| | November 20178CIOReviewOPINIONAustin is Open by Default... Now What?By Stephen Elkins, CIO, City of AustinThe City of Austin's journey with open data is similar to a lot of other government agencies around the country. Learning from the challenges other cities faced and how they overcame them has been critical to how we have planned to move our open data and problem-solving in general to the next level. My hope is you can avoid the lulls in progress we had to make your open data program as robust as possible. In 2013 Austin's former City Manager Marc Ott directed all City of Austin departments to begin identifying data that could go on our new open data portal. The platform was in its infancy, but his vision for our open data program was that the City of Austin would be "Open by Default." Slowly but surely millions of data points were added to Data. AustinTexas.gov and we vaulted up the US City Open Data Census rankings. In just a short period of time we had a variety of data that we could showcase on our new tool and our open data initiative was off and running. Fast forward to 2015 and the needle had barely moved. We had data that was on our open data portal that was stagnant. We watched as other cities passed us by and Austin plummeted to 58th in the Open Data Census. This has followed the pattern of so many other cities that had an initial edict and then made the mad dash to publish as much data as possible. Then, once that was done, it felt like the work was over. We felt we had succeeded by just putting massive amounts of data online. The City was at least more transparent and had embraced the vision of being "Open by Default." What we have discovered is publishing the data was the easy part. Taking that data and turning it into something useful has been the real challenge.It became clear that was our next step. So, in 2015, we began to look at how we could take the data we had published to solve problems. This led us to looking at what problems we needed to solve and if the solutions could be impacted by data we already had. Citywide teams came IN MYStephen Elkins
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