Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland is asking the residents of Memphis for feedback on the city’s new open data policy.
“When I ran for mayor, I promised to measure results, hold city government accountable, and share those results with you,” Mayor Strickland said in a post on Facebook today. “We’ve been doing that by sharing our monthly data reviews. But with a new open data policy, we can do more.”
The mayor’s Office of Performance Management has been working with experts from What Works Cities and the Sunlight Foundation to create the new policy. The development and implementation of this policy will drive a more transparent and open city government, increasing accountability and expanding the opportunities for the City of Memphis to work together with its community partners.
The new policy is broadly similar to those advanced by other locales in the What Works Cities program. Officials plan to release data in machine readable formats and pledge to update it regularly. The mayor has also proposed the creation of a Data Governance Committee to oversee the datasets and review requests from the public for specific information. The proposal doesn’t offer much in the way of detail about what specific datasets will be released first or what the timeline would be for a data review. Other cities taking part in the What Works program have, however, started releasing information fairly quickly after they set an open data policy.
Residents can leave comments on the policy through the end of October. The full text of the proposal is available here.
