A report released this week says Oklahoma state government leads the nation in opening up government data to public purview. The report, produced by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Data Innovation, ranks Oklahoma as one of the top six top scoring states for its open data policies.
Specifically, the report cites two pieces of legislation – House Bill 1086, enacted in 2011 and authored by state Rep. Jason Murphey, R-Guthrie, and House Bill 2062, enacted in 2013 and authored by state Rep. David Derby, R-Owasso – as catalysts for the top ranking.
The report builds on the national recognition already directed at Oklahoma’s government modernization legislation. Earlier this year, Government Technology magazine highlighted the ongoing transparency and efficiency efforts.
“These open data policies are just a few of the transparency initiatives approved by the Legislature and Oklahoma Governors Mary Fallin and Brad Henry as part of Oklahoma’s modernization efforts of the past few years,” Murphey said. “As time goes on, I believe we will continue to see an ever growing awareness of the impact these policies are having in cutting the cost of state government and in making it more transparent to the public.”
According to the report Oklahoma has “established an open data policy that requires basic government data, such as expenditure information, as well as other agency data, to be published on their open data portals in a machine-readable format. These portals contain extensive catalogs of open data, are relatively simple to navigate, and provide data in machine-readable formats as required.”
Murphey specifically credited Oklahoma’s former state Chief Information Officer Alex Pettit and previous Government Technology Applications Review board member Sid Burgess, the Web Developers at OK.GOV, the employees of the Information Services Division and Socrata, INC, with their work to implement the provisions of House Bill 1086.
“This dedicated team has been responsible for implementing the data.ok.gov Web portal which allowed us to score so high on the report,” Murphey said. “Without their first-class implementation of the idea this could have become just another unmet legislative mandate.”
