This is one in a series of Sunshine Week columns for the SPJ Colorado Pro Chapter.

By Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson

Imagine you just bought – paid for in full — a large-screen television.  Still, the dealer keeps it somewhere behind the counter and will only let you watch your TV under certain conditions.

It’s probably in the store, you believe.  But you have to submit a written request to come into the showroom, and only at a time convenient to the store and its employees or wait until the dealer summons you, saying “Your TV is turned on now.”

Sometimes he keeps your TV — and its inherent information about public events, crime, news, restaurants or mattress sales – in the back room.  Sometimes you might be able to hear the programming, but if you want to see it you have to buy a large mirror and prop it up in a doorway at just the right angel to see the screen.  Even so, you’re not allowed to bring a camera to record the shows and ads.

Such is the situation with The People’s Data, data which citizens have paid government to collect and maintain.  For centuries, taxpayers have paid government at all levels to collect data about health, education, contracts, traffic flow, police and fire activities (that have little to do with privacy or public security), applications and permits, budgets and expenditures.

Those governments generally keep The People’s Data somewhere behind the counter stored in dusty boxes with few labels describing the contents.  That data could drive informed decisions about voting for candidates or bond issues, health care, economic growth, public safety or potential improvements to quality of life.

Yet the culture, philosophy and process of government usually resist automatically making that data available to the people who have paid for it.

But times are changing.  Nations around the world are embracing the concept of “Open Data.” Open Data are raw, machine-readable data that are free for everyone, available 24/7 with nonproprietary software and has no or minimal licensing fees.  It’s up there on the Web as the presumptive default process of government data management.

Since the nation’s founding, government was, and still is, responsible for maintaining infrastructure like streets and sewers, for providing public security, creating a legal system and conducting elections. More recently, taxpayer-funded government provides for public education, emergency response and health care. The latter largely emerged in the Age of Steam and then the Industrial Age.

Today we are in the initial nano-seconds of the Digital Age. What had been ink-on-paper documents and images are now created and stored in digital files of 1s and Os.  Photographs and sounds are no longer created and saved on film or physical disks or magnetic tape.

The advantages of this shift are many: “Documents” today can be copied, saved and shared at minimal cost. Perhaps more important, the digital documents facilitate unprecedented opportunities for analysis, whether it be to examine the departmental distribution of city budgets over time (and anticipated future) or generating maps reflecting the demographics of a community related to school populations or all the transportation routes.

Taking advantage of this change, however, requires a dramatic shift in perspective. The responsibilities of government today must include making all that data about education, health, public financing, city planning, traffic flow, vendors, contracts and judicial rulings easily available.

By implementing the open data philosophy:

• • In the first nine months, the city of Chicago’s Department of Public Health reduced by 65
  percent the number of Freedom of Information Act requests for environmental records.
• • Access to real-time transit data (in San Francisco) resulted in 21.7 percent fewer SF311
  calls.  Decrease in call volume saved more than $1 million a year.
• • When citizens analyzed data from California’s state transparency portal ($21,000 to
  implement), $20 million-plus was saved by site users identifying unnecessary
  expenditures.
• • With open data and standard analytic tools used by citizens, Texas renegotiated its copier machine leases to save $33 million over three years. The state also was able to negotiate prison food contracts to save $15.2 million.

All of New Mexico should work to rapidly implement the Open Data perspective and philosophy so its citizens can watch the shows.

Tom Johnson (tom@itsthepeopiesdata.org), is the Society of Professional Journalists Region 9 Director, and founder and co-director of the Institute for Analytic Journalism in Santa Fe. NM. He is coordinating a public initiative in Santa Fe to bring Open Data to city and county government.