{"id":19161,"date":"2013-04-23T09:36:35","date_gmt":"2013-04-23T13:36:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.raleighpublicrecord.org\/?p=19161"},"modified":"2013-04-23T09:36:35","modified_gmt":"2013-04-23T13:36:35","slug":"opening-data-in-raleigh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/featured\/2013\/04\/23\/opening-data-in-raleigh\/","title":{"rendered":"Opening Data in Raleigh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Raleigh\u2019s new open government portal<\/a> won\u2019t be fully launched until September, but the city\u2019s new open data manager Jason Hare is working to get as much data online and accessible before then. The portal is still in its \u201csoft launch\u201d phase, but Hare said recently this is more than just a new website for sharing the city\u2019s datasets. He hopes open data will be integrated into the way all city departments work.<\/p>\n

Members of the City Council pushed last year to make city data available online and put a little money behind the idea to hire Hare to collect the data and build a new site. The open data portal launched in March and continues to be updated with big sets of data including building permits, police and fire incidents, trail maps and other digital information collected and created by the city.<\/p>\n

[pullquote]\u201cWe want this to be citizen driven, not the Jason Hare open data show.\u201d[\/pullquote]<\/p>\n

The Record sat down with Hare recently to talk about how the open data initiative is progressing and what\u2019s to come. Hare\u2019s central message: \u201cOpen data is not just a resolution, it\u2019s also a philosophy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hare, whom the city hired away from the Durham school system late last year, spent the first months in the job gathering input from community members and data from city departments. He said he\u2019s interviewed 100-plus people on what they want in an open data portal, and he\u2019s reaching out to community groups such as the Citizen Advisory Councils<\/a> to tell people what he\u2019s up to and ask what they want to see from the open data push.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t want the government telling you what datasets you want; you want to tell the government what dataset you want,\u201d Hare said. \u201cI want to be deluged with requests.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want this to be citizen driven, not the Jason Hare open data show.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt solves the \u2018Stephen Colbert truthiness\u2019 problem. Sometimes what you think is true isn\u2019t always actually true. It seems true, but it\u2019s not. Here\u2019s the data; that is true. That\u2019s what we want to get to,\u201d Hare said.<\/p>\n

This summer he\u2019s planning to go through each of the city\u2019s 26 departments and 130 units to inventory the datasets being collected and used across city government.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we\u2019re discovering these datasets we\u2019re going to be curating them at the same time and we\u2019re going to be setting up data contacts\u201d as they work toward launching the full site in the fall.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re going to see financial data; you\u2019re going to see all kinds of data. Right now we don\u2019t know what we don\u2019t know,\u201d he said. \u201cWhere are all the datasets at? Well, they\u2019re everywhere. And they\u2019re in all kinds of formats.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re biting off a lot, but the folks here are pretty smart. I have all the confidence in the world that we\u2019ll pull this off.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Raleigh's<\/a>

Raleigh’s new open data team. From left to right: Data Analyst Sai R. Sudhini, Open Data Project Manager Jason Hare and Senior Data Analyst Robert Richmond. Photo provided by the City of Raleigh.<\/p><\/div>\n

Hare said the open data push is not just transparency for transparency\u2019s sake.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe also hope some people make a lot of money off of it,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s part of this, not just transparency but to have a real impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

He points to industries such as real estate that could use the maps of neighborhoods to make listings more accurate and give potential home buyers more options and information.<\/p>\n

Hare pointed to what websites looked like in 1992 compared to now, and said he can’t predict how people and companies could use this data in the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re at the very tip of what those uses could be,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been asked a couple times, \u2018is this thing temporary?\u2019 And no, this is permanent. Open is permanent.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Raleigh\u2019s open data manager wants open government to be a way of life for City Hall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24002,"featured_media":19163,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1123,23],"tags":[1236,270],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19161"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}