Open Data Transforms Public Safety Outcomes and Creates New Opportunities

Increasing numbers of cities and countries around the world are learning the value of making government data pools open and available to the public. These initiatives create platforms for community engagement, stimulate innovative solutions to civic issues, and boost economic activity. Open data has been embraced by municipalities both as a mechanism to better respond to public safety emergencies and to more mundane, but equally resource-intensive tasks such as monitoring bylaw violations. For example, open data enables geospatial modelling of traffic violations to better allocate limited resources to hotspots around the municipality.  The growing success of these initiatives has led some governments to release data specifically focused on policing, traffic, critical infrastructure and other relevant categories in order to improve public safety.

While the concept of open data continues to gain traction, not all governments have successfully developed their open data initiatives. For example, the Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI) was launched in 2011 to some fanfare, with analysts expecting that this initiative could lead to grassroots innovation in public safety. Instead, it faced considerable criticism because of its slow uptake. More specifically, public sector employees and municipal politicians actively resisted releasing high value municipal data, largely because the initiative lacked a clear policy framework to govern the release of data. Decision-making power over the release of open data was concentrated within the most difficult to reach executive branches of government, and these agencies typically worked in silos, resulting in inconsistent data formatting and different data release cycles. Uptake was therefore slow and inconsistent, and until KODI’s recent relaunch, it served as a cautionary tale indicating that simply building an open data portal is not sufficient to drive use and adoption.

The muddled open data policies hindering the performance of the KODI project contrast sharply with the policy framework that Chicago instituted alongside the launch of its own open data project. In 2012, the mayor of Chicago issued an open data executive order with the aim of creating an ‘unprecedented’ level of transparency and accountability.  This policy framework provided concrete guidelines for the dissemination of public data and immediately produced measurable results, amassing more than 16 million page views.

Three key provisions in Chicago’s policy contribute to its success:

• An open data advisory group, to be chaired by a Chief Data Officer, was established. (Chicago was, in fact, the first major municipality to appoint a CDO.)
• The advisory group oversees and coordinates the release of data from government agencies in consistent and cross-compatible formats.
• City agencies are mandated to provide an annual report to ensure their open data compliance.

The public safety data available through Chicago’s initiative includes hundreds of databases detailing longitudinal crime reports, information on policing districts, fire stations and more. The City of Chicago honors the applications developed using the open data that the City provides on its Digital Hub page. These public safety applications range from the relatively straightforward, measuring weather and water conditions on Chicago’s beaches or creating a visual map of current 311 requests, to the more complex, such as the SmartData Platform, which uses sophisticated analytics to enable leaders to see trends in crime and other public safety metrics.

The success of these applications demonstrates how a coherent policy framework that encourages the release of open data can produce positive change and measurable outcomes for public safety in the city. Additionally, these applications have the benefit of reducing the burden on city administration and streamlining otherwise cumbersome processes. Other jurisdictions around the world are following Chicago’s example in embracing the power of big data and analytics to create a measurable and positive impact on public safety.

Opportunities on the Horizon

Even as some municipalities embrace open data, many more struggle with harnessing the transformative power of big data. The success of these projects hinges on two guiding principles:  (1) creating effective partnerships between governments and businesses, and using them to ensure the expertise and technology necessary to facilitate widespread uptake and citizen buy-in, and (2) establishing a clear, transparent policy framework that makes data available for everyone to use.

Following these principles, cities can take a series of “next steps” to implement an effective open data program:

• Establish an advisory group to oversee and coordinate the release of open data. This approach bridges the gap between government agency ‘silos’ that proved disruptive in the rollout of Kenya’s open data project. Consider adding two levels of group membership: one which is comprised of city staff, and another which is comprised of technology partners and non-governmental agencies. Two layers of membership will ensure data validity and greater applicability.
• Ensure that data formatting is cross-compatible and interoperable for maximum usability. Leverage well-established standards such as ISO 8601 and upcoming standards such as ISO 37120. Network with other municipalities and advocate for widespread adherence to these standards during the data entry and data release processes. This will reduce data cleaning costs and help create open data compatibility across municipalities.
• Work with a set of trusted technology partners to develop a coherent open data policy, and use this opportunity to administer an ICT platform that marries disparate sources of data into a manageable and interoperable format.
• Increase automation in the process of producing open data. For example, automatically scan each data set and provide a statistical quality measurement score, then encourage and reward improvements to that score.

Adopting these measures will drive open data progress and innovation. As the field of smart public safety brings stakeholders from multiple municipal bodies together, partnerships formed can lead to new opportunities to improve public safety and address issues that cross municipal borders, such as weather emergencies. As cities in developing and developed countries continue to realize the potential of open data for improving public safety, they will be most successful when working with partners to aid them in in their transformation into smart cities.