OpenColorado

The OpenColorado Platform

OpenColorado provided a data sharing platform that allows Colorado government organizations to make public data available and accessible to all Colorado constituents. Also, OpenColorado’s vision is to support a transformation that will lead to a simple, beautiful, and easy-to-use government. Furthermore, OpenColorado was founded to achieve this new, more effective, and open government.

In Need of Migration

Open Data Hosting Platform and Partnership Network is a Consortium of a few dozen Colorado Cities and Counties for mostly cities and counties. None of which can support the required infrastructure as well as collaborating feeds with bordering mature cities and states. Also, this site provides access to over 1600 government datasets becoming available from participating jurisdictions. Furthermore, the platform is based on CKAN.

In 2015, Xentity Corporation reached out to OpenColorado to offer pro-bono technical development support. Also, Xentity has participated in OpenColorado CityCamp Colorado which is OpenColorado’s primary revenue generator forum. With the (now dead) website running on CKAN, OpenColorado was a good fit for Xentity to build its expertise with the open source data platform and grow its junior data science analysts as well as offer its senior data analyst services and best practice guidance.

 Xentity provided OpenColorado.org with:

  • Developed to new specifications, including GIS search, view, and map requirements
  • Migrated Open Data catalog to new CKAN 2.5.2 with enhanced GIS facet capabilities
  • Implemented enhanced CKAN APIs to support GIS API analytics queries
  • Migrated data to new space
  • Improved AWS hosting configuration
  • Implemented and configured improved custom header and other UI tweaks
  • Trained team on new platform and how to manage in Agile environment
  • Implemented harvest capabilities for other agencies to pull data live

Upgraded and Enhanced Tools and Capabilities

With these efforts, Xentity and OpenColorado built the infrastructure needed for upgrading and enhancing the data catalog’s tools and capabilities. This partnership brought OpenColorado a step further in building the data catalog as a community resource. The pro-bono support also allowed OpenColorado to keep its costs low and continue making the data catalog free to use.