From OpenMuni Wiki

Facilitating collaboration and cataloging case studies, best practices, and standards for open governance, open data, and open source on the local municipal level:

OpenMuni is a resource to spread knowledge and connect localities to better provide open channels of information to improve quality of life, increase civic engagement, and make local government more effective. The website will be much like an encyclopedia documenting best-practices and open standards for file formats, APIs, open source software, and supporting policies and licenses that are pertinent to the municipal level. Furthermore, there will be case-studies documenting the process of opening-up city agencies and building closer partnerships with their constituents and software developers.

OpenMuni is a collaboration between many cities and organizations including OpenPlans, Code for America, and CityCamp.

Contents 1 Open Government Guidebook 2 Open Government Initiatives by City 2.1 United States 2.2 Canada 2.3 United Kingdom 3 Open Governance Policies 3.1 Transparency 3.2 Participation & Collaboration 3.3 Accessibility 3.3.1 Sharing Policy 4 Open Data Initiatives 4.1 Cities 4.2 States, Provinces, and other Regions 4.2.1 Community Run 4.3 Nations 4.3.1 Community Run 4.4 Intergovernmental Organizations 4.5 Other Open Government Data Resources 4.6 Idea Sourcing for Data and Apps 4.7 Open Source Data Catalog Platforms 5 App Catalogs 5.1 Nascent App Contests 6 Open Source 7 Data Standards 7.1 Standards Resources 7.2 Standards Priorities 7.3 Geo Data 7.3.1 Legacy Standards 7.3.2 Geo Data APIs 7.4 Municipal Services 7.4.1 Transportation 7.4.1.1 Public Transit 7.4.1.1.1 Real Time 7.4.1.2 Bicycling 7.4.1.3 Traffic 7.4.1.4 Accidents 7.4.1.5 Parking 7.4.2 311 7.4.3 Crime 7.4.3.1 Apps 7.4.4 Emergency 7.4.4.1 Feeds of Emergency Response 7.4.5 Education 7.4.6 Budget 7.4.7 Garbage/Sanitation Service 7.4.8 Health Inspections 7.4.9 Building Permits 7.4.10 Building/Lot Data 7.4.11 Land Use & Zoning 7.5 Local Democracy 7.5.1 Representatives 7.5.2 Voting 7.5.3 City Council & Legislation 7.5.4 Public Meetings 7.5.5 Social Media Policies & Best Practices 7.5.6 Strategic Planning 8 Case Studies 9 Regional Alliances 10 Other References 11 Related White Papers 12 Organizations Covering Municipal Information Technology 13 Likeminded Efforts 14 News

Open Government Guidebook

The Open Government Guidebook describes step-by-step processes for opening government. This is a work in progress and as a wiki we encourage you to contribute case studies and references to this material. The processes are organized into the following sections:

• Build Alignment
• Develop Policy
• Manage
• Derive Value
• Sustain

See also the Open Gov Playbook wiki for the Open Government Directive

Open Government Initiatives by City

United States

• Ann Arbor
• Arvada
• Austin
• Boston
• Chicago
• Manor
• New York City
• New Orleans, LA
• Portland, Oregon
• San Francisco
• Seattle
• Washington D.C.
• Lexington, KY

Canada

• Edmonton
• London, ON
• Mississauga
• Nanaimo
• Ottawa
• Toronto
• Vancouver

United Kingdom

• London

Open Governance Policies

• Open Governance Policy (broad openness and civic engagement policies)

Transparency

• Open Data Policy
• Open Data Guidelines

Participation & Collaboration

• Social Media Policy
• Open Source Policy

Accessibility

• Open Standards Policy
• Terms of Use

Sharing Policy

• See recommendations and precedents for how to share policy, on the Sharing Policy page.

Open Data Initiatives

Cities

• Washington D.C. (terms)
• Nanaimo, B.C.
• Vancouver, B.C. (terms)
• San Francisco (terms)
• New York City (terms)
• Toronto (terms)
• London (terms)
• Edmonton (terms)
• Seattle (terms)
• Portland (terms)
• Ottawa (terms)
• Chicago (terms)
• Arvada (terms)
• Boston (terms)
• London, ON (terms and Board of Control Ordinance)

States, Provinces, and other Regions

• California, USA
• Utah, USA
• North Dakota, USA
• Maine, USA
• Michigan, USA
• Massachusetts, USA
• Rhode Island, USA
• New Jersey, NJ
• Texas, USA (State Comptroller) and Texas, USA (Texas.gov)
• Mecklenburg County, NC, USA
• British Columbia, Canada
• Basque Government, Spain
• New South Wales, Australia
• Oregon, USA

Community Run

• Colorado, USA (This also lists apps/ideas)
• Metro Chicago Information Center
• Greater New Orleans Community Data Center
• Indiana Coalition for Open Government (ICOG)
• Washngton Coalition for Open Government

Nations

• United States of America (terms)
• United Kingdom (terms) - built on the CKAN source code
• New Zealand (terms)
• Australia (terms)
• Kenya (About) [Note: Terms did not actually exist yet]
• Denmark
• Norway
• Ireland StatCentral and Open Data Northern Ireland

Community Run

• Sweden
• Slovakia
• Canada
• Israel
• OpenGovData.ru and GovWeb.ru in Russia
• Japan

Intergovernmental Organizations

• World Bank
  • terms
  • API
  • Data Catalog

Other Open Government Data Resources

• http://wiki.opengovdata.org
• http://wiki.sunlightlabs.com/Government_data_catalogs
• http://opendatalinks.com/
• http://opengovernmentdata.org/
• Open Data @ CTIC
• Open government data catalogs by Antti Poikola
• Public Sector Information (PSI) Data Catalogues (by governments)
• lists of local data catalogs
• openmuni+datacatalog and CityCamp+datamine on delicious

Idea Sourcing for Data and Apps

• Data.gov Insights Uservoice (by iStrategyLabs)
• Washington D.C. Uservoice
• Toronto DataTO
• NYC BigApps Uservoice, Uservoice CSV, BigApps Suggestions, BigApps RFEIs, and wishlist
• Boston Uservoice
• San Francisco DataSF Ideas
• Edmonton Uservoice
• Austin Open Austin
• Manor Manor Labs
• Portland CivicApps Ideas
• Ottawa DataOTT
• See also: http://opengovtracker.com/

Open Source Data Catalog Platforms

See main article at Data Platform

• CIVX (source)
• CivicDB (source)
• Openly Local (source)
• Citizen DAN and structWSF at OpenStructs
• Microsoft Open Government Data Initiative - OGDI (source)
• OpenGov Sweden (source) - Directory
• Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (source) - Directory
• National Data Catalog (source) - Directory
• GovKit - Ruby client library for US federal & state open government datasets
• DataCamp - Codebase used for Datanest, a community-run Slovakian open data catalog

Directory denotes that the system links-to and provides metadata about data hosted elsewhere rather than acting as a repository for the data itself.

App Catalogs

• Washington D.C. App Store and Apps for Democracy
• NYC BigApps
• San Francisco App Showcase
• Portland CivicApps
• London Data Store / Inspirational Uses Blog
• The World Bank
  • World Bank Data Quality and Effectiveness

Nascent App Contests

• Apps 4 Climate Action - British Columbia, Canada
• Apps 4 Africa

Open Source

• Procuring Open Source
• Releasing Open Source
• Open Source Policy

• Open Source Case Studies

Data Standards

Standards Resources

• Standards Case-Studies
• Standards Frameworks

Standards Priorities

A suggested list of priorities for standards can be found on the Standards Priorities page.

Geo Data

• WGS84 as a default projection
• KML
• GML
• See more OGC Standards

• GeoJASON
• GeoRSS

Legacy Standards

• Shapefile

Geo Data APIs

• WFS and WFS-T (See WMS & WFS at the OGC)
• GeoCommons API
• OpenStreetMap API
• Your Mapper API
• http://www.business.gov/about/features/api/geodata/
• http://wiki.open311.org/GeoWeb_DNS
• Google Maps API
• Geocoders
• Master Address Repository

Municipal Services

Transportation

Public Transit

• GTFS schedule data standard
• http://CityGoRound.org
• Case studies by city
• OpenTripPlanner - open systems for multi-modal routing

Real Time

• Service Interface for Real Time Information (SIRI)
• Portland Trimet
• Washington D.C. Circulator
• SFMTA NextMuni prediction feed
• BART ETA Feed
• MassDOT / Boston MBTA Real time feed
• Chicago Transit Authority (third-party)
• Seattle King County Buses API

Bicycling

• Chicago Bicycle Program's Bike Parking data and feeds
• Urban Planning and Infrastructure Design

Traffic

• Traffic Management Data Dictionary (TMDD)

Accidents

Parking

311

• http://www.open311.org

Crime

• http://www.ipublic.org/wiki/Municipal_crime_reporting
• UCR & NIBRS
• Example API: http://labs.hamptonroads.com/api/crime/
• Example Data: http://data.octo.dc.gov/Metadata.aspx?id=3 (KML google maps)

Apps

• http://oakland.crimespotting.org/
• http://www.lapdcrimemaps.org/
• http://www.seattlecrime.com/911/map
• http://www.crimereports.com
• http://spotcrime.com/ny/new+york
• EveryBlock - Formerly ChicagoCrime.org.

Emergency

• Common Alerting Protocol
• DHS Virtual USA (forthcoming)
• People Finder Interchange Format

Feeds of Emergency Response

• Nanaimo
• Montcopa County
• Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Live Incident Status, (also available in RSS format)

Education

• Education.com Schools API

Budget

• LEDES Electronic Budget XML Format

Garbage/Sanitation Service

• http://vantrash.ca/api.html

Health Inspections

• http://www.nyc.gov/html/datamine/html/data/terms.html?dataSetJs=raw.js&theIndex=24

Building Permits

• San Francisco: These are .XLS spreadsheets published on a monthly basis. Go here for more info: http://www.datasf.org/search.php?search=building. Here is how the data is used on EveryBlock: http://sf.everyblock.com/building-permits/
• Atlanta: This is not a "feed", just a series of text files like this. This is definitely not a preferred method of publishing data, but it is consistent, so that a developer would only have to write a scraper once. Here is how the data is used on EveryBlock: http://atlanta.everyblock.com/building-permits/by-date/2009/12/1/103138/
• Charlotte/ Mecklenburg County: This is an interesting case. Many years ago, they launched their "Integrated Data Store", a system of searches and download files. It is not a "feed", really (XML, RSS), but it does allow for the user to configure a search and download a reliably formatted .csv file. Here is how the data is used on EveryBlock: http://charlotte.everyblock.com/building-permits/
• Boston permit search: This is an example where the data is not provided in any format other than a Web search. The goal of any city should be to eliminate the need to scrape Web databases. Here is how the data is used on EveryBlock: http://boston.everyblock.com/building-permits/by-date/2010/1/22/339007/

Building/Lot Data

Land Use & Zoning

Local Democracy

• DemocracyMap

Representatives

• http://ideas.topplabs.org/wiki/Who_is_my_government%3F

Voting

• http://votinginfoproject.org/

City Council & Legislation

• Legislation

Public Meetings

• Public Meetings

Social Media Policies & Best Practices

• http://www.govloop.com/page/web-20-policies-and-best

Strategic Planning

• Strategy Markup Language (StratML)

Case Studies

• Leveraging Open Data: Washington D.C.
• Developing an open standard: GTFS
• On the ground civic engagment: FixMyStreet et al
• Open Policies
• Engaging the developer community: Boston MBTA
• Multi-city collaboration: Open311
• Social Media Engagement: BART
• Apps Contests
• Real Time Data
• Open Source: Portland
• Open Data Study - Commissioned by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative and Soros Foundation, primarily looking UK and the U.S.
• Open Data to advance competition and save costs, from Denmark
• Open Data in Germany Analysis of eParticipation and Web 2.0 Applications in Germany’s 50 largest cities and 16 federal states. Study illustrates that while eParticipation is on the agenda, states and municipalities still have a long way to go to fully engage in it.
• Shah (2007), State of Masschusetts Case Study on Data Policies
• NASCIO (National Association of CIOs) Open Data Report

Regional Alliances

• eCityGov - 45 Cities in Washington State
• Colorado Government Association of Information Technology (CGAIT) - 50+ members in Colorado

Other References

• http://www.ipublic.org/wiki/
• http://www.talkstandards.com/open-forum-standardization-and-egovernment-3/
• http://www.osor.eu/
• http://www.futuregov.net/articles/category/localgov/
• http://govfresh.com/category/local/
• http://www.govtech.com/pcio/
• http://opengovdirective.pbworks.com/
• http://www.opencongress.org/wiki/Third_Party_Websites_That_Transform_Government_Data
• http://ideas.topplabs.org/wiki/Open_Government_in_a_Box#Local_Level
• http://pages.e-democracy.org/Tools_for_transparency

Related White Papers

• Open Data is Civic Capital: Best Practices for "Open Government Data"
• IT Governance Capability: Laying the foundation for government interoperability
• A Call to Action for State Government: Guidance for Opening the Doors to State Data
• Open access policies, practices and licensing : a review of the literature in Australia and selected jurisdictions

Organizations Covering Municipal Information Technology

• MySociety
• OpenPlans
• Code for America
• E-Democracy.org
• National Association of Government Webmasters
• Center for Future Civic Media
• Senseable City Lab
• EU CitiLab, Innovative City
• Public Technology Institute
• International City/County Management Association & Alliance for Innovation - Transforming Local Government
• National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors
• National League of Cities
• United Cities and Local Governments
• Digital Local Agenda
• IT4ALL - Network of Local Authorities for the Information Society
• Global Cities Dialog

Likeminded Efforts

• Gov2.0 Best Practices
• CivicTEC
• OSOR (Open Source Observatory and Repository for European public administrations)
• MISA/ASIM (Canadian Municipal Information Systems Association)
• MuniGov 2.0
• Metropolitan Information Exchange
• LGov.org

News

• New government transparency rules strike chord with public - Budgetary Spending among government officials and their families in China