In the 12 days following the Jan. 30 launch Open Data BR, the city-parish’s new website with a plethora of municipal statistics and public documents previously unavailable online, Mayor Kip Holden says the site got more than 109,000 pageviews. In an interview with Government Technology magazine, which spotlights Baton Rouge’s new site, Holden says the most popular data on the site thus far is, perhaps not surprisingly, info on the salaries of city-parish employees.
“Some have questioned the appropriateness of publishing this level of detail regarding salary information and, to questions such as those, I respond that the salaries public-sector employees earn is and always has been public record,” Holden tells the magazine. “Anyone can contact the city-parish and ask what a city-parish employee makes.”
Holden says the salary info is likely the most popular because people are just curious about what other people make. But the mayor wants the site to be much more than just a resource for the curious.
“As more data sets are posted to the portal and the site gains more visibility among user groups, we expect the varied uses of it will increase as well,” Holden says.
The first phase of the portal, which cost $6,000 to launch and six months to coordinate, includes 13 data sets and 10 different apps for data analysis. Topics touch upon such areas as finance, crime, fire, recreation and traffic. Next phases include cultivating support from the local civic tech community to develop additional data-based applications, and more data sets are slated to be added in the coming months.
“We also view this system as a critical public engagement tool that complements our visions for creating a more ‘digital friendly city’ and a stronger digital ecosystem here in Baton Rouge,” Holden says. “While in its raw form, data may not mean much to a layman; but when visualized, mapped or incorporated in collaboration with other data or technologies, it can tell amazing stories and support the creation of unique solutions to everyday problems. We are strongly encouraging private industry and application developers in Baton Rouge to pull our data, connect to our APIs, create as many visualizations as they can think of and help us work to solve such problems—even ones we didn’t know existed.”
