When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit American cities, many people wanted rapid access to information on a crisis that was constantly changing. Cooped up in their homes, the public wanted a real-time look at how coronavirus spread, how cases were stacking up from week to week, and where COVID hotspots were forming. The demand for online information on its impact on people's lives skyrocketed.

Public health agencies and other research organizations took note. Alongside spikes in COVID searches came a boom in online dashboards tracking counts of new COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most large cities, and all 50 states, the dashboards kept decision-makers and the public up to date on the pandemic's impact on local communities. They informed critical decisions, like when to return to in-person interactions or postpone them as new variants emerged.

COVID dashboards became a commonplace feature of how public health agencies communicate complex and constantly changing information. Still, public dashboards run by local authorities began much earlier and lingered long past the days of lockdown. With origins in the open data movement, and embraced by local governments, public dashboards also emerged to bolster trust between local governments and communities and make data available to all.

Since the 2010s, municipal governments have launched open data portals to make data more accessible to the public. Keeping data in a publicly accessible repository has become a way to reduce public records requests from researchers and journalists and meet the public's growing demand for information about public services.

To understand what is behind this public dashboard trend, Government Salaries researched how open data initiatives are increasing transparency in local governments and changing how they communicate with the public.

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A brief history of open data

With the rise of the internet, the 2010s saw cities trend toward open data initiatives to improve government transparency and accountability. The federal government launched its own portal in 2009, making a small fraction of datasets available to the public. Today, the portal provides access to more than 300,000 datasets.

New York City and Chicago were among the early adopters, kicking off a wave of open data policies nationwide. Today, open data initiatives are active in 132 cities, states, and counties in the United States, according to Data.gov.

Many cities began placing commonly requested datasets online as a one-stop-shop for municipal systems, covering everything from traffic activity to fiscal spending, building permits, and officer-involved shootings. Organizing information in machine-readable datasets online can help agencies get ahead of the public records requests they receive from citizens, researchers, and journalists, foster innovation through shared data, and increase participation in civic life.

Sometimes, instituting data portals is legally mandated, like in Chicago, where a 2012 mayoral executive order required an open data portal. In the 2013 book "Beyond Transparency," Brett Goldstein—then Chicago's chief data and information officer—described it as a way to help Chicagoans "build tools to help their neighbors." The city's civic tech community took to it well, creating apps to notify users to move their cars the night before street sweepings and explaining zoning codes through interactive maps.

Local agencies are required by law to fulfill public records requests—where individuals can request a vast array of government records to help inform the public. But often, the departments handling them are backlogged with requests. Proactively placing maps and data related to crime, traffic, property, and public spending can empower people to find the information needed themselves and increase public trust in local government.

When local governments open data to the public, it enables research institutions to take on new fields of inquiry and businesses to create innovative products or services that might not exist otherwise. Some start-ups came to life amid open data programs, like BrightScope, which leveraged Department of Labor data to develop a 401(k) plan comparison tool, or SpotHero, which utilized Chicago's open data to help people find parking spaces.

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How data can influence policy

In many cases, opening the data floodgates has influenced real-world policies for the better.

When Brazil included government credit card transactions in its open data portal, it spurred media reporting on questionable transactions. It swiftly led to a 25% reduction in credit card spending by government officials. In New York City, one data analyst examined his city's open data to find systematic errors in parking tickets, leading the New York Police Department to issue a message to officers to help clarify the rules and end that pattern of mistakes.

Open data initiatives can have a big impact on cities. But for the average, nondata-savvy resident, navigating these portals can be intimidating. Some cities, like New York and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, set up training programs to teach people how to use their open data programs and answer questions about their communities.

Others, like San Francisco and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have created online learning materials to encourage residents to explore these data portals and build up their data skills in kind. Equipping the public with tools to investigate their own cities can yield dividends, even inspiring programs where neighborhood organizers work with cities to keep up with development and improve their communities, like in Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

Launching an open data portal can create some challenges for cities. Data quality issues can limit their impact, create privacy concerns if data is not properly anonymized, and introduce the potential for misunderstandings between local governments and the public. Still, many see data as a powerful tool for engaging with communities and informing decision-makers in the public and private sectors.

Story editing by Natasja Sheriff Wells. Additional editing by Elisa Huang.Copy editing by Paris Close. Photo selection by Lacy Kerrick.

This story originally appeared on Government Salaries and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.