Final decision due today on open data initiative

A bill requiring the City and County of Hono­lulu to create a policy making publicly available government data easily accessible on the Internet whenever possible comes up for a final vote before the City Council today.

Burt Lum, executive director of the nonprofit Hawaii Open Data, said quantifying the city’s commitment to making information open and accessible to the public benefits not just Oahu’s citizens, but government agencies themselves as they try to find ways to best serve constituents in a budget-strapped world.

Call it the "help me to help you" concept in action.

For instance, private citizens took up a challenge made by the city and Hawaii Open Data, backed by award money secured from private technology companies, to come up with user-friendly applications that riders of TheBus can now access either directly through their smartphones or an Internet Web page.

"What’s key is finding the city agencies interested enough to committing some people resource to make it happen," Lum said. "If they don’t take any interest in leveraging the resource that the community can bring to the table, then there’s no point in bringing the two together."

Those who developed TheBus applications, Lum said, used data sets already made available by the city Department of Transportation Services and Oahu Transit Services, the operators of TheBus.

Data sets are collections of information taken from such things as forms, lists and schedules and put into spreadsheets that can be sorted and searched.

Councilwoman Carol Fuku­naga, who introduced Bill 53, echoed Lum’s comments.

"With (all levels of government) facing shrinking resources and other challenges, the good thing here is that open data is a pathway by which government can engage the community," Fuku­naga said.

The latest draft of the bill calls on the city administration to make all information deemed public by the state Office of Information Practices available "in open, standards-based, machine-readable formats."

The bill mirrors language in Act 263, signed by Gov. Neil Abercrombie in 2013, that codified the state’s Open Data Initiative.

The city bill calls on city Chief Information Officer Mark Wong to announce and publish within 180 days of the bill becoming law the date of a public hearing on draft rules for the open data policy.

Wong would also need to report back to the Council on the progress of the initiative in a year.

Wong said the Caldwell administration supports the open data concept, noting similar initiatives are being adopted by states and municipalities across the U.S., and at the federal government level as well.

The city already has a portal where such information is placed at data.hono­lulu.gov, but the bill will codify a formal policy of what data should be released and how, Wong said.

He cautioned that it will take time for the policy to take shape.

"We’re going to go through a long period, probably perpetually, to develop and then refine procedures to get this data out," Wong said.

A major issue is that "there are very few applications that were developed with an eye toward exporting the data," Wong said. Gradually replacing the software, some of which is decades old, with new technology will take a while.

"The way I like to describe it is that we’re turning our systems inside out, where data is at the core rather than the applications," Wong said. "In the past we would buy applications that would solve particular problems like reporting potholes, or we’d find an application that handles permits for the city. But each of these applications have their own data requirements, and the approach we’re taking now is to design, or architect, the data for the entire city and then the functions to access that lie on top of that. They’re almost subsidiary to the data itself. And then once we have a unified design for the data itself, it makes it much easier to share the data with not only our own applications, but with the public."

Lum said the concept behind the open data initiative is to get government agencies, private companies and the general public comfortable enough to share information and ideas and to interact openly and collaboratively for the benefit of all.

"With the mix of support from the agencies, the data and the people … if you mix them all up, I think ultimately some great ideas come out of that," he said.