Page 49 - GCN, May 2017

they need it,” he added.
Therriault sees two main audiences
for the open-data portal: external us- ers and Boston government employees. The new website showcases how users are interacting with information that’s tailored to the in-government audi- ence. For instance, a budget applica- tion offers insight into how operating and capital budgets are allocated across city departments and presents a map of capital projects planned for the fiscal year. And the BuildBPS Dashboard pro- vides analysis tools and data visualiza- tions for school buildings.
Analyze Boston will officially launch this spring, and there’s a schedule for releasing new datasets over the next six months.
“We’ve been actively partnering with the police department and our \[emer-
gency medical services\] system to look at public safety-related data to get as much published on there as possible,” Therriault said. The data team has also been working with the city’s Environ- ment Department to understand utility use by city properties.
In addition, Boston has changed the way it licenses its data — a move the Sunlight Foundation has praised. Pre- viously, the standard was a Creative Commons attribution license, which Therriault said was fairly permissive. However, it came with stipulations that could be problematic when users wanted to build derivative products by combining the data with other informa- tion or applications because they had to ensure that the data had the proper attribution all the way down the line.
“We decided to make the default li-
cense just a public domain license so that there are no restrictions on usage,” Therriault said. “People can do what- ever they want with our data. If they want to attribute it to us, great, but we’re trying to be as open as possible to make it easier for this data to be used elsewhere.”
Boston’s effort to make data more usable to the public and the city’s em- ployees is a trend across governments, said Joel Natividad, OpenGov’s director of open data. “It has to have utility not just for the public. It has to have utility for government itself,” he added.
“Once you’ve got that data available, allowing government folks to use it just as much as citizens is probably going to drive more value in the long term,” said Michael Schanker, head of marketing at OpenGov. •
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