In bid for tranparency, Chapel Hill launches open data project

The Town of Chapel Hill has joined Raleigh, Durham and Cary in a national trend of posting the city government’s information on a user-friendly website.

The public already had access to the information, but interested parties would have needed to search through specific departments’ databases or make public records requests. Now, the information is under one roof.

It’s all in an effort to increase transparency and the public’s access to data, said David Green, Town of Chapel Hill library systems manager.

“Town Council has a goal to improve civic understanding and open data is a way to achieve that goal,” he said.

Chapel Hill is paying $15,600 annually to OpenDataSoft, a data-management company, to provide a ready-made website that will host the town’s information. The project, Chapel Hill Open Data, allows anyone to examine the city government’s data in several formats from tables to maps, graphs and charts.

Chris Matthews, a senior database administrator for Wake County’s open data project, said the point of open data is to make information available to citizens in a format they can use.

“We take hacking and bring it back to that civic space to make everyone’s life better,” he said.

Jason Baker, a Chapel Hill resident and longtime blogger on Orange County politics, is already putting the city’s new data organization plan to use.

“The project I’m trying to build is a toolkit for empowering neighborhoods and other community groups to make better planning and zoning decisions,” he said.

Adam Martin, open data program manager for Raleigh, said open data websites are also helpful to local governments.

Open data projects help different departments share information and they can help governments see where they fall short, he said.

“If you air your dirty laundry or dirty data, it can help reveal gaps in your business process,” Martin said. “The data is not dirty because we’re incompetent. It’s dirty because there is much more data in the world than we can process — it’s about skills and priorities.”

Sharing this information can elicit valuable feedback from the public that can encourage governments to improve data collection, Martin said. There are experts in the public sphere that can analyze the data in ways that local governments do not have the capacity to do.

The big question is how to get the data to people in the context they want it, Martin said. Most people will not access the government’s information, even when it is hosted on a user-friendly site, he said.

To solve this problem, the city of Raleigh worked with Google Waze to share traffic reports and with Yelp to post health sanitation scores on restaurant’s pages, Martin said.

It is possible that Chapel Hill will try to follow suit in the future but the program is new and has not yet moved in that direction, Green said.

“We don’t fully understand our audience yet — what they want, what they need,” he said.

How the project develops depends on support from the city manager, funding and feedback from the public, Green said.

At this point, the possibilities for Chapel Hill’s Open Data project are as numerous as the data itself.

@jordant_wilkie

city@dailytarheel.com