Greensboro, NC launches Open Gate City
Greensboro drives community engagement and promotes innovation with award-winning open data portal.
Newsworthy
Doing data differently – Greensboro’s evolving open data program : Sunlight Foundation
Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants…
Doing data differently – Greensboro’s evolving open data program : Sunlight Foundation
What Works City Feature: Greensboro, NC - What Works Cities
The Opportunity As the third most populous city in North Carolina, Greensboro has a long history of using data and evidence to inform decision-making and policy. Notably, Greensboro has developed a Management, Accountability and Performance (MAP) program designed to capture cost, performance, and efficiency data for many city programs. For example, requests for increased budgets …
What Works City Feature: Greensboro, NC - What Works Cities
Resources | Tyler Technologies
Resources | Tyler Technologies
Highlights
In partnership with What Works Cities and the Sunlight Foundation, Greensboro created an open data policy and a new open data portal, Open Gate City.
With popular datasets available on the portal, the city has seen a major reduction in public records requests – enhancing the citizen experience and improving productivity for city staff.
Greensboro placed among the leading city governments in the 2018 Digital Cities Survey Award for its success in transparency and open data.
Summary
In 2016, the $ City of Greensboro$ , NC set its sights on transparency. The city wanted to give residents and entrepreneurs easy access to key datasets, with the goal of fostering citizen engagement and supporting local businesses.
Greensboro worked with the What Works Cities program and the Sunlight Foundation to create an open data policy and develop a new open data portal, $ Open Gate City$ . Using the portal, citizens and businesses can seamlessly explore a wealth of city data, including housing and development, geographic information, and city finances.
The city analyzed public records requests (PRRs) to determine which data to include in the portal, adding the most in-demand datasets first. This approach has led to a considerable drop in PRRs, since citizens are able to find the information they need through the portal, rather than having to make requests – saving time for both residents and city staff.
Open Gate City empowers local businesses, universities, and residents to find innovative new ways to use city datasets. At the portal’s launch hackathon, for instance, participants created a heat map of fire incidents and a tool for locating nearby grocery stores. The portal also provides users with unprecedented insight into city programs, ensuring that local government is kept accountable.
Along with its recent website redesign, the open data portal was central to Greensboro’s success in the 2018 Digital Cities Survey Award. The North Carolina city was named among the country's top-ranked local governments thanks to its work in transparency and open data.