SEATTLE – May 15, 2012 — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services today launched the Health System Measurement Project, an extensive performance dashboard that provides data on about 50 U.S. health system measures, in an accessible, data-driven interactive experience. The breakthrough site, which is powered by the Socrata Data Experience Cloud, is publicly available at HealthMeasures.aspe.hhs.gov.

The Health System Measurement Project optimizes the delivery of critical U.S. health system indicators to policymakers, providers, and the public, providing contextual, data-driven information to enhance the understanding of changes in the health care system. The groundbreaking performance dashboard organizes over 400 datasets sourced from across the federal government in ten topical areas, including access to care, cost and affordability, prevention and health information technology.

Users of the site can then explore different measures in each topic, and drill down on each measure to compare trends across several dimensions such as year, geographic region, or population characteristics including age, sex, income level, and insurance coverage status. For example, through this project, a user can monitor the percentage of people who have delayed needed health care due to cost, and track hospital readmission rates.

This first-of-its-kind performance dashboard also represents several breakthrough technology innovations in cloud-optimized data modeling, user experience design, and metadata-driven information architecture. The result is a new generation of data-fueled interactive experiences that abstract the complexity of data exploration through a user-friendly, Consumer Web experience.

The enabling technology platform supports several key objectives:

• Making the health system more open and transparent.
• Expanding access to information and making it accessible to every day users and non-technical audiences, in a familiar, Consumer Web experience.
• Promoting innovation and cost-effectiveness in information delivery by adopting new turnkey, cloud-based technologies designed to promote agility, reusability, and ease of maintenance in data-driven information systems.
• Facilitating collaboration between government agencies and elimination of data silos.
• Empowering entrepreneurs, programmers and developers with an open, standards-based Application Programming Interface (API) for each dataset on the site.
• Enabling policy analysts to interactively explore the data online, share it on social media and download it in a number of open formats for deeper analysis.

The new system uses a flexible metadata-driven architecture to provide a cost-effective solution that is easy to modify and update and is ubiquitously accessible.

About Socrata

Socrata is the leading developer and provider of Open Data cloud services, a category of Web 2.0 solutions that enable public sector organizations to dramatically improve citizen access to information and online services, while reducing costs.

The Socrata Data Experience Cloud™ optimizes the management and speeds up the dissemination of data-driven interactive content to citizen, professional and internal government audiences, through multiple interfaces: Web, social, mobile, API, apps, voice, SMS. Information assets include tabular data, geospatial data, unstructured content and real-time data from government transactional systems of record.

Socrata customers include cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and New York City; states such as Oregon, Illinois and Oklahoma, and federal agencies such as Medicare, SAMHSA and GSA (Data.gov). Socrata is a private company, based in Seattle, Washington, with venture financing from Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures. To learn more about Socrata, visit www.socrata.com.

Contact

Saf Rabah
VP, Marketing
Socrata, Inc.
206.340.8008 ext 151
saf.rabah@socrata.com

Or, one might consider that we are a team of people who care that our technology enables positive change. Reinventing government with Open Data is not an empty slogan we use for marketing. It is a promise we make to our customers. Numerous government organizations share in this vision and have trusted Socrata to help them achieve it. We felt it would inform this debate if we shared the all the different ways that our customers are using Open Data as a platform for innovation. So yes, we are biased, but we do have a a unique perspective and a viewpoint that was shaped by working in the trenches, as part of the Open Data community, since 2008.

First, Let’s not conflate Open Data with Open Government

The first point has to do with the definition of Open Data. Since it is a broad term that describes a nascent and rapidly-evolving movement (sic) it lacks the structure and definition of more mature concepts, like e-Government. This makes Open Data easy to love and easy to criticize at the same time. In this regard, Tom’s post is helpful because it challenges the community of advocates, activists, volunteers, developers, entrepreneurs and government leaders who participate in shaping Open Data’s future to be crisper, more purposeful and grounded in our approach.

The first problematic assertion that Tom Slee makes: that is conflating Open Government with Open Data. The two are related, but not the same (See the opening graphic in Alex Howard’s article to visualize the distinction.) In our view. An open Government strategy needs to include Open Data as a component of enabling transparency and engaging citizens. However, Open Government is also about a commitment to open public meetings; releasing public information in all its forms, if not proactively at least in a timely fashion; engaging the public in decision making; and it is also a general mindset, backed up by clear policy, that citizens need to be empowered with information and a voice so they can hold their government accountable.

At the same time, a good Open Data strategy should support Open Government goals, by making structured data that relates to accountability and ethics like spending data, contracts, staff salaries, elections, political contributions, program effectiveness…etc. available in machine- and human-readable formats.

This brings us to the second incorrect statement that Tom Slee makes. He states that:

The Open Data movement is doing nothing for transparency and accountability in government

This is simply not true. Let’s take Ethics.gov, for example. It is a great government-led example of enabling the public to easily search 7 different sources of information on lobbying reports, ethics records, and campaign finance filings in the U.S. federal government. At a more local level, Chicago’s public performance management program provides every performance indicator about city services in easy-to-understand, interactive charts, in addition to raw data and programmatic access via APIs (more on APIs later). Here is one such example:

Another striking example of Open Data for transparency is the City of Chicago’s publicly available and detailed lobbyist data, which Derek Eder, a local developer, used to build this fantastic app.

The State of Oregon, like many of our customers provides checkbook-level expenditure data from all its agencies. It’s important to note that Oregon’s success is in part due to their embrace of Open Data as a Platform, instead of merely providing a download of their expenditure data. The distinction is important. The former transforms data into an active ingredient of a service delivery pipeline. The latter is entirely divorced of any ability to deliver service.

Beyond transparency, Open Data directly impacts our quality of life

Opening up weather data, or GPS data or TIGER data had nothing to do with transparency, nor was it labeled Open Data at the time. It had everything to do with releasing a vital layer in the information infrastructure that we all depend on for the quality of life that we now enjoy. The same is true for new types of data that are being released under the Open Data banner: realtime crime data in Seattle neighborhoods, restaurant inspection data in NYC, new permits and licenses, zoning changes, property taxes in Baltimore, foreclosures and abandoned buildings in Chicago, San Francisco’s 311 data, national or regional product recalls, radiation levels as a result of the Japan earthquake, the effects of the Oil spill in the Gulf, and the list goes on.

Making this information available in ways that ordinary people can easily access, interact with, make sense of and contextualize is at the heart of the Open Data movement. There is real innovation happening here in terms of building the new digital infrastructure that supports the flow of information between governments, citizens and businesses.

Open Data helps governments become more efficient

If the previous argument was about expanding citizen access to vital information, this part of the argument looks at the supply side of the information flow and the costs of delivering online services to constituents. Let’s take the State of Oregon as an example. In this video case study, the team from Oregon gives two concrete examples of how they are doing more with less, by leveraging Open Data as a platform to deliver online services more cost-effectively. The Secretary of State office, one of the state agencies, is embracing news ways to manage and deliver online databases for trademark applications and business registrations in the state. By turning the experience into a self-service online model, they expanded access for their customers and improved their own productivity at the same time. A win-win scenario.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in the federal government, is using Open Data as platform where the same nationwide database of treatment facilities is accessible via multiple self-service channels, including ubiquitous SMS. This illustrates two important aspects of innovative approaches to Open Data: reusing the same information across channels and multiple citizen interfaces (economies of scope) and leveraging the power of cloud-based APIs to connect the different interaction channels with the data.

Open Data APIs, the plumbing for Digital Government

The digital world we live in and the online services we consume and use very day are connected together via Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs for short. Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps are just three examples of powerful API-enabled services that are people use on other sites, often without realizing they’re interacting with the service via APIs. In a recent article in Programmable Web, Adam Duvander predicts that every company will have an API. This prediction is supported by the explosive growth of APIs in recent years, shown in the graph below:

Source: 5,000 APIs: Facebook, Google and Twitter Are Changing the Web, by Adam Duvander. Programmable Web, 2012.

Why then, would we accept that the public sector, which represents approximately 40% of our economy, would remain isolated from this wave of API-enabled innovation? It should not be.

He writes:

The most popular API category from the last 1,000 APIs is government. In total, we list 231 government APIs and nearly half of them have been added in the last four months. Many looked to 2009 and 2010 as the years of government’s embracing transparency. That was true in terms of opening up many gigabytes of data. However, it appears 2011 and 2012 are the years where that data becomes easily consumable in bite-size chunks, something that APIs make much easier than Excel files.

APIs are a fundamental part of the Open Data fabric, which is why every dataset that Socrata customers put online, is automatically API-enabled. We can argue that some don’t need to be, but the point here is that Open Data APIs are enabling the next wave of innovation which is all about connecting government data with apps and online services, in real-time and at scale, which only APIs can support. This is the Next Big Thing in the evolution towards a Digital Government.

The final point that we’d like to raise is the assertion by Tom Slee that Open Data is not a movement. We are not experts on what qualifies as a movement, but if you follow #opendata on Twitter, or go to any hackathon, app contest and CityCamp that happen every week around the world, you’ll quickly realize that Open Data has captured the imagination of thousands of people. Most of them donate their time and skill to advocate for more openness, scrape data and curate it so they can put it online, build apps that deliver social value, do the research and write thoughtful papers about Open Data and its impact. Many of them are government employees who travel on their own dime, and spend a weekend with civic hackers building something worthwhile.

Is that a movement? Is this all a joke? One way to find out is to go out there, get involved and contribute something.

Thanks for reading this long post.

Kevin Merritt is the Founder and CEO of Socrata.
@kmerritt

“The City of San Francisco, in partnership with Socrata, will present the San Francisco Open Data Cloud and executives from the National Conference on Citizenship will launch their Civic Data Challenge onstage at the Data 2.0 Summit.”

View Article > >

Source

“I think we all know that many of the issues facing government are cross-departmental, and historically, we might not have been very good at doing that. Things would have stayed within siloes rather than a collaboration — that’s one of the pieces we’re working through.”

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SAN FRANCISCO, Where 2.0 Conference – April 3, 2012 — Socrata today unveiled Mondara^TM, the first cloud service that enables mainstream web content developers – the Other 99% who are not GIS experts- to rapidly create an exciting new class of data-driven, interactive online maps. The new Mondara^TM service democratizes access to valuable geospatial and location data in government, currently locked up in inaccessible, proprietary formats, by making online map creation as easy as adding a photo to Facebook^TM.

Until today, creating data-driven, interactive online maps has been the exclusive domain of experts in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and skilled programmers. As a result, the vast majority of government geospatial data is still being shared as download-only files, delivered in formats that are inaccessible to everyday information consumers, such as Esri Shapefiles and Google KML files. These barriers have limited the reach and utility of millions of otherwise valuable public information assets.

“GIS Professionals have plenty of sophisticated software already. We invented Socrata Mondara^TM for the other 99% who just want the freedom to create interactive online maps and share them with the public,” says Kevin Merritt, Socrata’s Founder and CEO. “We eliminated costs and complexity by moving the entire creation-to-consumption lifecycle of online maps to the cloud, where our customers can leverage the power of Socrata’s open APIs and easy-to-use web and social interfaces to create compelling, data-driven, interactive content for their constituents.”

With no cumbersome desktop software, or GIS expertise needed, webmasters, communications professionals, and online content developers can drag-and-drop readily-available geospatial files from their GIS department to the cloud, and instantly transform those files into interactive online maps. Mondara^TM leverages the Socrata Open Data Platform architecture to enable content creators to easily combine layers from geospatial maps with related location data to create a new class of contextual, socially-connected, map-based applications.

Socrata Mondara is the latest example of a greater shift in government towards adoption of Open Data platforms, pervasive cloud access, and standards-based APIs for information delivery. Three years ago, the same innovations unlocked tabular transactional data for citizens, analysts and developers, while driving down the total cost of operation for government.

Today, The City of Edmonton, one of the recognized leaders in the Open Data movement, announced it has deployed Socrata Mondara^TM to its Socrata-powered Open Data Cloud. Chris Moore, Edmonton’s Chief Information Officer, says, “Socrata Mondara^TM provides significant value to Edmontonians in a quick, cost-effective way. By providing the ability to deploy rich interactive maps in a matter of minutes, with ease and limited technical experience, employees and residents are able to visualize relevant municipal information like neighbourhood boundaries, school zones, and the maps of the City’s service infrastructure in an easy-to-understand way.”

Socrata Mondara^TM, is available immediately, as a plug-and-play cloud service with any Socrata Open Data Portal^TM, or as a standalone portal for data-driven, interactive online maps. Mondara offers these unique design features:

• A simple drag-and-drop of KML files and Shapefiles to the Socrata cloud instantly transforms them into rich, interactive online maps;
• Newly-empowered online map creators can add points on a map from any related location data, and mix and match different map layers for added context;
• Citizens and non-technical consumers enjoy interactive online map exploration, unlimited social sharing and embedding just like they do with YouTube videos;
• Professional users get automatic conversion to multi-format file downloads for high-fidelity bulk data;
• Developers can continue to use the same standards-based, RESTful Socrata Open Data API (SODA) for all data, geospatial or transactional.

Socrata Mondara^TM was developed using open source technologies, including GeoServer and OpenLayers and supports OGC standards including Web Map Service and Web Feature Service.

For more information about Socrata Mondara^TM, including a three-minute demonstration video, and our introductory offer, go to www.socrata.com/Mondara

About Socrata
Socrata is the leading developer and provider of Open Data cloud services, a category of Web 2.0 solutions that enable public sector organizations to dramatically improve citizen access to information and online services, while reducing costs.

The Socrata Open Data Cloud^TM optimizes the management and speeds up the dissemination of data-driven interactive content to citizen, professional and internal government audiences, through multiple interfaces: Web, social, mobile, API, apps, voice, SMS. Information assets include tabular data, geospatial data, unstructured content and real-time data from government transactional systems of record.

Socrata customers include cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and New York City; states such as Oregon, Illinois and Oklahoma, and federal agencies such as Medicare, SAMHSA and GSA (Data.gov). Socrata is a private company, based in Seattle, Washington, with venture financing from Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures. To learn more about Socrata, visit www.socrata.com.

Contact

Saf Rabah
VP, Marketing
Socrata, Inc.
206.340.8008 ext 151
saf.rabah@socrata.com

Cloud Of Government Data Grows Over Chicago

Source: Information Week | Author: Elizabeth Montanalbo | Date: March 26, 2012

“With the help of cloud service provider Socrata, the state of Illinois, the city of Chicago, and Cook County have developed and launched the Metro Chicago Data Convergence Cloud as part of a transparency effort connecting data from each jurisdiction via a cloud-computing environment.”

View Article > > 

Chicago, Cook County and Illinois Start ‘Convergence Cloud’

Source: Digital Communities | Author: Jim Shilander | Date: March 21, 2012

“We are collaborating with our partners, the city of Chicago and Cook County, to not only break down the barriers between us and increase government transparency, but 

also to apply the lessons learned in the world of information technology to create new opportunities for entrepreneurship, foster creativity and create jobs,” said Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn.”

For additional press coverage regarding the new Illinois convergence cloud, click here. 

Partners Combine Their Public Data and Launch a Single Online Interface to Serve Constituents Across Jurisdictional Boundaries

CHICAGO – March 21, 2012 — Governor Pat Quinn, Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle and Mayor Rahm Emanuel today unveiled Socrata-powered MetroChicagoData.com, the nation’s first data convergence cloud that brings public data from the City of Chicago, Cook County and the State of Illinois into a single Open Data portal, for easy access by residents and businesses in the Metro Chicago area.

“We are collaborating with our partners, the City of Chicago and Cook County, to not only break down the barriers between us and increase government transparency, but also to apply the lessons learned in the world of information technology to create new opportunities for entrepreneurship, foster creativity and create jobs,” said Governor Quinn. “Making raw data more easily available to the public in areas such as health care, public safety, economic development and transportation will make government accessible and empower our citizens to develop new software applications to improve government processes.”

This groundbreaking initiative, developed by State, County and City technology staff in partnership with Socrata, connects the three existing Open Data programs at each organization, into a unified, citizen-centric experience. Residents are now able to find, explore and share online resource, across jurisdictional boundaries, using a single web interface, based on common themes, such as healthcare, public safety, housing and education.

Bringing a critical mass of data into a single cloud, with a unified citizen interface and a common data dictionary, further exemplifies all three governments’ commitment to open government and transparency.

“Transparency enables accountability and strengthens public trust,” said Preckwinkle. “MetroChicagoData.com is another step in providing tools to help the public measure outcomes, find services, and see the impact of policies across all three levels of government.”

“This unprecedented initiative will foster innovation, economic development and more efficient delivery of services,” said Mayor Emanuel. “When we break down bureaucracies and our governments work together, we open new doors for our constituents.”

The new, Socrata-powered, Metro Chicago Data Convergence Cloud, offers key design, feature and architecture enhancements, including:

• State-of-the-art cloud federation services that automatically and seamlessly create a connected data cloud from data.cityofchicago.org, data.cookcountyil.gov and data.illinois.gov, without any duplication or delay.
• Automatic full-text indexing of every data set’s content, regardless of originating organization, to facilitate a unified online search and discovery experience.
• Automatic and uniform programmatic access to every data set, via the Socrata Open Data API (SODA), in addition to technical support and online developer resources.
• A user-centric site design, with normalized categories to promote comprehension and ease of access.

The initial release of Metro Chicago Data organizes datasets using a common taxonomy for categories, which includes Housing and Property, Economic Development, Education, The Environment, Government Administration, Ethics, Health & Human Services, Public Safety, Tax and Revenue, and Transportation.

The site also features the first-ever composite datasets that combine related data from all three partners; Namely:

• An interactive map explorer for the area’s hospitals, clinics and other healthcare facilities that are operated by the city, the county, or the state.
• A common directory of government buildings and facilities in Metro Chicago
• A data package that includes tax, permits, investment incentives, and regulation data to streamline businesses access to administrative information.

The State of Illinois’ Chief Information Officer Sean Vinck, Cook County Chief Information Officer Greg Wass and Chicago’s Chief Data Officer Brett Goldstein worked in collaboration with Socrata to develop the new site.

About Socrata
Socrata is the leading developer and provider of Open Data cloud services, a category of Web 2.0 solutions that enable public sector organizations to dramatically improve citizen access to information and online services, while reducing costs.

The Socrata Open Data Cloud™ optimizes the management and speeds up the dissemination of data-driven interactive content to citizen, professional and internal government audiences, through multiple interfaces: Web, social, mobile, API, apps, voice, SMS. Information assets include tabular data, geospatial data, unstructured content and real-time data from government transactional systems of record.

Socrata customers include cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and New York City; states such as Oregon, Illinois and Oklahoma, and federal agencies such as Medicare, SAMHSA and GSA (Data.gov). Socrata is a private company, based in Seattle, Washington, with venture financing from Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures. To learn more about Socrata, visit www.socrata.com.

Contact

Saf Rabah
VP, Marketing
Socrata, Inc.
206.340.8008 ext 151
saf.rabah@socrata.com

“Last week, right before we launched Ethics.gov — which brings data from across the federal government to one place where it can all be searched — Chris Vein, the Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer, sat down to talk about how the site works and walk through its features.”

View Article > >

SEATTLE – March 14, 2012 — Mayor Edwin M. Lee unveiled data.SFgov.org, the next-generation, cloud-based San Francisco Open Data site, and the successor to one of the nation’s pioneering Open Data initiatives, DataSF.org.

The adoption of Socrata’s cloud services, social citizen interfaces, and open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to power San Francisco’s new Open Data site, underscores the Mayor’s commitment to providing state of the art cloud infrastructure to drive more innovation in citizen access to information, community engagement and government efficiency.

“Making City data more accessible to the public secures San Francisco’s future as the world’s first 2.0 City,” said Mayor Lee. “It’s only natural that we move our Open Data platform to the cloud and adopt modern open interfaces to facilitate the flow of information and develop better tools to enhance City services.”

Today’s upgrade dramatically expands access to information, while simultaneously enhancing cost efficiencies and speed of execution. The new Socrata-powered San Francisco Open Data Cloud offers a wide variety of feature, architecture, and performance enhancements, including:

• Simple, easy-to-use, citizen interfaces that allow non-technical users to interactively explore data, visualize it, and share contextually-relevant information with others, on the site, across the web, and on social networks.
• Automatic full-text indexing of every data set’s content to facilitate online search, in addition to the ability to download the data in multiple, open, machine-readable formats.
• Automatic API access to every data set, via the Socrata Open Data API (SODA) and access to technical support and online developer resources, which will lower the access barrier for civic developers.
• A powerful publishing platform for city employees to rapidly transform data into interactive online resources that can be reused elsewhere on SFgov.org and deployed as open cloud services.

Jay Nath, San Francisco’s Chief Innovation Officer adds, “Two years ago, when we launched DataSF.org, Open Data was a visionary experiment in reinventing the government of the future. Today, with increasing worldwide adoption, we view Open Data as part of our new cloud infrastructure to deliver citizen, social, and programmatic interfaces to government services, in a much more cost-effective and agile model.”

The new site contains 175 datasets including the new geocoded case data from San Francisco 311 since 2008, Map-based Crime Data, Active Business Listings as well as several updated administrative and financial datasets.

To learn more about Mayor Lee’s Innovation Portfolio, go to: innovation.sfgov.org.

About Socrata
Socrata is the leading developer and provider of Open Data cloud services, a category of Web 2.0 solutions that enable public sector organizations to dramatically improve citizen access to information and online services, while reducing costs.

The Socrata Open Data Platform™ optimizes the management and speeds up the dissemination of data-driven interactive content to citizen, professional and internal government audiences, through multiple interfaces: Web, social, mobile, API, apps, voice, SMS. Information assets include tabular data, geospatial data, unstructured content and real-time data from government transactional systems of record.

Socrata customers include cities such as Seattle, Edmonton, Chicago and New York City; states such as Oregon, Illinois and Oklahoma; and federal agencies such as Medicare, SAMHSA and GSA (Data.gov). Socrata is a private company, based in Seattle, Washington, with venture financing from Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures. To learn more about Socrata, visit www.socrata.com.

Contact

Saf Rabah
VP, Marketing
Socrata, Inc.
206.340.8008 ext 151
saf.rabah@socrata.com