Sacramento Named Nation’s No. 2 City for Open Data
Sacramento, CA (PRWEB) March 19, 2014 -- The city of Sacramento, which has invested in providing residents with meaningful access to information through the Junar Open Data Platform, earned national recognition recently as one of nation’s top cities for Open Data.
Sacramento is No. 2 in the U.S. City Open Data Census, a collaboration among Code for America, The Sunlight Foundation and The Open Knowledge Foundation that ranks the cities’ openness according to the number of datasets they have made available online.
“The City of Sacramento is committed to transparency. The open data portal ensures that public City data can be easily found and used by citizens,” said Maria MacGunigal, chief information officer for the City of Sacramento. “It is important to support and encourage innovation in our City. Providing access to information in a reliable consistent format encourages residents and businesses to find new ways of using public data. We will continue to add useful data and are encouraging the community to work with us and tell us what they need.”
City leaders decided last year to provide important public data online as part of an effort to increase openness, transparency and accountability in government. Sacramento partnered with Junar and its cloud-based open data platform to provide the data in a one-stop format that allows visitors to view data as charts, in dashboards or in sortable spreadsheets.
“Since our platform is Software-as-a-Service, Sacramento was able to quickly and efficiently transform its existing city data into readable, searchable and usable insights for the community,” said Diego May, co-founder and vice president of business development of Junar. “Open data initiatives have shown that freeing data for public use drives new opportunities, collaboration and transparency, ultimately benefiting both the municipality and the citizens.”
Sacramento’s open data portal provides comprehensive online datasets for 311 service requests, finance and budget, police department statistics, citywide contracts, building permit numbers, census data, housing and education statistics and much more. The city offers access to nearly 50 datasets, leading to its high ranking in the U.S. City Open Data Census.
City leaders say that the current portal is just the beginning of a new era of transparency in their government that will only expand across the data catalog. The city also hopes that, by making data public, residents and stakeholders will develop new applications and become a part of innovating and improving daily life and efficiency in city services.
To view Sacramento’s Open Data Portal, please visit: http://portal.cityofsacramento.org/opendata.
About Junar
A global company with offices in Dallas, Silicon Valley and Latin America, Junar provides a cloud-based open data platform that enables innovative organizations worldwide to quickly, easily and affordably make their data accessible to all. Using the Junar platform, initial datasets can be published in a few weeks, providing greater transparency, driving collaboration and citizen engagement and freeing up precious staff resources. http://www.junar.com.
Jamie Rudolph, Idea Grove, +1 972-850-5858, [email protected]
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