City leaders panel: local issues and open data solutions, lessons learned, and setting short and long terms priorities
Moderator: Alex Howard, Sunlight Foundation, What Works Cities initiative
Juan Prada, City of Montevideo (Uruguay)
The main reason to open data is the belief that data belongs to the citizen, not to agencies. Why should the citizen be charged for the use of their own data?
In 2008 the government began its open data strategy. After an initial publication of data, the government focused on enabling the creation of open data based services developed by the citizens, such as the adaptation of Fix My Street for Montevideo.
The service behind the open data initiative acts as thus, as a service, and so has a help-desk and an analysis unit to monitor usage and make proposals of new data sets to be published, etc.
Víctor Morlán, City of Zaragoza (Spain)
Same belief as Uruguay: access to data and public information is a basic right for citizens.
Now, all services that the City Council website creates use open data as a main source. Thus, there is no need to maintain different databases and services: open data becomes useful for the City Council itself.
Privacy is dealt with in the open data initiative, and everything that is published has gone through a thorough process of compliance with the law.
Stephane Contre, City of Edmonton (Canada)
After a first deployment, the big effort now has been publishing a “data analytics website” so that people that are neither tech-savvy or data-savvy can query the data themselves.
One of the big impact has been the internal use of open data. Using specific algorithms you can use open data to improve municipal services.
