HomeMy WebLinkAboutMemo - Mail Packet - 11/2/2021 - Memorandum From Kevin Wilkins, Tim Campbell And Ginny
City Hall
300 LaPorte Ave.
PO Box 580
Fort Collins, CO 80522
970.221.6505
970.224.6107 - fax
fcgov.com
MEMORANDUM
DATE: October 28, 2021
TO: Mayor Arndt and Councilmembers
FROM: Kevin Wilkins, Chief Information Officer
Tim Campbell, Senior Analyst
Ginny Sawyer, Senior Project Manager
THROUGH: Kelly DiMartino, Interim City Manager
Tyler Marr, Assistant City Manager
RE: OpenData Annual Update
Bottom Line: In 2017, The City of Fort Collins initiated an effort to develop an open data
platform and process. By Resolution, staff provides Council an annual update on the OpenData
program.
The OpenData Portal (available at https://opendata.fcgov.com) has been greatly expanded
since its 2018 launch and data added during the pandemic in support of local businesses
continues to be helpful to the public. New data publishing and community engagement efforts
have been paused in 2021 due to lack of dedicated OpenData staff. The robust data currently
on the platform continue to be updated, and will need to be expanded going forward to better
support the community. The Data Inventory project is now a subset of a larger organization-wide
data strategy, which will allow staff to define and expand inventories faster and more-efficiently
than in the past.
Annual Open Data Update November 2021
Data Publishing and Inventories: The Data Inventory effort, which aims to capture all data
sources within the City, is being expanded beyond the original scope of OpenData. The effort
will now include internal data governance, storage, access, and business intelligence to better
goal of creating an inventory of current data
locations will continue as a subset of this larger project. Because of the expanded scope and
lack of dedicated OpenData staff, current efforts have focused on maintaining the OpenData
platform rather than expanding: there are 208 public data sources on the Portal, which is the
same amount as last year at this time. An up-to-date list of published data sources can be found
on the Portal (https://opendata.fcgov.com/d/hjfc-8qj5).
OpenData Usage: Usage of the OpenData Portal and OpenBook, our publicly-available
expense reporting module, is tracked to assess the usefulness of the data being released. Since
this time last year, the maximum weekly public visits to the Portal site have increased 8.7% (see
addendum), and the number of data source views decreased 18% in the same period. This is
likely because there were no new datasets to publicize and the Portal does not yet have enough
data to be self-sustaining. OpenBook continues to show sharp increases in site visits relative to
key financial periods (e.g. beginning of a fiscal year, City budget draft milestones), with the
latest spikes showing a stark 50% decrease from the previous year. This decrease is likely the
result of an increased concern in City spending during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic
rather than a disinterest in the platform. More information can be found on the Portal at
https://opendata.fcgov.com/d/f95c-i6zi. The decreases in OpenBook usage and data source
activity and increase in Portal usage suggest that there is ongoing public interest in City data,
but more datasets need to be released.
Community Engagement: that centers around discussions
about data remains cancelled due to the risk of in-person meetings. This series is a
collaboration with a local volunteer group with input from community organizations; more details
are available at https://ourcity.fcgov.com/open-data. The FCx events have been the primary
engagement mechanism of the OpenData program.
Extended Projects: Aside from the OpenData Portal publishing and data governance, there is
an active project aimed at a specific area of improvement.
Staff in Social Sustainability are creating interactive dashboards from the results of the
Equity Indicators project. These dashboards will be available to the public and will serve
to encourage conversations around equity within our broader community.
Next Steps Include:
Expanding data governance and Data Inventories
Identifying resources to further advance the program
Maintaining and improving OpenData automation processes
Assisting with internal data sharing to facilitate OpenData publication
Planning community engagement opportunities and projects
Addendum: Figure 1: OpenData Portal public usage since release