Let’s Be Glad the City of Wilmington is Embracing Transparency
Recently, DelawareOnline covered a troubling story about a neighborhood association meeting which “featured a skirmish between top officials of the city treasurer’s office and the Mayor’s Office.” The skirmish was due to an unlikely source of conflict — “which city government transparency website should be funded”.
For good reason, the article focused on the skirmish itself, but the more important story for citizens of Wilmington should be that the city is clearly making a concerted effort towards transparency. We should be encouraged by the fact that we were left with the quote “which city government transparency website should be funded” instead of the quote “if a city government transparency website should be funded”. It is the difference between “which” and “if” which highlights a subtle paradigm shift in how the city views transparency.
The heart of the difference between the treasurer’s office and the Mayor’s Office lies at the strategy behind implementing a transparency tool for citizens. “The mayor’s office said their pick would be more comprehensive while the city treasurer, Velda Jones-Potter, said hers is more user-friendly.” The article does not directly indicate exactly which product each party is interested in purchasing, but it does provide descriptions of each.
The first tool described would allow for citizens to explore capital improvements to the city in a user friendly way from a company called Socrata. We can make the reasonable assumption¹ that this refers to Socrata’s Capital Projects Explorer.
The second tool would provide a portal for citizens to view city spending for all of its departments from a company called OpenGov. We, again, can make the reasonable assumption¹ that this refers to OpenGov’s Budgeting and Performance tool.
Each of these tools provides a different view into the inner-workings of how the City of Wilmington is run. Both of these tools appear to be built with the constituent point-of-view in mind. In the context of transparency, civic technology, and open data, it is important to grapple with the usability of any proposed solution by the group that would be using it. If the City of Wilmington is aiming to build transparency tools for its constituency, then both of these tools would accomplish that goal.
For years, the City of Wilmington has lacked civic technology tools² that help to make it accessible to community members. These new tools — regardless of which one is ultimately picked to be used — demonstrate that the city has transparency in its view. It also begs larger questions:
- What is the city’s larger civic technology plan?
- How does the city plan to use technology to make its constituents lives easier?
- How will the city continue to make its data more accessible for constituents?
While all of these questions will need to be thoughtfully considered and answered moving forward, let’s be glad that the City of Wilmington is embracing transparency now.
¹ While these seem to be the tools that are most likely being described by each of the respective parties, the details about each are scarce enough in the article that it is important to make the caveat that this assumption could be entirely incorrect.
² To be fair to the City of Wilmington, there has been improvement over time. One small example being that the city now publishes its CompStat reports and utilizes another 3rd party tool to map crime, providing a much better snapshot of crime than just a few years ago. Still, there is a long way to go in regards to transparency here. For example, only the most recent CompStat report is available and it is only provided as a PDF. A fully transparent solution would provide all data in both human and machine readable formats (like the state’s open data portal). A solution that would provide the most utility for constituents would include a tool that would allow users to seamlessly dissect the data.
