I’m excited to announce that we will be rolling out a new open data portal for the Philadelphia region, OpenDataPhilly.org on April 25.  Open data and government transparency have been increasingly visible concerns over the past few years.  Almost 10 years ago, the City of Philadelphia made its GIS data available to the public at no charge, and, at the time, was one of the first and largest municipalities in the world to do so.  That data has been available on PASDA, the spatial data clearinghouse for Pennsylvania, ever since.

In the past few years, many municipal governments have been making a public and concerted effort to improve the transparency of their government operations by releasing significant and useful data sets.  Washington DC deserves credit for playing a leadership role in this respect.  DC was arguably the first major city to not only release downloadable data sets but create real-time streams of data from operational databases.  Today the District provides access to 475 datasets from multiple agencies and in a variety of formats, CSV, RSS, KML, XML and shapefiles.  In May 2009, the federal government launched Data.gov with just 47 data sets.  Today there are 380,000 data sets (of which more than 376,000 are geospatial). Many other cities have followed suit. A few of them include:

• London
• New York City
• San Francisco
• Seattle
• Toronto
• Washington DC

But Philadelphia isn’t in that list.  While the City was an early and unsung leader 10 years ago, these recent efforts by other governments have left it behind.  There is no Philadelphia Open Data web site.  So why is Azavea building one? Well, we really have Roz Duffy to thank.  She encouraged me to get involved with the Open Access Philly task force, a group sponsored by the City.  I attended my first meeting in January and was impressed by the range and diversity of the people who have been attending these meetings over the past year.  After the first meeting, I felt like Azavea was actually in a good position to create something that would both serve to bring the various City data sets together in a single catalog as well as extend the catalog to other resources.

So while the Open Access Philly task force is supporting this new catalog, OpenDataPhilly.org is not a City project.  The City government doesn’t have the resources to build something right now.  But I’m proud that Azavea is building it.   That said, this is not a typical project for us.  We don’t build open data portals – we build spatial data analysis and visualization tools.  But I felt this was important for a number of reasons.  First, I kept hearing other technology people in the region lamenting how Philadelphia was being left in the dust by other cities.  That’s sad because there’s actually far more data available than most people realize, but that was certainly a common perception.  Second, much of Azavea’s work depends on open standards and the broad availability of useful data sets.  By making it easier to find data, we are supporting the ecosystem that supports our business.  Third, I buy into the idea that open government can encourage both better government and a more engaged citizenry.

Because Azavea is not the City, OpenDataPhilly.org is different from most other open government data portals.  We have taken a look at a lot of them and we’ve done our best to incorporate what we thought were the best parts.  But we’ve decided to try some different ideas that we hope will make the catalog more useful.  First, the catalog is not limited to data from the municipal government – we have also incorporated data from non-profits, universities and commercial organizations.   Second, this catalog is not just about data; we’ve also included data-centric web and mobile applications as well as developer-oriented APIs and other structured data feeds.  Third, we realize that data for its own sake is not really all that helpful.  To be useful, the data needs to actually be put to use in new applications, visualizations and stories.  So the OpenDataPhilly.org site includes an Idea Gallery, a feature similar to London’s Inspirational Uses page.

When the site rolls out on Monday, it will not only be a catalog of existing data sets, applications and APIs, it will also include a series of new geodata APIs that the City has implemented over the last few weeks.  So the act of constructing the catalog has inspired the City to release some data sets in a new and useful way.  That’s pretty exciting.  From our perspective, that means the effort is already a success.  Furthermore, while the City didn’t pay for the development of OpenDataPhilly.org, that doesn’t mean they didn’t help.  Several staff at the City’s Office of Information Technology, including Jeff Friedman, Stuart Alter, Paul Wright, Jim Querry, Brian Ivey, Walter Svekla and others have supported it’s development through both encouragement, suggestions and the hard work required to roll out these new APIs.

The rollout will also coincide with Philly Tech Week, a week-long celebration of technology and innovation in Philadelphia organized by Technically Philly.  Open data serves as bookends for the week.  Azavea will be rolling out OpenDataPhilly.org on Monday at noon at WHYY.  On Saturday as part of the BarCamp NewsInnovation at Temple University, Tropo is organizing an Open Government Hackathon.  The Hackathon will aim to build new applications that use the data listed in the catalog.

Want to get involved? Here are a few ways:

• Show up on Saturday for the Hackathon and join a team.
• Got data? We know we probably missed a bunch of useful data sets. There will be a mechanism for organizations to submit information about their data sets for potential inclusion in the catalog.
• Is a critical data set missing? We’ll have a way for you to ask for it and vote on other people’s requests.
• Write to your city, state and federal legislators and ask them to support open government data policies. We can help you with that too. Check out Azavea’s Cicero API.
• If you are a developer, build some apps that use the data. Or, better yet, apply for Code for America, an innovative approach to public service where you can apply your skills to making government work better for everyone.
• Say something with the data. Download some data and develop a beautiful visualization that tells a story. Then submit it to the Idea Gallery.