends, most governments will need to update their legacy systems, receive training in how to analyze data, learn to optimize for outcomes, etc — and all that takes time and money.
But you gotta have money to spend money (and that is a big problem for most governments.) So governments need to educate their residents about how infrastructure investment in data as an enterprise asset is critical. (Which is a hard sell, because as that last sentence proves, it sounds *really* boring.) A collective effort around storytelling, where real humans and real dollars are saved as a result of data collection and analysis is key.