Asheville opens up data with SimpliCity

Fulfilling data requests can be a painful and time-consuming process for small, local governments. Jonathan Feldman, Asheville, NC's Chief Information Officer, noticed that city employees were spending a minimum of two hours of time, involving multiple departments, to fulfill a single request.

The standard procedure was a by-exception process: a request came in, the records were found, the data was processed to ensure that no inappropriate information was released, then that data was made available to the requesting party. This process had to be repeated every time someone requested information—even if that data was previously made public to another citizen.

Feldman decided to push for an open data portal where information was proactively made available to the public, encouraging self-service. The project has met with widespread support from city officials, businesses, nonprofit groups, and citizens alike.

The city is slowly working through all of its past data, redacting any necessary information and then making everything else publicly available. It isn’t possible to publish all datasets immediately due to the review process each set must undergo, requiring datasets to be processed and released one at a time. Because there is a distinct possibility that the information, as well as the timing and order in which it is released, could be viewed as political, datasets are prioritized based on a three-tiered system.

• Pragmatics: If publishing a dataset will save staff time, decrease the number of public record requests or the cost to the government, or make a process easier for citizens, it’s deemed pragmatic.
• Participation: Citizens may vote on which datasets they’d like to see. A higher number of votes indicates a greater level of public interest, making those datasets a priority.
• Policy: If the open data governing board determines that a dataset will benefit the community even if it doesn’t meet either of the other two criteria, it is made public.

Within a year of the initiative beginning, the open data portal was already saving city staff an estimated 70 hours of work per month. As more information is made public, those savings will continue to grow.

One manifestation of this project is a system called $ SimpliCity$ , a local government search engine. Citizens can type in simple requests (e.g., “when is my recycling day?”) and the search engine will comb through all of the city’s open data to present a simple, concise answer.

The natural outgrowth of this is to incorporate open data requirements in all future work generated by the city or contracts with private vendors. Transitioning to a system where all final documents are automatically formatted to be made publicly available will streamline the process from the very beginning.