Hawaii Open Data LLC (HOD) is dedicated to advancing the adoption of open data and the development of solutions capitalizing on open data in Hawaii. We focus on improving data accessibility and integrity in support of public/private collaboration, government transparency, and civic engagement. Our interest in data includes government datasets but extends into the fields of technology, energy, health, education, media, social science, labor, agriculture, economic development, and the environment.

Please describe your innovation?

Hawaii Open Data’s innovation is to leverage technology, social media and the design thinking process to create environments where the community and government can come together to leverage technology to build useful applications that drive understanding, engagement and improvement in the places we live. The company’s core competencies include new media, marketing, outreach, community building, education, strategic planning, project management, IT technologies and infrastructure support. We also plan to build server infrastructure in co-location space in Hawaii to provide a repository for APIs (application programming interface) and data if needed.

What is the problem or situation that your innovation seeks to address?

Currently vast repositories of data held in municipal government is not easily available. There are various methods that citizens can use to get access to this data. One of which is the Freedom of Information Act. Another is to scrape data from spreadsheets or PDF files. Each of these are laborious and time consuming. If data were made available in an open data, API (application programming interface) machine readable format, these data would be much easier to access and analyzed. Businesses and community programmers could take this data and build applications to better interpret this data. With these applications citizens would better understand and be more engaged in helping to improve that environment. HOD also solves the problem of fragile links and transient data by offering to host APIs in local servers. Co-location data centers in Hawaii offer bandwidth, power, backup services and environmental protections to ensure APIs and data are stable and accessible.

What effort have you made to test out your new idea?

Hawaii Open Data organized several events that brought together government officials and citizens to see what types of information would be of interest and what types of applications could be built. In Dec 2011, CityCamp Honolulu was the first of its kind civic unconference that provided the opportunity for citizens and government to interact in a collaborative environment. As a result of CityCamp Honolulu, 10 ideas were proposed for further development. In January 2012, HOD helped organize the first Civic Hackathon that brought together application development teams to work on rapid prototyping of several ideas. Six applications were presented including DaBus and Allb.us. In February, HOD organized the 5th annual Unconferenz which featured Code for America Honolulu fellows who were here in Honolulu working with the City government and the community to determine possible apps to develop. Once a stable of applications are build the next phase is to build out server infrastructure.

What is particularly noteworthy or novel about your innovation?

Hawaii Open Data combines technology, social media, community building and the process of design thinking to create compelling products. HOD is also active in organizing collaborative environments like unconferences, hackathons and Ignite talks that bring people together to identify opportunities to create solutions. The innovation is the solutions are crowdsourced and user centric. HOD also believes in agile development and leveraging existing organizations, new/social media tools and infrastructure to get the job done. Finally, HOD is a partner with the City & County of Honolulu, the State of Hawaii, Code for America and Socrata. This relationship gives HOD the ability to shape open data and civic engagement in the State of Hawaii, the City and County of Honolulu and the neighbor island counties and to provide the infrastructure necessary to provide a stable, lean, sustainable environment.

What impact do you expect your innovation will have on the problem or situation described in the previous question?

HOD has already shown how open data can benefit the C&C of Honolulu with the recent announcement of DaBus app available on the iTunes Store. The key is to continue to drive transparency and civic engagement. The more data we can make available and the more applications, analysis and visualization that results from this data, the better we will be able to understand and work with government. The transparent view into government will foster change, increased trust and civic engagement and ultimately create a government that is working for the people. Once we establish a sound policy for open data in government, the next frontier is for open data is personal data and smart disclosure. Specifically, smart disclosure refers to the timely release of data in standardized, machine readable formats in ways that enable consumers to make better decisions about finance, healthcare, energy or other contexts. Hawaii needs to keep up with this national trend.

What other community partners will you need if your innovation is to scale beyond your organization?

We are at the forefront of this open data movement and have established partnerships with the City & County of Honolulu (Dept of Information Technologies) and the State of Hawaii (Office of the Chief Information Officer). HOD also has a strong relationship with Code for America in San Francisco and Socrata in Seattle. In order to scale we need to broaden these relationships with more departments in the State, like Hawaii Tourism Authority, Dept of Transportation, Dept of Health and Human Services and the Dept of Education as well as the Neighbor Island counties. It is also important to maintain a strong relationship with the technology community, especially software developers, application programmers and user-interface designers. A sustained community engagement is critical and there needs to be a conscious effort to nurture this community. This could be in the form of prizes through sponsorships, recognition by Government officials, economic opportunities and growing markets.

Why are your organization, partners, and key personnel suited to take on this project?

Hawaii Open Data is a first mover for this initiative in Hawaii. We’ve started as a grassroots community building effort to bring together the technology community. We were first to organize and implement a civic unconference and hackathon. We continue to work with community programmers to roll out applications based on open data resources and provide an aggregation point for open data activities in Hawaii at HawaiiOpenData.com. HOD is also involved with education through the various STEM organizations and activities. HOD also has years of experience in strategic planning, project management, technology and new media consulting and Internet infrastructure development. We are committed to this initiative and will continue to work toward its sustainability.