Part 1: Why We Open Up Data

In December 2013, Mayor Eric Garcetti passed Executive Directive No. 3, mandating that barring any legal, privacy, or security concerns, all of the City of Los Angeles’ data should be made openly available -- launching the City’s Open Data Program.

Open Data is raw data generated or collected by government agencies made freely available for use by the public, subject only to valid privacy, confidentiality, security, and other legal restrictions. A few examples of open data include building and safety permit information or crime and collision data; locations of all parks or city buildings; and city performance data such as 311 calls or permit processing times. Broadly speaking, there are three types of data generated: (1) Demographic: the "gestalt of the city" (poverty rates, education etc); (2) Performance metrics: outcomes and efficacy from the departments (eg fire response times); (3) Operational data: real time information from day to day systems (eg all crimes, 311 calls etc).

Many other cities have launched open data programs, leading to meaningful ROI on three core goals: 1) transparency and accountability; 2) internal efficiency and better decision-making; and 3) community-driven innovation and entrepreneurship.

As the City of Los Angeles is committed to fostering a “data-driven culture of innovation and excellence” and empowering citizens to be more deeply involved in their government, the availability and reliability of open data is key to success.

As the Executive Directive states:

Open Data empowers Angelenos to participate in governance with greater understanding and impact. Opening government data to entrepreneurs and businesses promotes innovation by putting that information to work in ways outside the expertise of government institutions and gives companies, individuals, and nonprofit organizations the opportunity to leverage one of government’s greatest assets: public information. Most significantly, it fosters creative new thinking about solving our most intractable challenges through public-private partnerships and promoting a culture of data sharing between our own City departments and other civic resources.
- Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, December 2013 (Executive Directive 3)

To that end, the City of Los Angeles’ open data portal, data.lacity.org, with the City Controller’s, ControlPanelLA, make data freely available to our citizens, businesses, nonprofits, and other government agencies. These portals are centralized, easy-to-use websites where one can directly view or visualize data, or download it in bulk to run analysis or build tools, apps, and visualizations.

Beyond these portals themselves, the Open Data program will also support the adoption and use of other data tools, such as mapping or analytics platforms, to help City departments put data to work for performance management and data-driven decision making.

The Executive Directive requires all departments to participate in the Open Data program, making all appropriate data publicly available. This Open Data Policy and Playbook offers detailed instructions on the program and what role you and your department should play. This is a living document, approved when updated by the Information Technology Policy Committee (ITPC), that will respond to feedback and commentary.

Principles & Strategy

The Open Data program is designed to realize many different varieties of public good, including greater government transparency, accountability, efficiency, civic engagement and economic growth. Accordingly, these are the high-level principles and strategies of the Program, the execution of which this policy and playbook will detail:

Default to Open

Proactively release publishable city data, making it freely available in accessible formats for the public to reuse and redistribute
Publish high quality data in standard formats and documentation (metadata) to foster interoperability with other governments’ data, and actively pursue intergovernmental partnerships
Proactively consider how new technology or systems will provide open data automatically for public consumption

Two-Way Engagement

Bring citizens into the process of understanding what data is useful and get the data in the hands of those it matters to, through ongoing citizen outreach (both online and offline)
Create mechanisms where citizens and developers can add value to the data through two-way (read/write) technology platforms (APIs)
Support the creation of meaningful applications and tools built atop the data, by local developers and startups through hands-on engagement and community building

Putting data to work

Foster an open data process that streamlines, rather than duplicates the work of the data owners
Rely on open data to support data-driven policy making within city hall and connect performance management and budgeting with technology through data
Diminish organizational silos through department-to-department data-sharing

Mind the Data