The Little Rock Board of Directors will soon vote on adopting an open-data policy that would call on officials to proactively release all city data online in searchable formats if it is open to the public under state law.
The policy is on the agenda for discussion today at the board's 4 p.m. agenda-setting meeting and set to be voted on at the 6 p.m. meeting May 3 at City Hall.
Little Rock was recently selected for the "What Works Cities" initiative by Bloomberg Philanthropies. As part of the process, the Sunlight Foundation worked with the city to draft the open-data policy.
"Little Rock maintains a significant amount of data which is of interest to citizens and is not exempt from the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act," a memo to the board said.
The policy states that the city will be proactive in releasing publishable data.
Officials have already created a data portal and put 36 data sets online at data.littlerockar.gov. The information includes crimes by location, city park locations, and locations of various service providers and assistance programs.
"I really look at this as another tool to help us connect to the citizenry," City Manager Bruce Moore said at the time. "We are rethinking how we are putting this data out there. Can we put it on a map? The good thing about this process is it's going to evolve. The information we put out initially, that's going to change over time. A lot is going to change based on what we learn about what people want to see."
Moore created a Governance Committee made up of city staff to evaluate what kinds of data each department has and how it can be released.
The open-data policy would have the city encourage innovative use of the data by other agencies, the public and city partners.
It requires Moore to appoint a lead open-data coordinator for each city department, and to create a comprehensive inventory of all data sets held by each department.
Moore will also come up with a process for prioritizing which data sets are released first, taking into account the public interest in that data, partly determined by the frequency of records requests made on a particular subject.
A timeline will be made and released to the public, with regular updates, showing when new data sets will be published online.
Within a year of the adoption of the open-data policy, Moore will report back to the board on the progress made and do so annually thereafter.
At that time, he will also be required to make suggestions for improving the process, according to the policy.
The policy can be viewed online by going to littlerock.org, clicking on "board of directors" to the left, selecting "meeting agenda," clicking the agenda for tonight's meeting and selecting the attached document on item No. 4 titled "resolution."
Metro on 04/26/2016