2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

120 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
Machine-readable data could be requested in filtered and sorted formats
directly from the source in real time and displayed for the end user in
many formats in any web browser.
In 2003 Phil Windley, the chief information officer for the State of Utah,
published his “Web Services Manifesto,” arguing that all data resources
should produce at least machine-readable Extensible Markup Language
(XML) data, and human-readable text only when necessary. The idea was
to let others develop applications built on the machine-readable government
data. Windley wasn’t the only voice calling for government data to
be made available as open web services, but his formulation was elegant
and actionable. In 2006, we in Chicago formed a data exchange collaborative
(the Illinois Data Exchange Affiliates) around Windley’s principles
(Sanders 2007). In 2007 a group of open government advocates developed
the “8 Principles of Open Government Data” (Open Government
Working Group 2007).
On his first day as president in 2009, Barack Obama issued a Memorandum
on Transparency and Open Government (The White House 2009)
that not only set the tone for federal policy on open data, but also sent
a message to state and local government entities that might seek federal
funding. By 2009 the federal government had launched the http://data.
gov open data portal. Progress is not limited to the United States. Many
European countries (and the European Union itself) have rolled out opendata
platforms. After the launch of data.gov, publisher and web guru Tim
O’Reilly popularized the term government as platform, which conceptualized
the public sector as a provider of raw information from which the
private sector could build applications.
The federal government continues to increase its annual data output,
and many of its wholesale products are directly relevant to community
revitalization work. Data from the US Census Bureau have long been
packaged by entrepreneurs into many useful tools, but the Environmental
Protection Agency and the Departments of Labor, Education,
Transportation, Housing and Community Development and others also
contribute to this flow.
Data access below the federal level has improved also. Many state
agencies have released granular data about issues of community importance
such as public health, education, and licensing. Local government,
long associated with impenetrable data silos, has made good progress in
some cities, notably New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington,
DC. Early proof of the government as platform concept emerged in 2005