A new program being launched this week by the City of Portland Bureau of Technology Services—with support from several regional affiliates—aims to strengthen transparency in local government, reduce City government spending by becoming more efficient and create technology jobs in the region.
The Open Data Initiative (ODI) is a regional effort to promote increased transparency and openness in government by making various regional data sets freely open to the public in a universal, electronic format. Community members and local web developers will then be called upon to participate in any of several application development events to provide ideas and create useful technology-based applications using the data sets. The type of apps that can be submitted varies depending on platform and visualization methods, but will most likely come in the form of iPhone apps, Google Maps, widgets, web sites, or by integrating the data sets into the use of Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.
“The idea of open data and the increased use of technology in government was ushered in with the Obama administration,” said Rick Nixon, a program manager with BTS who is in charge of the Open Data Initiative. “Some of the staff here at the City took an immediate interest in the idea and decided to investigate further.”
data set: neighborhood boundaries
Although made a priority on the municipal level by the Obama administration, open data has been a goal of the federal government for years. Data.gov was launched in 2007. The site allows public access to high value, machine-readable data sets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Washington D.C.-based Sunlight Labs then held an Apps for America contest. Out of it came several useful apps to help both citizens and members of the government. Some of these included RSS feeds for the House Committee schedule, Digg's (social news web site) Earmark Watch tool and a petition-like site that uses Twitter to gain supporters.
The ‘Apps for Democracy’ design contest soon followed on the municipal level in Washington, D.C. iStrategyLabs was asked by city officials to make its revolutionary data catalog useful for the citizens, visitors, businesses and government agencies of Washington, D.C. The company decided to hold an apps creation contest. The contest cost Washington, D.C. $50,000 and returned 46 apps with an estimated value in excess of $2.6 million to the city.
While Washington, D.C. is known to have the prototypical model for city-based Open Data, Portland’s Open Data Initiative plans to take a much more expansive approach.
“Portland is slightly different than a lot of the cities doing this because we have several different bureaus that all have beneficial data instead of just one citywide source,” said Skip Newberry, economic policy adviser to Mayor Sam Adams.
The data used in PortlandMaps.com will be available.
This coupled with the fact that Portland Maps—a useful collection of regional maps from around the city—already uses regional data, led BTS to make the Portland Open Data Initiative more expansive than most cities. Instead of just using citywide data, the Portland Open Data Initiative will use regional data from Portland Metro, Multnomah County, TriMet, Portland Public Schools and several other regional entities.
“It’s made the initial process harder, but it will be much more beneficial in the long run,” said Newberry. “Fortunately, TriMet has been producing unified data and making apps for years.”
He continued, “In the interest of producing a good product, we wanted to do this right.”
Using as much regional data as possible should help eliminate some potential downfalls that have occurred in similar projects around the country. On the federal-level for example, an application was created through the Apps for America contest to search for Federal parks across the country by state/activity/etc. The problem was that the app only used federal level data, thus state and municipal parks were left out of the mix.
Approximately 110 data sets are currently available. Some data sets already available include address points, bicycle parking spots, bridges, business licenses, building permits, crime incidents, groundwater maps and zoning data. They have all been retrofitted into structured, machine-readable formats for programmatic access. These include XLS, CVS, RSS, XML, SHP, KML and other formats depending on the type of data. You can view the available data sets by visiting: http://www.civicapps.org/datasets.
data set: Crime Statistics.
The event portion of this program is called CivicApps for Greater Portland. The idea-gathering phase of the event is currently underway and runs through April 26. The first round of the development challenge overlaps part of the idea-gathering phase and is tentatively set to begin April 19 and end May 31. A second development challenge will begin June 1 and run through July 13. Awards will be handed out at the end of each phase.
Awards and judging will be conducted in a “County Fair” model with lots of awards and recognition for contributions. The primary rules are that all app submissions must use at least one data set from the open data catalog, and they must all be licensed under the Open Source Institute approved Open Source License. Also, the institutes that own the data sets are encouraged to submit apps, but will not be awarded any prizes. For other rules please visit: http://www.civicapps.org/contribute/rules.
Awards include best ideas, most useful app, most appealing app, most original app, best use of data app, civic choice app (voted by the public), participant choice app (voted by peer developers) and best of show app (best of both design events). Runners up will be awarded prizes for each category. Judges will also be allowed to distribute discretionary prizes for unanticipated theme-based apps (energy, sustainability, etc.).
Prizes range from $500 for best idea to $3,000 for the best of show app. Runners up prizes range from $50 to $100. The discretionary awards may come in the form of gift certificates, federal dollars for clean energy retrofitting and internships for local technology-based companies, just to name a few.
data set: Intelligent Traffic System
The City is hopeful that these events will be much better received by the local tech community than last year's PortlandOnline.com Banner Redesign challenge. The City put out a call for local web designers to submit a redesigned banner to be used on the top of every page of PortlandOnline.com. The prize? A link to the winning designer's web site on every page.
The contest caused an uproar in the tech community. Many felt the contest prize devalued the community's work because they were working on spec. Read what they had to say here.
"I'm convinced that one of the secondary issues with that contest, aside from the spec work design angle, was that no one in the community was approached to help advise the City on their design contest," said Rick Turoczy, author and editor of the tech blog, SiliconFlorist.com. "And that only exacerbated the situation."
This time around Nixon and the City made sure to get input from local developers and designers by conducting stakeholder meetings and creating a citizen advisory committee. In addition, the prizes are all donated by local tech companies and the judges are made up of locals involved in the tech community.
"This time around, I know Rick Nixon and his team have been working closely with the developer community to outline the contest, he said. "So, I'm assuming that a number of the features of the contest are being driven by the community itself. And the City is doing a good job of continuing the conversation and keeping it open."
Turoczy continued, "It will be interesting to see how this affects the broader community's response to the contest given that involvement."
The idea behind these events—or competitions—is twofold. One, they allow local application developers a chance to gain visibility in a down economy. Also, they create a platform for developers to come together, collaborate and build upon their combined wisdom. This works out of the idea that the benefit and participatory landscape of the web is given its value not by a few people making large contributions, but by many people making small contributions.
“I work in economic development and when we were working on the Portland Economic Development Strategy last year one thing that was striking was the size and quality of our technology workforce,” said Newberry. “With this economy a lot of people have found themselves out of work. So, these events will give those individuals an opportunity to showcase their skills and possibly make some money.”
Once apps are created and licensed, the source code will be open and made available to the public. Anyone interested will then be allowed to build upon the open source code to improve the app. This will be much like the Linux operating system, Firefox web browser and the Apache web server, which all allow its users to further develop the functionality of the programs.
One current City-based iPhone app that will have its code available to those who want to improve it is the City of Portland Citizen Reports. The app allows residents to report and interact with the City concerning problems and issues with publicly maintained infrastructure, including graffiti, broken street lights, potholes and other such issues. Any resident with an iPhone running on OS 3.1.2 or higher may download the app for free through iTunes. To use the City's app, you simply have to take a picture of the issue, select what category it falls into and pinpoint the location on a map. For more information on the app visit: http://www.portlandonline.com/bts/index.cfm?c=51917.
The City's Citizen Reports iPhone App
An example of an application that could be developed through this event is a tool that would allow residents to see how much power they are using in real time and what appliances are causing the most consumption. This could be created through the use of Portland General Electric’s smart meters and Google’s power meters. Although a lot of work would have to go into this, it isn’t all that farfetched.
“This program is important for a number or reasons,” said Newberry. “It will make us more efficient, increase transparency within City government, promote cooperation in technology and improve community engagement and interaction with the City.”
The Open Data Initiative and the CivicApps for Greater Portland are all part of Mayor Sam Adams' and the City of Portland’s goal to create an ongoing thread of conversation between citizens and government through the use of technology. This program in particular is one of the reasons Portland was ranked second, only behind Washington, D.C., in 2009 for performance on municipal e-governance.
"The most important aspect of this whole thing, in my opinion, is not so much the contest but the City opening up these data sets to developers," said Turoczy. "I remain hopeful that the contest doesn't overshadow the importance of this step forward for open data in Portland."
While the program is days away from its official launch, the City is still accepting corporate sponsorships for the event. Sponsorships range from $1,000 to $5,000 and will go towards the prizes for winning apps. Sponsors will be allowed to submit various discretionary prizes and will have their name attached to all the event-related signage. Also, for the right price, sponsors will have their name attached to a specific award. Sponsors can also donate various in-kind awards (like gift cards), event services or event facilities.
data set: Bicycle Network
Those entities looking to sponsor the event should contact Rick Nixon at 503.865.8447.
For those looking to participate in the event, you can learn more by visiting the web site: http://www.civicapps.org.
City of Portland Bureau of Technology Services
1120 SW 5th Avenue
Suite 450
Portland OR
