Bloomberg wants to open up local government data

Michael Bloomberg is launching a $42 million program to increase the use of open data in mid-sized cities across the country. 

The project announced Monday, called the What Works Cities initiative, would help 100 cities expand open data and make better use of it when crafting policy and their budgets.  

{mosads}The program is being run through the former New York City mayor’s charity organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies. It has invited more than 275 cities to apply that have a population between 100,000 and 1 million people. It will later whittle that number down to 100.  

By making the data public, the program will also encourage private citizens to work with it. Bloomberg pointed to tools developed through New York City’s use of open data to create a number of subway and other transit apps.

“Sharing data with the public is still a relatively new idea,” Bloomberg said in an op-ed in The Huffington Post. “Through What Works Cities, we’ll help it spread, by empowering more city leaders to make data available to the public in ways that are easy to access and use.”

The program will partner with a number of universities and transparency organization to help cities along — including Johns Hopkins University, the Harvard Kennedy School, the Sunlight Foundation, Results for America and the Behavioral Insights Team.  

The partners will help make the data available, make better use of it and track the progress. The project is only a fraction of Bloomberg’s charity budget. Last year the foundation doled out $462 million to various projects.