Toward more open, data-driven cities
Last week marked the two-year anniversary of the official launch of the What Works Cities Initiative, which makes this a useful moment to reflect on Sunlight’s progress supporting cities in the What Works network in the context of our broader theory of change.
Sunlight’s Open Cities Team believe strongly that cities must leverage data-and-evidence to become not only more efficient, but more transparent, accountable, and participatory — in short, more open — as well.
Many city officials agree, and, propelled by this conviction, our team is working hard to help city halls that want to become both data-driven and data-democratized.
In this post we’ll check in on this work by exploring our progress supporting three critical steps needed for cities to realize the full benefits of data-driven governance in a 21st century democracy:
Taken together, these steps are key to moving the conversation beyond the data-driven city hall and toward a vision for the open, data-driven city.
Sunlight’s primary role on the What Works Cities effort to date has been supporting city halls as they develop public policy frameworks to ensure the proactive release of government information online (“open data policies” for short).
We believe these data-democratizing reforms constitute critical infrastructure for cities that strive to be data-driven, and our progress in helping cities build this infrastructure has been substantial.
When What Works Cities first launched in April of 2015, fewer than 30 American cities with population between 100,000 and 1 million people—only about 10% of the municipalities that our initiative defines as “mid-sized cities”—had at least one open data policy on the books.
Since that time, Sunlight has provided support to over 50 city halls seeking to develop new open data policies, and as a result the number of mid-sized cities with a policy on the books has nearly doubled.
The scale of this success is critical to fostering open data as a democratic norm in US cities. Public policy is how we enshrine our democratic values as a society and as open data policy spreads to more and more communities, we are are seeing that democratic value spread as well.
City leaders and the publics they serve are increasingly viewing open data as critical democratic infrastructure for the 21st century: Instead of skeptically questioning “why should we have an open data policy?” more and more city leaders are instead asking “why don’t we have an open data policy already?”
The progress of our efforts in building the infrastructure of data transparency in What Works Cities should not simply be measured by the quantity of reforms passed, however, but also by the quality of these reforms—by how thoughtful and innovative policy ideas are advancing the field of open data.
We are thrilled to have provided technical assistance in the development of bold new policies that have pushed boundaries and driven the open data movement forward. Of the ten cities that have committed to the highest number of Sunlight’s open data best practices in official policy, our Open Cities Team supported seven in the development of those policies via the What Works Cities program.
Individual cities have stood out in specific ways:
Policies like the above and many others have collectively raised the bar for what a high-quality municipal infrastructure for data transparency looks like in US cities and in cities globally.
Key to our success in scaling and advancing the municipal public policy infrastructure of data transparency has been Sunlight’s democratization of the reform process itself. We’ve put together the most comprehensive suite of city open data policy resources available anywhere, and it’s available online for anyone to use. As a result, any city official, community advocate, or member of the public with an Internet connection and a desire for a more transparent, accountable, and participatory city is now equipped to develop great open data policy.
