L.A. County Kicks Off Drive to Expand, Enhance Its Open Data Platform

Los Angeles County’s deputy chief information officer, Jagjit Dhaliwal, has kicked off “a journey to develop a vision for a next-generation Open Data 2.0,” the county’s initiative to expand and enhance the use of public data.

An Open Data 2.0 Task Force that Dhaliwal assembled had its first meeting last week, an online collaboration “to gather holistic inputs from all constituents of the L.A. County” on how public data is used. The county’s chief information officer (CIO), Bill Kehoe, addressed the group’s kickoff meeting and explained why Dhaliwal reached outside of government for input.

“We didn’t want to just talk to county employees and county departments,” Kehoe said. “Since this is an open-data platform, it’s really important that we talk to the folks that want to use the platform and have a need to use the platform so we can better understand, as we move forward with our Open Data 2.0 vision, how should we move forward, and what is the demand and what are some of the use cases … that we really need to consider.”

Kehoe said Open Data 2.0 was formulated more than a year ago.

“I really challenged my team to come up with a new vision for the L.A. County Open Data Platform. I really felt like Open Data L.A. County had become stale,” Kehoe told the task force. “We really had lost our purpose from the original inception, and we really needed a refresh.

“Our vision for our data platforms is to make them more dynamic, where data is securely flowing into the platform and make it available to the public from our county transaction systems, our enterprise platforms and our department platforms where appropriate. … People believe it’s an important platform but we hardly use it, and a lot of that is because we’re still using the stale data sets, and we really haven’t evolved the platform.”

The members of the task force include residents, business representatives, academics, a journalist, researchers and members of public agencies.

The county’s goals are twofold:

• Push data and information to internal and external customers, communities and partners to enable informed decision making and to support partnerships
• Increase the amount of data regularly published on the county’s Open Data Portal, to support information sharing and public policy research

The county’s interest in harnessing and using data is borne out by its involvement in the three-day Data Con L.A. 2020, an online conference — formerly known as Big Data Day LA — that ended Sunday and included Kehoe among its speakers.

Techwire Managing Editor Dennis Noone is a member of the Open Data 2.0 Task Force.