Delaware public records gold mine: new open data portal

Want to know which state agency buys the most pizza?

Maybe you're more curious about whether your favorite restaurant passed its last inspection, the traffic counts on your road or the most popular subjects at your local library.

That's just a sample of the information that state officials say will be searchable, sortable and, in some cases, mappable come Wednesday evening when Gov. Jack Markell unveils Delaware's new open data portal – an online clearinghouse of raw statistics and other nonpersonal information collected by state agencies.

The 30 datasets also included in the launch will cover topics such as state contracts, toxic releases, cancer mortality rates, licensed child care providers and even the most popular baby names in Delaware.

"We're talking everything from births to deaths," said James Collins, the state's chief information officer. "That includes Medicaid enrollment, bike trails and future DelDOT construction in your neighborhood."

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All of that information is publicly available now. At least technically.

But accessing it can mean sifting through clunky databases across a variety websites or forking over cash and waiting weeks for the state to respond to yourFreedom of Information Act request.

The U.S. State Open Data Census, a 2016 report card on the information states make available online, gave Delaware a B for its digital checkbook and online database of restaurant inspections, but failed it in seven other categories ranging from incarceration statistics to vehicle crashes.

The Markell administration's latest stab at transparency — less than 100 days before the end of his second term — is designed to make some of the state's most requested data easily accessible in formats that are actually useful, all in one location: data.delaware.gov.

“The open data portal will save time for citizens searching for information, particularly supporting entrepreneurs, researchers, data scientists, innovators, and academia," Markell said via email. "This initiative represents an important step in our continued effort to increase government transparency and foster innovation as we give the private sector better opportunities to work with the public sector to solve community issues together.”

Ryan Harrington and David Ginzberg are two of the open data enthusiasts hungry to get their hands on the new portal. Last year, the duo created Open Data Delaware, a Wilmington group of "white hat" hackers that seeks to convert the state's raw data into useful apps and other tools. The group has more than 400 members, with a dozen or so attending meetings every other week.

"Open data like this can be used to produce a lot of cool things that improve government inefficiencies or just help you find the best fishing spot on a given day," said Harrington, education coordinator for the co-working space 1313 Innovation. "The limits are based only on your imagination and the granularity of the datasets available."

The launch of the state's new open data portal also was cheered by John Flaherty, president of the Delaware Coalition for Open Government.

"There have been some bumps in the road, but all in all I think Gov. Markell deserves credit for trying to improve the state's transparency," he said. "This seems like a positive step in that direction, and I hope the next administration continues that effort."

Markell ordered the creation of the open data portal in January when he signed an executive order directing 10 state agencies to collaborate on replacing the state's current portal, a rudimentary list of websites where reports and other data are housed. The Government Information Center then hired the Seattle company Socrata to build the site and its back-end functionality at a cost of nearly $70,000 for the first year.

"The cost is minimal for the impact and product that we are gaining," said Dana Rohrbough, the acting manager of the information center. "Plus, now that we are publishing more data in the portal, we expect that our costs and staff time to fill information requests will decrease."

Daniel Castro, director of the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Center for Data Innovation, said many states and cities are increasingly offering open data portals like Delaware's for several reasons.

"For one thing, they get a lot of FOIA requests and one of the easiest ways to get ahead of that is to just put the information out there," he said. "Open data sets also can be used by businesses to do market research or integrated into product design. Parking ticket data, for example, has been used by startups to build apps that help people find the best parking spots in their cities."

While the initial focus will be on how Delaware's open data portal looks and functions, Castro said it may take months to determine whether the website is serving the public good.

"If nothing happens but a press release, then that's not a success," he said. "The most critical pieces are how often the data is updated, when are new datasets added and how engaged is the state in working with various communities to make sure something useful is coming out of it. That's the real test."

Ginzberg, a teacher at Zip Code Wilmington, said he's eager to start putting the new portal through those paces.

"I'm guessing that I'll probably spend 20 hours in the just first week looking over all the datasets," he said. "At first, I'll be looking over the available fields, trying to figure out how clean the data really is and then determining what is the most readily usable."

Contact business reporter Scott Goss at (302) 324-2281, sgoss@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @ScottGossDel.