Information Technology / Open Baltimore

• Improves transparency, trust and accountability - By providing public access to government data, we improve the level of trust between citizens and government. We empower citizens to hold their Government accountable for the way Government spends citizen tax-dollars.
   
• Fosters innovation, community collaboration and participation - Over the last decade; "green", "open", "transparent" and "social" have become the community standard. The application development community is poised for developingapplications that make use of government data and OpenBaltimore provides that developer community access to data in formats they need create useful applications to help the city solve its problems.
   
• 63% of citizens prefer exploring and interacting with data online, while only 16% prefer to download and analyze the data in a spreadsheet. OpenBaltimore allows both!^*
   
• 65.7% of developers said that most public data is not accessible via an Application Programming Interface (API). OpenBaltimore makes data accessible via an API.^*
   
• 61.4% of citizens and 88.3% of government stakeholders believe that developers and entrepreneurs will transform government data assets into useful applications and services.^*
   
• 43.6% of developers cite the potential for their applications to impact people’s daily lives as their primary motivator. OpenBaltimore will allow developers to develop applications that positively impact our citizens.^*
  

OpenBaltimore provides many ways to get involved. Here are some of the ways we are enabling democratization of City data:

1. Sharing tools for popular social networks such as Facebook and Twitter
    
2. Portable data viewer for embedding datasets and views into your own website or blog
    
3. Fully integrated commenting and discussion capabilities
    
4. Create custom data visualizations from our datasets and share them with the world
    
5. Share your dataset suggestions with us via http://data.baltimorecity.gov/nominate
   
   
6. Start or join discussions, send general feedback, report issues or share your ideas on the City's Discussion Forums at http://discuss.baltimorecity.gov.