BATON ROUGE, LA — December 14, 2018 — Mayor Broome recently released a report outlining local successes in open data over the past year and a look ahead at planned efforts for 2019 that will build upon these successes. This 2018 Open Data Policy Report, presented by the Department of Information Services to the Metro Council, marks the first time the City-Parish has prepared such a report and aligns with key elements of the City-Parish’s open data policy adopted by the Metro Council in late 2017. A copy of the report is available for download at http://brla.gov/opendatareport.
“Over the past two years, we have made great strides in becoming a more transparent and data-driven City-Parish government – from policy measures that govern how data must be considered open by default moving forward to how we utilize data to more efficiently serve citizens and make better, more informed decisions,” said Mayor Broome. “This report serves as a clear example of the progress we have made to further our commitment to open data, as well as the opportunities that lay ahead of us to more intentionally use data to improve quality of life in Baton Rouge while building upon our standing as a leading digital city in the nation for mid-sized communities.”
The release of this report follows Mayor Broome’s launch of Open Checkbook BR, a web platform that provides users with an unprecedented level of access to checkbook-level expenditure data for City-Parish departments, services, and programs. The platform is supported by data that originates within the City-Parish enterprise resource planning system, a recently launched modernization initiative that replaced a number of aging and disparate systems with one consolidated system for financial, procurement, and human resource functions. In addition to the launch of Open Checkbook BR, the City-Parish has made publicly available the underlying datasets that support this platform such as purchase orders and contracts, annual contracts, expenditures, vendors, and upcoming procurement opportunities.
Other datasets identified within this report as priority candidates for publication include comprehensive information related to road closures from 2015 to 2018, Baton Rouge Fire Department spill incident and occupancy inspection data, Emergency Medical Services incident data, Department of Development permit reviews by fee type, and East Baton Rouge Parish Library resource circulation data, among others.
The implementation of the City-Parish’s open data policy is supported by an interdepartmental Data Governance Committee, which consists of 33 designated data coordinators representing 27 City-Parish departments. It meets to inventory existing data, discuss challenges or needs related to advancing open data goals within the City-Parish, identify opportunities for publishing additional data to the public domain, or collaborate across departments to use data in a coordinated manner.
For more information, visit the City-Parish’s “Transparency Hub” located on the recently redesigned BRLA.gov website, located at http://brla.gov/transparency. To access the City-Parish’s Open Data BR portal, visit http://data.brla.gov.