Civic Tech Chat is a monthly podcast about the civic technology movement. We seek to harness the power technology has to improve the delivery of public services to people everywhere. This is the first of our series of of Breakdown Talks. These sessions are meant to summarize various civic technology concepts. Our subject today is open data. What is open data? It's a government policy to govern accessible data. It tends to follow a few basic principles. The data is public and has safeguards for personal or sensitive information. It is accessible, formatted in a standard and machine readable way. It's documented in a manner that makes the information clear and understandable. It's reusable, licensed in an open fashion without restrictions to use by the rest of us. It's managed and has permanence. Information should be maintained over time, and changes are done in a transparent way with consideration for versioning and archival. So why is there a push for these policies? To promote transparency, whether it's grants, budgets, or economic data, these portals allow the citizen to see what's going on. Whether it's Cincinnati's procurement dataset, which empowers citizens to look into how the city gets what it needs, or Chicago's transportation data sources, providing stop locations, ridership statistics, and more, these portals give a snapshot into how your government operates. To encourage participation, open resources empower us to roll up our sleeves and dive into the data that is used to make decisions. What better way is there to enter a town hall than informed with a view of where things stand? To foster innovation, citizens can provide insights, find patterns, and build things with data that were previously unprovided. For example, here in Chicago, there's an app called My Building Doesn't Recycle. It was created by Claire Micklin, Ben Wilhelm, and Alex Khan during Shy Hack Night. The tool allows folks to report residential buildings in violation of recycling policies in the city, and allows them to see previous reports in a friendly map format. To improve government services, through data use, governments can iterate, learn from feedback, cooperate with the public, and get better at what they do. This happened in Nepal in 2015, after two earthquakes impacted the region. An organization called the Local Interventions Group partnered with the Nepali Home Ministry to open up emergency helpline data. This was used to allow public tracking of aid and to provide a means for people to report gaps in delivery. This allowed for an informed effort with an open space to air out problems. You might be thinking that this sounds great, but is it being implemented? It absolutely is. Data.gov, an initiative of the US federal government, provides a directory of such services boasting quite a sizable listing. It includes 48 states, 48 US cities and counties, 53 countries around the world, and a 165 international regions. Datasets are available for use covering scopes as large as nations and as hyper local as individual neighborhoods. Whether you wanna find out more about health, energy, education, agriculture, or something else entirely, these portals can be a wide ranging resource. But where can you find out more? I'll provide a more detailed listing in this session's description. Resources like data.gov provide a directory of links, perhaps even to one where you live. The Sunlight Foundation provides more information regarding open data guidelines, as we talked about in the beginning of this talk. And the US government's own Project Open Data initiative strives to share methodologies meant for use across federal agencies. That is your breakdown of open data. Hopefully, this has given you a high level view of what it is, why it's implemented, its pervasiveness, and where to learn more. If you'd like us to do a more in-depth analysis of the topic, please feel free to tweet us using at civic tech chat. And as always, you can subscribe using your podcast app to keep up with the newest content.