An incredibly condensed look at the development of open civic data in the United States

Civic data is nothing new in the U.S. Since the founding of the nation, the decennial census collected data about people and communities, and local governments kept track of property ownership and other important information. Governments made some paper-based administrative records accessible, but being able to see the documents may have required a visit to the county courthouse or city hall. Over time, governments have digitized many of these records and an increasing number of datasets are now born-digital, enabling them to be easily replicated and accessed far from the place where they were created.

Beginning in the 1980’s and 1990’s people in some communities began to assemble digital federal and administrative data into community indicators systems. Building these systems required the development of relationships between academic institutions, public-sector agencies, and community organizations. Democratizing this data, the creators of these systems worked directly with residents and community organizations to equip them with information in order to have a say in the decisions being made about their communities. A number of these organizations came together in 1996 to form the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP), a national peer network of community information intermediaries.

A decade after the founding of NNIP, a movement to make public information freely and openly-accessible as a public resource began to build. This concept is rooted in earlier efforts to make scientific research and software openly and freely available to all, along with initiatives from groups like the Sunlight Foundation to make government more accountable and transparent to citizens. Some early leaders of these open data movements have roots in these open government, open science and open source software communities. Soon after early leaders of the movement outlined a set of open data principles, the U.S. Federal Government, and several local governments issued directives to release public information as open data, established open data portals, and published data.

Civic-minded technologists were among the earliest users of open government data. Events like hackathons and hack nights were organized to encourage skilled volunteers to build digital tools and applications using available data. Groups of volunteers began to form organizations dedicated to “civic hacking’ with encouragement of organizations like Code for America.

While there were many positive aspects to these early efforts, some felt that much of the data published was not terribly relevant, that development processes for digital tools were not inclusive of members of frequently-excluded communities, and that the tools developed did not have a long shelf-life.

As a result of these criticisms, more-recent open data efforts are beginning to adopt a demand-based perspective. The focus of these efforts is less oriented to output measures, such as number of datasets published or the number of tools developed, and more targeted to the impact data and technology can have in communities. Government agencies are now investing in efforts to improve data quality and use information as an organizational and community asset. There’s also a much greater awareness that digital tools must be built in collaboration with users, organizations, and institutions in the civic data ecosystem. In this way, contemporary open data initiatives are beginning to more-closely resemble the community indicators initiatives that began to take shape 25 years ago; this return to a strong community and user focus means that libraries are perfect partners to make key contributions in civic open data ecosystems.