Open Government

When governments work in the open and proactively release public data in standardized formats, they can drive transparency, participation, and collaboration to help further key priorities.

Open Government means that information is being shared proactivly in a user-friendly way, ensuring accessibility and understandability. By sharing information, governments can facilitate public dialogue and spur productive participation focused on key issues, allowing the community to help make government work better.

Practice Open Government

We're publishing a set of guides, tools and resources to help governments work in the open, proactively publish public data online, and collaborate with the community to help make programs and services better for everyone.

Resources

• Book: Beyond Transparency: Beyond Transparency is a book written by Brett Goldstein and Lauren Dyson that serves as a cross-disciplinary survey of the open data landscape, in which practitioners share their own stories of what they’ve accomplished with open civic data.

Tools

• Tool: Open Data Census: The first step in making data actionable is to make sure the data is easily accessible. Many cities, whether they have an open data policy in place or not, have work to do in terms of making datasets open and available online. Do an evaluation of where your city stands on releasing our landscape of datasets openly and work with your municipal partners to come up with a plan for making all of them open and available.
• Tool: CityGram: Citygram is a geographic notification platform designed to work with open government data. It allows residents to designate area(s) of a city they are interested in and subscribe to one or more topics.
• Tool: NextRequest: NextRequest makes public records requests friendlier for the public and easier for governments to manage.

Spotlight

• 2015 Summit Video: You published some Data. So what? Creating value for all stakeholders
• 2014 Summit Video: Emily Shaw, Alisha Green and Natalia Rudiak: Open Data on Any Budget
• 2014 Summit Panel Discussion: Defaulting to Open

Further Reading

• Read: The Sunlight Foundation's Open Data Policy Guidelines: The Sunlight Foundation created this living set of open data guidelines to address: what data should be public, how to make data public, and how to implement policy.
• Read: The Sunlight Foundation's Open Data Policies at Work: The Sunlight Foundation created this living set of open data guidelines to address: what data should be public, how to make data public, and how to implement policy.
• Read: Eight Principles of Open Government Data: In December of 2007, thirty open government advocates gathered in Sebastopol, California and wrote a set of eight principles of open government data.
• Read: Open Data ETL Toolkit: This toolkit provides several utilities and framework to help governments deploy automated ETLs using the open-source Pentaho data integration (Kettle) software.
• Read: Contributing to Open Source projects on Github: Open source software is thriving on GitHub. Anyone can get involved and it's easy, too. This guide covers the basics about what to look for and what to do when contributing to open source projects.
• Watch: Getting Started with Open Data: 2013 Online Training: This Peer Network webinar convers the Basics of Open Data, from stakeholder support to crafting policy that suits local needs.
• Watch: Quality vs. Quantity? Developing Strategies to Release Valuable, High-Quality Open Data: Dustin Haisler, Andrew Nicklin, Shelia Dugan and Vijay Sammetahis discuss how to create processes for quality open data in this Summit breakout session.