Open Data Customer Service

Customer Service Wins Open Data Cities

Over the past four years, the Ohio Treasury Office has developed a large community of cities, townships, schools, and agencies working together with their open data leadership. After the Ohio open data portal, http://ohiocheckbook.com/ was established online, they needed their sources of data to participate. Without fresh information, an open data portal becomes irrelevant. To avoid this possibility, they made success happen through hard work in the trenches working directly with their customers and partners to onboard and support. Their focus on customer service has built up a network of government organizations participating in government financial transparency.

Policy Becomes Legislation For Long Term Success

A key aspect of the Ohio success has been good policy that enabled the customer service approach yielding results. The policy came from the Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandell and the Ohio Treasury Office staff like Director Frank Kohstall. However, policy is not law. To make important aspects of the Ohio open data success continue past the current administration, policy needs to become legislation. Ohio House Representative Mike Duffey has been working to pass open data legislation for the past few years. He sponsored Ohio Legislation HB3  to codify the existing policy into law. The bill is currently pending a vote in the Ohio House.

Next Steps

In addition to the broadcast discussion video above, we also met afterwards to discuss how to move Ohio open data legislation forward. For this Next Steps discussion, we got together Representative Mike Duffey, Ohio Treasury Office Director of Public Affairs Frank Kohstall, Research Fellow Buckeye Institute Greg Lawson, Sunlight Foundation Open Cities Analyst Noel Isama, Data Coalition Policy Director Christian Hoehner, and a couple of additional staff members.

The highlights are:

1. HB40 pending house for the Treasury to formally manage ohio open data
   1. Supported Grant level impact for counties participating , challenges as funding removed out of the bill
   2. Adds competition
   3. It includes Certification, DataOhio award
   4. Standardization of fields is working with cities
   5. The bill is stalled in committee
2. In an election year, HB3 must
   1. Pass the house by valentines day
   2. Passed the senate by Memorial Day
3. Making the data board real, work through the implementation
   1. Get senators and city officials discussing how this helps them
   2. Start holding DataOhio meetings now
   3. Get news to cover
4. Event panel people and discussion ideas
   1. Panel discussions
   2. Frank LaRose maybe in senate
   3. Senate president, or head of panel
   4. Secretary of state
   5. Municipal league(s)
   6. Americans for prosperity
   7. Manuals of city data uniformity
   8. Creating jobs focus
   9. LexusNexus as example providing value
   10. Farm townships
5. Questionnaire to legislators on their support depth of open data and transparency

DataOhio Board Implementation

The group that met here will reconvene in a few weeks while adding a few more policy and state representatives to work on the DataOhio board implementation defined in the pending legislation.