Embracing Open Data As A Startup | What's APPening®

"When Albuquerque, New Mexico’s Chief Information Officer first reached out to our company, APPCityLife, Inc., in 2011 to find out more about the company I’d founded a couple of years earlier, I believe it was the first time I’d heard the words 'open data' used. While our company had focused on the civic space from its launch, we were still approaching content curation from practices I had learned as a journalist. We were aggregating local event and news RSS feeds, working directly with public schools to publish basic contact information which was delivered in bulk via spread sheets and updated once a year. And we paid high school and college interns to research public information and transform the information into a usable format for our city guide mobile app. After a series of conversations with city officials, we decided not only to work with the city as they launched their Open Data Initiative but to pivot the direction of our company to meet the needs of what we saw as a huge growing trend among innovative city leaders. We put a stop to the process of researching data and manually coding the content for future city guides, something that at the time felt like a real step backwards on our roadmap to growth. Instead, we focused our energies on building out technologies and engines that supported the new data sets being curated at the source by city information technology leaders as well as features to help monetize these efforts to keep them sustainable and to engage communities through a creative twist on gamification in the civic space.  Our first open data project at APPCityLife was creating a mobile application for the City of Albuquerque’s transit department. It was to be the first open data app published by the city and would be the flagship app to launch the city’s Open Data Initiative. There was a lot riding on the success of the app, both for our company and for the city. And we only had three months to build the app and release it in time for Mayor Richard Berry’s press conference announcing the open data initiative. The ABQ RIDE app, released just a year ago, now has almost 10,000 users and has enjoyed an enviable retention rate among users of well over 90%. And the best part is that estimated savings to the city are in the six figures only a year into the initiative.  From that early app project and the subsequent projects we’ve started with other city departments, we learned a lot about the challenges and barriers to creating open data apps that not only meet the needs of the city departments curating the data but also deliver content that users want and need. Open Data is a tremendously fragmented initiative, still in its early stages of growth. There is often no central agency in most cities to drive the technology development around open data, and many times different departments within a city are individually moving forward with open data initiatives that may or may not be in sync with other departments. Add to that the variety of approaches independent developers within a community take when working with open data and the myriad agendas of interest groups involved, and it can become quite a challenge to streamline the needs, agendas and interests of all involved. We spend a great deal of time analyzing the pain points of the process and have developed new technologies to support open data initiatives. Here are a few of the projects we’ve either launched or plan to launch within the next few weeks and months ..."