Hard Work Awaits San Diego After Open Data Policy Is Approved
San Diego's City Administration Building trekandshoot / Shutterstock.com
The city’s information is scattered across multiple systems and officials don’t know the extent of the data that’s been amassed.
Add San Diego to the list of U.S. cities enthusiastically embracing open data. On Tuesday, members of the San Diego City Council unanimously approved a new open data policy that will help unlock municipal information resources to the public.
While increasing transparency is one of the goals of the new open data policy, which has been in the works since late last year, using the city’s amassed data as a vehicle for entrepreneurship and innovation is another.
“It’s opening up the data and seeing what people can do with it for the betterment of the community,” City Councilman and open data advocate Mark Kersey said, according to the Union-Tribune. “I can’t wait to see all the cool stuff that arrives out of this. A lot of it will be things we can’t even think of right now.”
But just because San Diego, California’s second-largest city, now has an open data policy doesn’t mean that the city government can simply snap its fingers and unleash the information. There’s a lot of hard work to do before then.
Maksim Pecherskiy, who was appointed as the city’s first chief data officer last month, told the council on Tuesday that there’s an 18-month timeline for the public release.
That’s because the city’s data is “is currently scattered, held within closed systems, and needs to be accessed via expensive proprietary software,” City News Service reported. The goal is to take all that information and put it onto a more accessible and common platform.
“We don’t know what information we have and our data is scattered,” Pecherskiy said, according to the Union-Tribune.
According to San Diego’s draft open data policy, there are various responsibilities on Pecherskiy’s plate, including the preparation and publishing of technical guidelines, figuring out ways to make the information “available to the greatest number of users and for the greatest number of applications,” and submitting reports on the open data policy’s implementation and compliance with the policy.
Beyond its open data initiative, San Diego’s city government has been busy on another digital front. In August, Mayor Kevin Faulconer kicked off a public engagement and stakeholder process to totally overhaul the city’s website.
As GovExec State & Local reported, the city partnered with Code for America’s local affiliate, Code for San Diego, on the website redesign, which aims to engage local vendors who normally wouldn’t normally compete to work on such a large project.
WATCH: Mayor Faulconer’s Google Hangout kicking off the website redesign process …
(Top image by trekandshoot / Shutterstock.com)
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