Inspiring cultural change is always challenging, but with the right leadership, inclusion and innovation can become driving forces for change and opportunity. Under the leadership of Mayor Eric Garcetti, Los Angeles’ Data Team created the Citywide Data Collaborative, a group of data liaisons across departments who oversee the collection, cleaning, and quality control of their department data, and manage their datasets on the city’s open data portal. Their work and collaboration with the Mayor’s Data Team has introduced an unprecedented approach to how Los Angeles city government handles, shares, and uses data in all of its operations.
In December 2013, during his first year in office, Mayor Garcetti issued Executive Order 3 on Open Data, which required each department to designate a data steward responsible for releasing departmental data to the city’s two data portals, the tabular open data portal and the geospatial GeoHub.
In the first phase of the open data process, Open Data 1.0, data stewards were tasked with unlocking hundreds of datasets, evaluating their accessibility, publishing them to the open data portals, and developing processes for regular updates. Initially, the review and classification of the public datasets suffered from inconsistencies in definition and practice. With over 1,000 datasets and 45 departments, the Mayor’s Data Team launched both a formal open data inventory process and the Citywide Data Collaborative to standardize the city’s tremendous data library for optimal use. The Collaborative developed the human infrastructure necessary to address open data challenges on a large scale.
Open Data 2.0 followed in October 2016, kicking off four months during which departments identified datasets to be added or deleted, or as geospatial data to be shared on the GeoHub. The Data Team developed a set of resource guides for the data stewards to standardize the cleaning process and track their progress. The resources included a metadata guide, example datasets, and a detailed inventory tracker that allowed departments to review the public datasets and assign an action to each. Additionally, the Mayor’s Data Team held regular check-ins with departments to ensure each data liaison was able to meet milestones and complete the inventory tracker with their updates by the end of the inventory in January 2017.
Maintaining a high-quality data library is an ongoing responsibility of a city that aims to be inclusive and meet the needs of its residents. While the formal inventory process has ended, members of the Citywide Data Collaborative continue to use the resources to ensure that the city’s data remains accessible and up-to-date. The City of Los Angeles also uses an internal Open Data Dashboard to track departmental data and incoming data requests, and to highlight city “data champions” who are actively contributing to the city’s open data library.
The success of the Los Angeles city data inventory process is the result of a developed structural plan complemented with departmental autonomy to complete the tasks. In creating the resource guides, the Mayor’s Data Team intentionally left some room for interpretation so that only the data stewards could determine when to mark their metadata complete. In addition to using the City metadata guide, data stewards were asked to follow a data standards checklist that focused on five key areas: consistency, accessibility, comprehensiveness, trustworthiness, and degree of interest.
