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Above: Los Angeles Chief Innovation Technology Officer Peter Marx
“The City of LA has been providing services and collecting data for a very long time,” said Peter Marx, the new Chief Innovation Technology Officer for the City of Los Angeles. Unfortunately, “most of the time the data is trapped within proprietary systems.”
But the city's new open data initiative seeks to change that. Recently, Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office has been opening up more and more of the city’s internal data and offering it to the public via a new website: data.lacity.org. The data ranges from city employee salaries to the city’s tonnage of solid waste collection. Upon launch, the platform featured over 100 data sets.
Mayor Garcetti, who describes himself as an early adopter of blogging and has been labeled by local venture capitalist Mark Suster as the “first tech mayor" of Los Angeles, is keen to catch up to cities like New York and Chicago, which have been pioneering open city data.
“The Mayor’s directive, it’s very straightforward: publish the data you have,” said Marx. “There’s no huge event that’s going to happen. Just continuing to find data sets and publish them.”
In fact, outside of the CITO position Marx holds, there is no special open data department.
“No one is solely dedicated to open data,” said Marx. "But lots of people are mandated as part of their job to provide open data. We don’t want it to be a special thing; we want it to be part of everyday business.”
If there is data not yet published on the platform it can be requested from City Hall via a “request a dataset” forum on the website. “If the data exists then we want to publish,” said Marx.
City Hall decides on the importance of publishing data based on two questions: “Does the data exist? And can we publish legally?” said Marx. For privacy reasons, “crime data with latitude and longitude we don’t publish."
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Left to right: Mayor Eric Garcetti, CITO Peter Marx, Managing Director of Launchpad LA Sam Teller, CEO and Founder of Docstoc Jason Nazar
Marx acknowledges that as LA's open data platform gets up to speed it has some internal challenges to overcome.
“It’s a new concept for a lot of people around the city,” said Marx, "It’s almost like opening a door to a room in your house you’ve always had, but didn’t know existed.”
But open data has proved so popular in other cities that City Hall appears willing to bear internal awkwardness for now.
It also appears willing to bear external criticism. Early on, published City Hall data was used for an unflattering article by the Los Angeles Times that showed “most L.A. City employees don’t live in L.A.” That article led to criticism of City Hall, but no one ever discussed taking down the datasets that drove that analysis.
So why would a city government open itself to criticism via open data? During pre-rollout of the open data initiative Mayor Garcetti said the open data platform was “to promote transparency and accountability.” Clearly much of this initiative is based on basic democratic ideals and credit should be given to those motivations, but an open data platform is probably also a good public relations strategy.
Open city data exists amongst a larger shift in consumer and citizen attitudes towards corporations and government. As the abundance of information on the Internet has made hiding mistakes and smothering critiques much more difficult, many corporations and governments are choosing to embrace open information. In the same way corporations would not want to be caught deleting negative product reviews, more and more cities hate to be viewed as closed off and too sensitive to criticism. An open data platform is a sign of authenticity.
Marx is also quick to point out that the data can and already does support valuable third party services. For example, ParkMe, an app that helps drivers find open parking spots in LA, is powered by data provided by the city of Los Angeles.
“If you don’t know where the parking meters are it’s really hard to make an app to locate parking. The data that drives those operations is useful in so many different contexts,” said Marx.
In many cases, it appears there is no organization better equipped to provide these data sets: “Zillow for instance gathers a lot of its real estate information from government,” said Marx. “They can collect the data themselves or they can get it from the government.”
