News Releases
The latest news and announcements from Mayor London N. Breed

Mayor Lee Improves Availability of City Data for Entrepreneurs & Residents to Improve Services

Open Data Strategy Promotes Greater Government Transparency, Accountability & Efficiency by Making City Data More Easily Available & Accessible for Residents & Businesses in 21st Century New Economy

Mayor Edwin M. Lee today unveiled the City’s updated Open Data Strategy to ensure City data is readily available so that entrepreneurs and residents can use it to improve services, generate jobs and economic activity and increase resident engagement and empowerment.

“Data is driving the economy of the future,” said Mayor Lee. “Our goal is to position San Francisco as a City that both feeds and participates in the emerging data economy. This updated plan will ensure a steady supply of high-quality, well-documented data but also finding new and creative ways for leveraging the City’s data. Not only will we continue to open our data so that others can create new value from it, we will continue to transform how we use data within the City to ensure our services meet the needs of our residents and businesses.”

The updated plan will make timely data easily available; improve the usability, quality and consistency of City data; support increased use of data in decision making; identify and foster innovations in open data and data use; and continuously improve, scale, maintain and monitor data work.

The plan also outlines specific actions including:
•    Fully deploy data automation as a service to ease data publication;
•    Deploy better, friendlier publishing for geographic data;
•    Identify methods to crowdsource collective intelligence about published datasets;
•    Launch new transparency websites;
•    Engage broader community around a handful of key issues or datasets;
•    Facilitate and standardize confidential data sharing;
•    Improve data quality; and
•    Develop Data Academy into a professional development strategy.

Currently, DataSF has 264 published datasets and 740 inventoried datasets. Users of City data will benefit from knowing what City departments are planning to publish. DataSF In Progress will show the status of data publishing, department publishing plans, and classifies dataset inventory by department. There are 35 inventories completed and 21 data plans.

The first year plan focused on building a foundation for the future and creating the institutional support to grow use and dissemination of data in San Francisco. The results of the first year plan saw the completion of the dataset inventory, relaunching of the open data portal and creation of a web home for DataSF, standardized publishing methods and metadata requirements, established a Citywide open data license for published data, launched the Housing Data Hub, launched the Data Academy, and developed a strategy to improve confidential data sharing.  

For more information on the Year 2 Strategic Plan, go to: datasf.org.