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The Potential and the Way Forward 391
Finally, as discussed in chapter 3, some cities are moving ahead with an
extensive open data agenda.
Second, NNIP partners generally report there are more nongovernmental
entities in their cities working with spatial data now than when
they began their own operations, including other university and nonprofit
research institutions and consulting firms. This change is expected
because low-cost GIS capabilities and related training are now available
almost ubiquitously in urban America, and more geographically identifiable
data are available to the public from all sectors. As discussed in
chapter 3, civic developers of data and tools are also increasing the
visibility of local data use through their apps and code-a-thons.
Finally, some national organizations are also helping localities make
better use of data. These include the Federal Reserve System, whose
regional bank staffs have been active in promoting the development and
use of community data in the past few years. In addition, long-standing
organizations like the International City/County Managers Association
and the National League of Cities, whose missions focus on the operation
of governance at the local level, are promoting best practices among their
members. Newcomers to the field from the technology sector include
Code for America and DataKind, also mentioned in chapter 3.
Advances in the Availability of Data and Technology
Recent years have brought notable progress in the willingness of government
agencies to share their administrative data. The initial work of the
NNIP data intermediaries to build the relationships and trust that made
such sharing possible was as important as their technical work in systems
building. Once a few local agencies had begun to regularly share their
data with an NNIP partner (and thereby the public) the precedent was
set, and it was generally easier to get other agencies to follow suit. And,
year after year, the ongoing technological revolution reduced the cost of
data assembly, storage, and manipulation for the intermediaries. As documented
in chapter 3, these factors enabled NNIP partners to substantially
expand their data holdings over the past two decades. For example, cases
in chapters 5 and 6 show how integrated data on properties are now being
applied productively (note, for example, the varied applications of the
NEO CANDO system in Cleveland, Ohio, documented in Nelson’s essay
in chapter 5). Chapter 3 also discusses the growth of integrated data systems
with data from multiple agencies linked at the individual level.