City of Long Beach Uses Opendatasoft on AWS to Better Engage Residents and Employees through Open Data Portal

Long Beach, a city of around 470,000 residents along the Southern California coast, is one of the 50 largest cities in the US. Known for its technology innovation, the city has been named a Top 10 Digital City for 13 straight years, including three consecutive years as the number one ranked top digital city for its population size, by the Center for Digital Government. As a leading digital city, Long Beach knows the importance of providing open data, with city data accessible, editable, and sharable to any resident. “If you are a city that is interested in building and keeping the trust of your constituents, you have to offer open data,” says Behrang Abadi, Digital Services Bureau manager for the City of Long Beach. Although Long Beach had offered open data in a basic format for several years, it realized it needed a more mature open data program. “Originally, we would post static documents such as PDF files of maps or spreadsheets,” says Abadi. Over time, the city offered data in a rudimentary portal, which included some geospatial and geographic resources but minimal tabular data. However, having data alone was not enough. Abadi says, “Our goal as a city is to be as accessible as possible. And to meet that goal, we needed to do more than just share raw data. We wanted to offer it in an understandable format, regardless of the user’s skill level.”

After going through an evaluation process, the city chose to work with Opendatasoft, an AWS Partner that offers a software as a service data portal solution for state and local governments and enterprise customers. The Opendatasoft portal has been validated by the AWS Smart City Competency program, demonstrating technical soundness and customer successes to help cities be more confident in their adoption of the solution.

The data portal solution, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), helps users quickly build new digital data experiences for both internal and external audiences. Opendatasoft runs on services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). “We selected Opendatasoft because it works out of the box and doesn’t require additional tools. We also like the fact that Opendatasoft is a developer-friendly company, focused heavily on feature development based on customer feedback,” Abadi says. Opendatasoft includes developer tools and automated data pipelines, in addition to integration with third-party data solutions. “Our software comes ready to build with, making it easy for cities to do what they want to do with their portals in terms of design and content,” says Adam Reiser, sales director for North America at Opendatasoft. “By running on AWS, we can provide a consistent and reliable experience for our customers that gives them flexibility.” For example, customers can use their own Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets to connect their data to a portal and automate data updates to deliver the most up-to-date information to residents.

Using Opendatasoft on AWS, Long Beach created and launched a new open data portal in support of its OpenLB program. The portal features 12 datasets with more than 930,000 records, from employee diversity demographic information to the status of service requests and the city’s animal shelter data. For example, the city’s Animal Care Services department publishes updated data on local animals that have been surrendered or found, and residents viewing the data can communicate online with the department to facilitate adoption. The portal also provides updated data from the city’s 311 reporting system, which is available each night. As a result, members of the public and elected officials can view data on reported incidents, such as graffiti, potholes or dumped items in their neighborhood or district. Updated employee demographic data helps residents see gender or racial disparity trends regarding city staff income. City staff, elected officials, and residents all have access to the portal, a single source of truth for city data. More than 150,000 application programming interface (API) calls are made on the portal every year. The portal contains a blend of technical features, such as API-accessible data in its raw form, alongside inviting data visualizations and dashboards that make the data more accessible for more novice users. In short, there is something for everyone, regardless of skill level.

Taking advantage of Opendatasoft developer tools, the city of Long Beach easily created its open data portal without having to invest in additional resources to maintain it. “We’re getting enterprise-level support and capabilities with Opendatasoft and AWS,” Abadi says. “Even if we built our own solution, we couldn’t manage and maintain it without having a large team.” With its open data portal on Opendatasoft, Long Beach is sharing relevant data in an easily accessible way. “We’re trying to accommodate everybody from the most basic user who might be intimidated by rows and columns all the way up to a developer who wants to build applications. And we can do that with the solution,” says Abadi. “We’ve made our datasets more inviting by providing a simple dashboard with maps and charts. Users can view the dashboard and then create their own visualizations and export data in a variety of ways.” As a result, the city can better engage with residents and employees.

“The open data portal on Opendatasoft is really the next step in our open data maturation,” says Abadi. “Previously, we would release PDFs at different intervals, but now we’re putting out raw data on a nightly basis. Long Beach is building on its relationship with Opendatasoft and AWS to add more features to the open data portal in the months ahead. “In addition to adding new datasets, we’re hopefully going to provide data-driven storytelling on Opendatasoft, integrating data and visualizations to tell stories around data,” says Abadi. Reiser adds, “The City of Long Beach is always trying to innovate, and they’ve been great to work with on this project. This isn’t the city’s data, it’s the public’s data. And we appreciate how they’re trying to present that data. We’re excited to see where this leads.”