DC Inno - by Ryan O. Ferguson
On Wednesday, Mayor Muriel Bowser's administration launched a new economic development dashboard, with the aim of providing District residents with easily accessible data on employment, income and housing. The Mayor's office said the site was developed in response to demand from residents for more data, specifically around the status of affordable housing projects and other construction around the District. The administration built the dashboard after seeing the success of District's Real Estate Project Pipeline, last year.
“The new dashboard highlights my administration’s priorities around transparency, accountability, and leveraging data to respond to residents’ needs and improve the District,” said Mayor Bowser in a statment. “Moving forward, we will continue to use technology and innovation to build good government and create more pathways to the middle class.”
Developed under the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, the dashboard was also supported by the Office of the Chief Technology Officer's Technology Innovation Program and is an important step towards open government. Though development until this point has been done in house, the Mayor's administration will be reaching out to engaged partners to improve and expand the tool via GitHub.
Because the site was built using open source licensing, individual contributors will be able to edit or suggest improvements in what the Mayor's office hopes to be an ongoing collaborative process. Importantly, this is the administration's first jump into outside contribution. The site uses public data compiled by the Mayor's economic intelligence team.
Open government proponent Seamus Kraft, founder and Executive Director of the Open Gov Foundation, a local non-profit dedicated to furthering citizen participation in government through technology, believes this move towards open source and accessible data is an encouraging one. "D.C.'s new economic dashboard points towards the next iteration in the world of civic data: ensuring open data is not only available, but truly accessible and understandable to as many citizens as possible," Kraft told DC Inno. "Pairing data with a straightforward interpretation layer is vital so that residents actually use the information pumped out by their government. I'm excited to see this open source effort grow and improve as more citizens and businesses engage with it."