Corona, California Launches Open Performance Portal

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Corona, California has launched a new open data portal called “Corona Open Performance” the portal provides several open data portals designed to provide residents with up-to-date government information.

The city worked with open data portal provider Socrata on the project.

Site users can download the datasets in spreadsheets, flag data sets to watch or compare, create visualizations, such as maps, charts and graphs, as well as embed the data into other websites. Currently, Corona has 91 datasets available for consumption that cover a variety of city operations, such as library and recreation patronage, social media, SeeClickFix, finance, business licenses, Police and Fire Department activity, and transportation, among others.

The Corona Open Performance project was developed through the City’s participation in What Works Cities, a national initiative launched by Bloomberg Philanthropies in April 2015. What Works Cities has helped 100 local governments across the nation deploy data and evidence to make better decisions, deliver more effective services and programs and improve residents’ lives.

Corona’s Department of Water and Power (DWP) was the first City department to champion the deployment of data analysis to troubleshoot and address challenges. By working with What Works Cities partner the Center for Government Excellence (GovEx) at Johns Hopkins University, the DWP tracked call volume during power outages, and developed a digital power outage map to pinpoint outage locations and provide hourly status updates on repairs to residents. The approach resulted in a 15-20% decrease in call volume at the DWP. According to Chief Information Officer Chris McMasters, “The goal is to achieve similar data-driven successes citywide to help drive innovation and service delivery models.”

The city said it would continue to add more data to the portal as it becomes available.

As CivSource previously reported, Socrata was recently acquired by Tyler Technologies and is now part of that company’s public sector technology platform.