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Open Data Day is Saturday, March 3!

As this coming Saturday, March 3, is Open Data Day 2018 – The City’s Open Data Team wanted share an update on a cool local event to mark the day, as well as highlight the work we’re doing to create a great open data platform to benefit the city of Seattle.

What is ‘Open Data Day’?

From: http://opendataday.org/#what

“Open Data Day is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. For the seventh time in history, groups from around the world will create local events on the day where they will use open data in their communities. It is an opportunity to show the benefits of open data and encourage the adoption of open data policies in government, business and civil society.”

How will the City of Seattle be marking Open Data Day?

Open Seattle, a local civic technology organization that advocates for open data and civic technology projects that improve the lives of Seattle residents, is hosting an event in conjunction with Seattle PyLadies, a mentorship group with a focus on helping more women become active participants and leaders in the Python open-source community.

This event will focus on using open data from the City of Seattle’s open data portal (http://data.seattle.gov), and some members of the Open Data team will be in attendance. We’re very excited to be participating and partnering with these wonderful organizations!

For more information on the event, go here: https://www.meetup.com/Seattle-PyLadies/events/248192001

For more on Open Seattle, go here: http://openseattle.org/about

For more on Seattle PyLadies, go here: http://seattle.pyladies.com

What are the benefits of releasing Open Data in Seattle?

We make the data we generate and collect openly available to the public for four main reasons:

  1. To help increase the quality of life for our residents
  2. To help increase our transparency & accountability
  3. To promote economic development and research
  4. And to improve internal City performance management

By making the City’s data available in this way, we encourage others, like organizations such as Open Seattle & Seattle PyLadies, to use our data to build apps and services that can benefit our communities.

What other open government data does the City of Seattle release to the public?

Apart from our Open Data portal, we also have several other cool sites where we share much more data on our City budget, Transit construction projects, City performance metrics and GIS mapping data. Check them out by clicking “Other City Data” on our Open Data portal!

How can I learn more about Open Data in Seattle?

If you are interested to learn more about the work that we’re doing, please visit the City of Seattle’s open data portal (http://data.seattle.gov), where you can access all of the data we have released to the public, as well as access other tools that will help you learn about some of the great work being done at the City of Seattle.

Additionally, you can find more information about the Open Data program here: https://seattle.gov/opendata. We plan to release our 2017 Annual Report and 2018 Open Data Plan here in the coming weeks, which will provide more insight into all of the work we are doing to grow and improve our open data platform.

And you can follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/SeattleOpenData) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Opendata.Seattle)!

Happy Open Data Day!