Giving Compass' Take:

• Sunlight Foundation reports on how the city of Baton Rouge, LA, has been giving its residents access to the data they collect, bringing the community into the process of local governance.

• This approach could be a model for civic transparency across the country — and helps give citizens a way to hold their leaders accountable for the decisions they make.

• Here's how to unleash the true power of philanthropy in civic society.

The City-Parish of Baton Rouge, Louisiana wants to make sure residents know about new open datasets as soon as they’re available. Leaders see this as a way to keep residents in the know about new resources, as well as an important part of how governments can and should be transparent in a digital era. A new website brings together all this work in one place.

Baton Rouge began publishing open data in 2015 when it launched Open Data BR. The city-parish solidified its commitment to the effort in December 2017 by passing its first open data policy — Sunlight is proud to have worked with Baton Rouge in creating this policy, as part of What Works Cities. The city-parish was publishing a lot of data, but it didn’t have a unified home online.

“We had five or six different platforms, and it was always difficult to understand what was where,” said Eric Romero, Director of Information Services for the City of Baton Rouge/Parish of East Baton Rouge. “We had our open data site, our open budget site, our open BR Neighborhoods site. Then we had two different GIS data sites, one with maps and one with GIS open data. During our work with What Works Cities and crafting the open data policy, we realized it would be good to channel everything through one door and that’s what the new website does.”

So in March, the city-parish brought all these efforts together at BRLA.gov, a new online home for the entire city-parish which replaced a 20-year old website that had gotten sorely out of date. The new site brings together all the resources residents need to understand the city-parish’s work on transparency and accountability, including direct access to open information. By presenting a united front to residents that links the city-parish’s various work around smart cities, new technologies, and open data, they’ve demonstrated their commitment to transparency and accountability, and keeping residents in the loop.

Read the full article about Baton Rouge's open data project by Alex Dodds at Sunlight Foundation.