Open government data in the smart city: Interoperability, urban knowledge, and linking legacy systems

ABSTRACT

Open government data (OGD) promise to reveal new insights and inform governance decisions related to changing populations, departmental operations, and economic drivers. Yet, where OGD figure prominently in the vision of a smart city, OGD are, in fact, scarce. From production and distribution practices to file types, organizational structure, and repositories, large quantities of potential OGD remain as legacy data trapped in incumbent systems. This article confronts the challenges of legacy data through a constructivist analysis of data wrangling (i.e., converting data into useful formats). The analysis illustrates that wrangling legacy data is more than a rote technical activity. Our findings suggest that smart governance in practice depends on the ways in which social, organizational, and institutional strategies cope with technical change. Further, our research demonstrates that wrangling legacy data is not a discrete problem to overcome but an operating condition defining the rapidly changing landscape of smart governance.

Notes

1. The term wrangling (or munging) refers to any steps taken to make data useful (Kandel et al., 2011). The particularities of what wrangling entails vary depending on a host of factors: the desired outcome, the technical capacity of personnel, the initial data format and system, and so forth. The goal of wrangling is to transform data to meet specific use requirements within a given system and circumstance. In the context of smart governance, wrangling is both specific—transforming LGD files into OGD files for specific projects—and general—migrating LGD to comply more broadly with a new or developing sociotechnical landscape.

2. Over the course of the project, this goal was refined to result in two specific files: a fund summary file that reported the amount of money budgeted in each fund group, fund, and subfund from 1996 to 2017 and a fund change file that reported and synthesized the budgeted percentage change of each fund group, fund, and subfund dating back over the same period. These files were created as Google spreadsheets that could be exported to various structured formats (.XSLX, .CSV, .TSV). Rather than discrete and sequential phases, these activities were iterative and required inputs from one another. As such, the process of transforming these legacy data was far from linear and instead required revisiting activities with new information and directions.

3. Currently, these documents can be downloaded dating from 2010 to 2018. Also available on this subpage are monthly financial reports from fiscal year 2010 to December of fiscal year 2017 and 5-year financial planning documents from fiscal year 2011 to 2018. Adopted budgets (“budget books”) dating back to 1996 can be downloaded on the Historical Budget Documents sub-sub-page. Spending documents—that is, documents containing data on the City of Atlanta’s audited spending—are found on the Controller subpage. This subpage contains both digest documents of the city’s performance (Popular Annual Financial Reports or PAFRs) from 2012 to 2016 and more detailed documents (CAFRs) from 2002 to 2016. See the website for more details: https://www.atlantaga.gov/government/departments/finance.

4. The ABE provides information on four of the city’s major funds: the General Fund, Trust and Pension, Enterprise Fund, and Service Revenue Fund. The site offers data on actual revenues and spending derived from the CAFR. Currently actual revenues and spending data are available for 2012 to 2016. Expected revenue and budgeted data derived from the adopted budgets are provided for 2017 and 2018. These data can be downloaded as a Tableau worksheet, PDF, Excel file (XLS), CSV, or image (PNG of a visualization). Despite offering a variety of longitudinal representations of spending and budgeting and providing machine readable file formats, these data must be individually downloaded based on funds and departments. See the website for more details: http://ditweb.atlantaga.gov/abe/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Lodato

Thomas Lodato is a Senior User Experience Researcher at Verizon Connect. Previously, Thomas was a Research Scientist with the Center for Urban Innovation at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests include the workplace cultures of knowledge workers, smart city programs, and participation in the public realm and workplace. He holds a PhD from Georgia Tech.

Emma French

Emma French is a PhD student in Urban Planning and a Researcher at the Luskin Center for Innovation at UCLA. Prior to starting her PhD, Emma worked for 4 years as a Research Scientist with the Center for Urban Innovation at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Emma’s research interests lie at the intersection of urban policy, sustainability, and social justice. Emma holds a Master of Science in Public Policy and a Master of City and Regional Planning with a focus on environmental and health planning from the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Analysis from Pitzer College.

Jennifer Clark

Jennifer Clark is Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she is Director of the Center for Urban Innovation and Associate Director for Smart Cities and Inclusive Innovation. She specializes in urban and regional economic development theory, analysis, and policy. Dr. Clark has published several books, including the Remaking Regional Economies (2007) and Working Regions (2013). She is a Fellow of the American Association of Geographers and the Regional Studies Association. She is also the current deputy editor-in-chief of the journal Regional Studies.