2017 can be the Year of Open Data in Atlanta
Open data policies are old news for some cities. Taking a look at this map built by the Sunlight Foundation, we see that many major cities indeed have open data policies on the books:
But if you look at Georgia, you see a completely blank state. At Code for Atlanta, we’ve been trying to change this for years, and we may just succeed in 2017.
In the past few months, we’ve been curating a resources list of open data for metro Atlanta and the state of Georgia. If you browse that list, you’ll notice a few things. First, suburban cities like Johns Creek, Sandy Springs, and Tucker all have bonafide open data portals. As does the Atlanta Regional Commission, which serves as the planning agency for the greater metro Atlanta area. Great work, y’all!
You’ll probably also stumble on the City of Atlanta’s DataAtlanta page. The stated goal of the page is “to make Atlanta a world-class open data city”.
But of the eleven resources listed on the page, only the Atlanta Police Department Crime Reports can be considered open data, and the link used there is out-of-date. The other resources link to dashboards, visualization tools, online databases requiring user accounts, or PDF forms.
There are eight principles of open data:
- Data Must Be Complete: All public data are made available. Data are electronically stored information or recordings, including but not limited to documents, databases, transcripts, and audio/visual recordings. Public data are data that are not subject to valid privacy, security or privilege limitations, as governed by other statutes.
- Data Must Be Primary: Data are published as collected at the source, with the finest possible level of granularity, not in aggregate or modified forms.
- Data Must Be Timely: Data are made available as quickly as necessary to preserve the value of the data.
- Data Must Be Accessible: Data are available to the widest range of users for the widest range of purposes.
- Data Must Be Machine Processable: Data are reasonably structured to allow automated processing of it.
- Access Must Be Non-Discriminatory: Data are available to anyone, with no requirement of registration.
- Data Formats Must Be Non-Proprietary: Data are available in a format over which no entity has exclusive control.
- Data Must Be License-free: Data are not subject to any copyright, patent, trademark or trade secret regulation. Reasonable privacy, security and privilege restrictions may be allowed as governed by other statutes.
Here’s the good news: This year, the City of Atlanta’s Atlanta Information Management office has been highly engaged with Code for Atlanta as a partner on the MARTA Hackathon. Last weekend, the MARTA Hackathon hosted over 300 attendees who formed 36 project teams.
For the event, MARTA launched its own open data resources page, and Atlanta Information Management made ten datasets available along with a terrific real-time API, both linked to in Code for Atlanta’s open data resources list.
So change is in the air! This November, Atlanta is electing a new Mayor and all the City Council seats are up. Code for Atlanta will be lobbying the dozens of candidates for those seats to get them committed to open data once they’re in office. We’ll continue discussions with Atlanta Information Management to get more data sets and APIs opened and useful to civic hackers. We’ll help organize another MARTA Hackathon in June, and are in talks with other municipalities around metro Atlanta to host their own hackathons.
And as always, Code for Atlanta will meet twice a month for civic hack night. Join us there. We have work to do y’all!
