Eindhoven Announces Socrata-Powered Open Data Initiative to Spark Citizen Engagement and Innovation
Seattle, Washington (PRWEB) June 06, 2014 -- Socrata, a Seattle-based cloud software company focused exclusively on democratizing access to government data, today announced that Eindhoven, a leading Dutch city for technology and design, has chosen Socrata’s open data platform and open performance solutions for its open government initiative. The city will launch an open data site to increase citizen access and use of its public data, as well as a performance dashboard highlighting progress on city goals and programs.
As the birthplace of electronics giant Philips and host to several universities, Eindhoven encourages collaboration between the private sector, government, and higher education to deliver a higher quality of life and better governance for citizens.
“We see our open data site and our open performance dashboard as participation instruments,” says Eindhoven Vice Mayor Mary-Ann Schreurs. “We want to give citizens and researchers the best tools and data to get involved with the government, understand our decisions, and participate in making life in Eindhoven better for everyone. Therefore, it's quite logical that we are also facilitating people to add their own data.”
The City of Eindhoven will begin by launching an open data site, available in both Dutch and English. Initially, the program will showcase Eindhoven’s rich collection of geographic data. The city recently won an award for having the best geospatial data in the Netherlands. This data currently covers the locations of open spaces, trees, art, recycling containers, and utilities information.
Eindhoven’s team plans to add more geographic datasets, as well as finance and crime data. Much of this data will be updated automatically and be API-enabled so that useful applications can be created with it. Eindhoven plans to do some innovative work with 3D data and city maps, as well as include sensor data from non-government sources.
“We are an intelligent city and we want to be on the cutting-edge of open data in Europe. We’ll be hosting more hackathons to encourage people to build apps with the data so we can showcase what’s possible,” says Schreurs. “I want our open data program to really improve life here,” she says.
Once Eindhoven’s open data site is established, it will offer a dashboard about city programs and their performance. The dashboard will be fed automatically with data from the open data site, making it near-real time. This level of transparency, where information on government progress is available without any edits or filters, establishes a high bar of transparency and collaboration with citizens.
“Eindhoven is set up to become a European leader in open data. By offering data to citizens in a user-friendly way, it’s opening endless possibilities for research, policymaking, and app creation. We hope that Eindhoven’s success inspires more European cities to open up their valuable data resources to the public on the Socrata platform,” says Socrata Founder and CEO Kevin Merritt.
About Socrata
Socrata has already established itself as the leading company in open data for more than 100 governments and organizations on five continents. Delivered as turnkey cloud services, Socrata’s data consumerization products help organizations unlock data and transform it into useful information that everyone can easily access, visualize, share, and reuse. Innovators like the country of Kenya, the cities of Chicago, New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and Nashville, the United Nations Development Programme, the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, and the Department of Health and Human Services have all chosen Socrata as the data sharing platform for their open innovation initiatives.
To learn more about Socrata, visit http://www.socrata.com or follow us on Twitter @socrata.
Steven Gottlieb, Socrata, http://www.socrata.com, +1 (206) 427-9591, [email protected]
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