West Palm Beach Mayor Jeri Muoio
Courtesy of West Palm Beach Insider Newsletter
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Mayor Jeri Muoio recently announced that the City of West Palm Beach has adopted an open data policy as part of the City’s larger commitment to transparency and collaboration with residents.
The policy establishes a framework for proactively publishing municipal data and lays the groundwork for West Palm Beach to drive decision-making with municipal metrics.
The West Palm Beach data effort creates a new space for city decision makers to meet and review metrics and also enables conversation on the quality and value of city data.
Not only will city data become more available for internal and external uses, but the information can also be used in future performance analytics projects.
“By making city data more public, West Palm Beach takes a giant step forward in its commitment to transparency,” Muoio said. “We are also committed to prioritizing data and delivering results for residents by making that information more consumable.”
One recent success to make key city data more accessible to the public is the recently unveiled Code Violation application, which enables residents to see, at a glance, code violations on an interactive city map with details on violation length and frequency.
The city will be unveiling a dashboard of key performance metrics later this year and will ultimately release an open data portal to the public where users can access data in a downloadable format without having the necessity of submitting a public records request.
The open data effort is the result of the city’s collaboration with partners on the What Works Cities (WWC) initiative, launched by Bloomberg Philanthropies and supported by experts at the Sunlight Foundation, the Center for Government Excellence (GovEx) at Johns Hopkins University and Results for America.
By working with WWC experts, the City of West Palm Beach was able to incorporate leading national best practices into its policy.
“Passing an open data policy is an important step for the City of West Palm Beach toward enhancing and sustaining how the city shares city data with its residents,” said WWC Executive Director Simone Brody.
Other recent City accomplishments related to opening data include:
• Enabling departments to more easily share each other’s data as a resource when making decisions;
• Establishing a data governance team to help manage the city’s open data program, review the quality of data and determine how to prioritize and release it publicly;
• And completing a first inventory of the city’s available data sets including key public safety data and beginning an analysis to understand the quality of existing data and what still needs to be collected.
Construction on the City of West Palm Beach open data portal is now underway, and the city looks forward to making the valuable information resource available soon.
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