On Monday morning, Boston City Councilor Michelle Wu filed an ordinance calling for municipal data to be open sourced in order to streamline Boston’s economic growth. Councilor Wu’s filing represents just one way in which she, along with the entire Walsh administration, hopes to make city government more transparent and beneficial to residents. For his part, the mayor signed an executive order doing exactly that on Monday evening.
BostInno spoke with Justin Holmes, interim Chief Information Officer for the City of Boston, to talk about the importance of open sourcing city data and the strides he and his constituents have already taken to make the datasets publicly available. Holmes focused our attention to several different websites housing municipal data, all of which ring true to the mayor’s commitment to transparency.
“Transparency has been a hallmark,” Holmes told us about the mayor’s plans for open sourcing. “It adds tremendous value to the public as well. It gives them a better experience of government, as well as government services.”
In a statement Monday, Councilor Wu’s office claimed that just 46 datasets were available for viewing on the City of Boston data page. However, after talking with Holmes, who directed us to the data analytics page, we realized that Boston actually has 341 total datasets up and ready for viewing online.
And better yet, the approximate 126 million rows of data are growing on a daily basis.
“We’ve added 14 new data sets since the mayor took office,” continued Holmes, “and 14.3 million rows of data.”
Holmes also directed us to the U.S. City Open Data Census, a cooperative that aggregates cities’ open source data and compares them to metropolitans across the country. Boston came in second out of 41 different cities, trailing just San Francisco, in terms of both quality and quantity of data transparency.
But, like Councilor Wu, the mayor’s office is not satisfied. That’s where the executive order comes in. In essence, it accomplishes two goals, Holmes tells us. “First, it establishes an affirmative tone that the city should be opening up as many data sources as available. Second, it allows [the CIO] to enact policy relative to the rules and regulations” applicable to data usage.
According to the order signed by the mayor, under Holmes’s policies, “all departments shall publish their public record data sets on the City of Boston’s open data portal to the extent such data sets are determined to be appropriate for public disclosure, and/or if appropriate, may publish their public record data set through other methods.”
In the last few weeks, Holmes tells us, his office has been working on mapping Boston’s data using a variety of metrics in order to increase engagement and, of course, transparency. Outlining anything from city demographics to land parcels and buildings, the map interface is a new means of reaching a Boston audience not familiar with dealing with easily digestible data.
“It’s the first time we’ve really talked about a Boston map platform,” posits Holmes. “It allows residents to download data but to interact with it as as well.”
