City of Minneapolis + OpenGov

[Jeff Pesek]

http://tech.mn/news/2015/02/09/city-of-minneapolis-pursues-financial-transparency-with-opengov/

Curious to hear this groups take on the City's avoidance of the new Open Data Portal for such information?  Here's what Sandra Christensen, Deputy CFO, said about it:

"While the financial data that the City is providing not API accessible, it is actually much more user friendly in that the average user will have the ability to download the data into a CSV file and utilize Excel to analyze, compare and model information without specialized skill or software.  From a transparency perspective, the City’s financial transparency tool will provide, in our opinion, the opportunity to reach a broader audience.  At some point in the future, we may be able to provide this same information via the Open Data Portal to make it API accessible; however, our priority at this time is it to make it available in a user friendly format to a wider audience."

[Alan Palazzolo]

I think a CSV is good, though I have not looked at it in detail. It
should be up on the City's Open Data portal at the very least. Using
the OpenGov platform makes sense as most people don't actually care
about raw data and want actual information. An API would be cool, but
it's usually a second step for releasing data, and given that its not
a huge data set and only changes once or twice a year, an API is not
even necessarily needed.
--
Alan Palazzolo
Code for America
2011 Fellow
al...@codeforamerica.org
+1 770 596 1951

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[Jeff Pesek]

Thanks to those who replied public & private. Here's a copy of the contract w/ OpenGov FWIW: http://tech.mn/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/City-Minneapolis-OpenGov.pdf