With Socrata’s 2015 Customer Summit Starting, What’s Next for Data and Government?
Socrata's summit is in Washington, D.C. Sean Pavone / Shutterstock.com
Kevin Merritt, the Seattle company’s founder and CEO, discusses the current opportunity to transform public sector operations and services through the power of data.
Looking back on the past year or so, Socrata CEO Kevin Merritt said it’s been a “phenomenal” time for the growing privately-held cloud software company that helps public-sector clients better manage and leverage their data.
Back in January, the Seattle-based company, which Merritt founded in 2007, announced a strategic partnership with Yelp to better distribute restaurant and other health inspection data collected and managed by local governments.
In February, the company launched the Socrata Foundation, a philanthropic effort to assist fiscally stressed governments around the world better use their data resources on projects that, according to the company’s announcement, “represent compelling social [return on investment] but are constrained by economic forces beyond the control of stakeholders.”
Thanks to the Socrata Foundation, the city of Detroit was able to use Socrata’s open data platforms to launch its own portal, just as the city was emerging from a historic municipal bankruptcy.
“One of the hardest things was figuring out how to give something away for free,” Merritt said in an interview with Route Fifty last month in Socrata’s headquarters in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood.
Another big 2015 launch for Socrata: its Data as a Utility platform, which allows government clients more flexibility in how they can publish, display and visualize data for citizens.
With the 2015 Socrata Customer Summit getting underway in Washington, D.C., what’s next for data and the community the company has built with it?
As Merritt puts it, “2016 is the year of the citizen.”
Governments are far more in tune to the need to deliver high quality customer service when they deliver public services. Information resources are critical to do that.
“Government is doing more with their data,” Merritt said, noting how they’re “rethinking how they’re digital.”
Borrowing and paraphrasing a line from Zillow co-founder Rich Barton, Merritt said that “[e]verything that can be rated, can be rated on the Internet.”
That certainly includes government. And it’s forced a mindshift within the public sector.
“Five years ago, seven years ago, governments didn’t want to know what the public thought about them,” Merritt said. Now, they can’t escape knowing what their customers think thanks to the expansion of personal technology and easy access to user feedback through social media and other engagement tools.
And government wants to deliver, Merritt said. “There’s a recognition that their appetite for operational excellence is high.”
But digital government services need to break out of their traditional domains that are often sequestered to public sector websites where citizens might not know that they exist. For instance, with health inspection data, citizens might not proactively seek that type of information out on a local government portal. But they might see it if it’s integrated into a ratings platform like Yelp.
Merritt says that Socrata, through its Open Data Network, is helping to build that integrated data ecosystem for the public and private sectors.
“Let’s get [government] data into Google, into Yelp, into Zillow, into Trulia,” Merritt said.
The 2015 Customer Summit will be an opportunity for many individuals around the nation who work with Socrata’s data platforms to share their experiences and stories.
“Many government employees are passionate about having more successful programs and initiatives,” Merritt said, so they’re eager to talk about what’s worked for them, what challenges they face and the solutions they’re looking at.
Many of the featured state and local speakers are on Monday’s schedule: Todd Strange, the mayor of Montgomery, Alabama, who will discuss data-driven digital tools and transparency; Carlos Gimenez, the mayor of Miami-Dade County, Florida, who will join Miami-Dade County program manager Mike Sarasti in a discussion about the South Florida jurisdiction’s data-centric vision; a discussion about the city of Austin’s efforts to boost the viability and sustainability of civic hacking initiatives featuring the Austin IT Project Manager Charles Purma and IT Division Manager Matthew Esquibel; Los Angeles City Controller Ron Galperin on how data is revolutionizing government operations; Julie Steenson, the deputy performance officer and senior performance management analyst in Kansas City, Missouri, discussing the using data art as a tool of civic engagement; and the city and county of Denver’s experience using a collaborative approach with its marijuana data to show the local impacts of legalization, featuring Denise Hawkins, manager of enterprise data, Stacey Shipper, associate data architect and business intelligence business analyst, and Yvonne Moss, senior data architect with the enterprise data management team.
See the Socrata Customer Summit’s full agenda here.
Michael Grass is Executive Editor of Government Executive’s Route Fifty.
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