BLOOMINGTON – The City of Bloomington has been awarded 2022 Best of Indiana Award for Best Application Serving the Public at the local government level for its updated data portal and new dashboards, which went live in 2021 at bloomington.data.socrata.com.
At the October 6 Indiana Digital Government Summit, The City of Bloomington’s Open Data Portal was commended for providing residents, city staff, and other stakeholders with data that is refreshed nightly from the City of Bloomington’s data and information systems. The portal was developed by the City of Bloomington Information & Technology Services Department and Tyler Technology to increase the transparency of city data while reducing the amount of effort required by city staff to compile and publish the data for public use.
“Our open data portal provides transparent access to public information and City services essential to our residents,” said Mayor John Hamilton. “I congratulate all of our staff in ITS and everyone else who helped expand our open data offerings. City residents, city staff, university faculty and students, and public researchers looking for city-wide information all benefit from this tool, and this well-earned award recognizes that.”
By implementing Tyler’s Data & Insights (Formerly Socrata) portal, the City has been able to automate data extraction and publishing from the City’s data systems and also provide real-time access to the City’s Geographic Information System (GIS) data services. The portal allows non-City staff to access and create visualizations, which has enabled non-city users and collaborators such as Indiana University to create and publish visualizations of city data within the data portal and automatically access the most current data.
A collaboration between Indiana’s Office of Technology and Government Technology magazine, the Best of Indiana Awards recognize state and local government organizations for their standout contributions, best practices, and innovations in information technology that improve citizen services.
“The City of Bloomington ITS team members are honored to be recognized for our work,” said Bloomington ITS Director, Rick Dietz. “I especially want to thank the ITS data team of Greg Overtoom and Cliff Ingham for continually applying their creativity and skills to improve our data and digital services. Special additional thanks to Director of Innovation Devta Kidd and Assistant Director of Sustainability Lauren Clemens for their work on the COVID and Climate dashboards.”
COVID Dashboard: https://bton.in/SOHjE
Climate Action Dashboard: https://bton.in/7-kYx
