California’s open data endeavor
Chris Cruz, deputy director and deputy chief information officer for the state of California, talked about the current technology-wise projects the state has, such as the consolidation of the state’s many data centers into only a few, the implementation of cloud technology, cybersecurity, and the open data and transparency initiatives. In this post, I will focus on the latter topic.
California’s government has released an open data portal in which people can access to information freely, immediately, and directly from their computers, without the need to go to a state office and file a request for information. The data available from the portal covers many topics, such as water, economy, demographics, transportation, recycling, among others.
As Mr. Cruz mentioned, this portal was made with the government’s commitment to transparency in mind, granting the people access to 325 high value data sets as of 2016, and by the end of 2017 this number is expected to increase to 425. And to further pursue transparency, the portal is open source (http://www.techwire.net/innovation/california-launches-first-true-open-data-portal.html), which means that people can be even more in contact with the inner workings of the portal, and it might even be beneficial for other state governments looking to follow California’s open data portal lead.
In addition to the increased transparency, the data sets included in the portal could be a great tool for app development using statistical learning methods which could help improve the state’s resource management, as well as providing insight on how the state government works. However, before this is possible, it is necessary for the state of California to organize their data sets, as their current state is messy and it hinders the analysis and interpretation of information (http://statescoop.com/california-open-data-portal-report-targets-messy-data). As the mentioned article explains, efforts are being made by the government to standardize the data available in the portal by using metadata. This could be a real challenge considering that all the agencies in California may have handled and organized their data using different criteria until now. Despite this, the state of California should continue pursuing standardization, as it will simplify the analysis of information, which translates to a better understanding and management of resources.
One can see the efforts made by the state’s government concerning transparency and access to data, but there is much room for improvement, mainly in the standardization of data sets. It is interesting to see the implementation of innovative practices such as the ones mentioned in this post in a setting which is usually seen as the opposite of innovation: the government. This shows the commitment of the state of California with staying up to date in order to attract the attention of younger citizens.
2 comments on “California’s open data endeavor”
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Hi Rodrigo! Thanks for an interesting read. I like how you relate the open data initiative to innovation, and want to add that your notion of open data being beneficial for innovators is recognized as one of the benefits of open data, as open data allows for public participation in the provision of services and for new business models to arise (https://www.europeandataportal.eu/en/providing-data/goldbook/open-data-nutshell). An example of a business arisen from open data is Helios, which offers tools using open data to calculate the benefits of retrofitting buildings (https://gust.com/companies/helios_exchange).
Hello Kasper. Without a doubt open data provides many benefits that we both mention. I found interesting the article you shared and did a little more research on the open data charter. Looks like some changes have been made on the open data charter since the article you provided was written, as it now consists of 6 principles instead of 5. Here’s the link for the principles in case you want to take a look at them (http://opendatacharter.net/principles/). I believe that this constant updating of the charter’s principle shows that the initiative has potential and that it is still an ongoing process in constant improvement. Also, the read was interesting for me as it listed many benefits and challenges of open data that I had not thought about, such as the need for raising awareness of the importance of open data and data literacy among the population so that everyone is able to interpret the information.