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Tag Archive: OpenGov

Recommendations for Stronger Crime Data

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crime scene

Releasing crime data is important to keeping the public informed about what is happening where they live, work, and play. The information from crime reports, specifically, fuels a wide variety of news stories and apps that keep people updated on important public safety issues. Improving the quality and format of crime data releases would help encourage the continued creation of these kinds of stories and apps and maximize their impact, keeping the public better informed about an issue that many local governments already closely track.

There are several steps those who control crime data could take to improve the quality and formats of the information, especially related to crime reports. Many of these ideas, outlined below, can be found in our Open Data Policy Guidelines.

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Your Guidelines to Open Data Guidelines Pt. 2: Stages of Development

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In revisiting Sunlight’s Open Data Policy Guidelines for our Version 2.0 release, we took a closer look at other sources for open data guidance that have been released over the years. To see a comprehensive round up of open data guidance (complete with a timeline!) see Part 1 of Your Guideline to Open Data Guidelines: The History.

Although it’s only been eight years since the first resource of this kind was created with the Open Knowledge Foundation's Open Knowledge Definition, exploring open data guidance in its totality not only shows how much these recommendations build on each other, but how the movement has matured. Moreover, many of these resources occupy separate-–but overlapping-–arenas of expertise, though an outside perspective may not immediately catch their nuances. Below, we’ll explore in more detail the three major themes of open data guidance: How to Define Open Data, How to Implement Open Data, and How to Open an Open Data Discussion.

The sequence, prevalence, and layering of these themes showcase the developmental stages of the open data movement thus far. Over the years we have seen open data advocacy emerge from its nascent expert-driven defining period to becoming (quite self-referentially) a public discussion. We’ve seen different missions of the major players in the open data movement inform nuanced definitions and implementation recommendations, and we have seen an increase in best practice assessments, academic critique, and diverging schools of thought.

To understand this larger story, let us look at each piece.

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The Impact of Opening Up Crime Data

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MinnPost-crime-map

Many cities in the U.S. release crime data, but how much information is available and how it's released varies greatly. Although there are more static tables with crime stats posted on websites than we’d like to count, there are also plenty of examples of decently structured data releases that form the foundation for informative and creative uses of crime data -- raising the bar for what is possible. All around the country, journalists, developers, and many other groups are transforming public crime data into meaningful stories, apps, data visualizations, and more, responding to the high demand for access to and better understanding of this information. Below, we’ve rounded up a few of the strongest examples of the different ways crime data can be used.

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The Landscape of Municipal Crime Data

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Every community deals with the presence of crime. This is evident in the daily police report logs shared through newspapers, community news websites, on TV, and through many other media outlets. The number of places sharing this information serves as a testament to not only the volume of information created from crime, but also to the public demand for this information. People want to know about crime to better understand what's happening in their neighborhoods -- the places they or their families live, work, and play.

cop-car

In the era of open data and online access to media and government sources, there appears to be a proliferation of crime information: How that data is shared from the original source, however, varies widely. Many municipalities use some kind of mapping service to share information with the public about where various kinds of incidents are occurring, while others focus on aggregate information posted online either in static tables or PDF reports. These variations show not just different understandings of how to share information about crime with the public, but also different understandings of what information about crime is useful to the public.

There are whole fields of study devoted to tracking and evaluating crime, but these complexities do not bar us from focusing attention on how this valuable data is collected and shared -- and how the systems for those processes can be improved.

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South Bend, Indiana Signs Open Data Policy

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SouthBend

On Thursday, August 22nd, South Bend, Indiana became the 15th municipality (and, with a population of roughly 101,000, the smallest!) in the US to sign an open data policy into law. Executive Order No. 2-2013, enacted by Mayor Pete Buttigieg, was largely crafted to introduce a new transparency website, data.southbendin.gov, as a platform for publishing public information -- a fairly common motive for cities making this kind of policy. What’s uncommon about South Bend is not just its size, but the fact that their new policy firmly grounds “open data” in the state’s public records law.

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Announcing the first seven OpenGov Grants

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APR_LogoSunlight Foundation is proud to announce its first group of OpenGov Grants awards. Launched in June with the financial support of Google.org, the OpenGov Grants programs offers one-time grants in the range of $5,000 to $10,000 to help open up government through creative innovations. Interest in the OpenGov Grants program has been brisk, and the selection committee worked at length to identify these engaging and lively projects.

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Transparency Case Study: Public Procurement in the Slovak Republic

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Introduction

Slovakia Presidential Palace

Transparency and open data policies and initiatives have reached a state of maturity where it is crucial for us to evaluate them to learn what works, what doesn’t and why. Transparency is not likely to be a cure-all, but we think it is a cure-some; so, we need to figure out where and how it should be best applied. As part of that process, we have been conducting a series of in-depth case studies on the impact of technology enabled transparency policies around the world. Our initial case studies look at transparency in public procurement and we have chosen four countries to study. This analysis discusses our findings about public procurement disclosure by the Slovakian government.

For the Slovakian case study, we conducted interviews or sent questionnaires and surveys to members of the following groups: members of transparency NGOs, journalists who have covered procurement, academic researchers, the Slovakian Government Office of Public Procurement and the Slovakian Business Alliance. The experiences of these diverse respondents have allowed us to develop an equally diverse and comprehensive picture of the impact of the public procurement reforms enacted in Slovakia over recent years.

Our major findings: Slovakians' increased access to public data has led to increased oversight and engagement by the civil sector and the public. However, because of a lack of enforcement, corruption in public procurement remains a significant problem.

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