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PolicyViz Podcast Episode #14: Ken Melero from Socrata
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In this, the 14th episode of the PolicyViz Podcast, I speak with Ken Melero, Director of Federal at Socrata. Socrata is a cloud-based open data software company that helps local, state, and federal governments open their data and make those data...
The post PolicyViz Podcast Episode #14: Ken Melero from Socrata appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to Ken Malero and Socrata
00:00:11
Speaker
This is the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. Welcome back to the show. This week I'm excited to have the Federal Director at Socrata, Ken Malero. Ken, welcome to the show.
00:00:20
Speaker
Hey, John, how are you? Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming. How are things there? Good, excellent. Busy all the time? Yeah, absolutely. Great. Well, let me ask you to maybe introduce yourself for those folks who may not have heard of you, may not have heard of Socrata. Maybe you can talk a little bit about yourself, a little bit about Socrata, and then I'm going to pepper you with questions about open data.
00:00:43
Speaker
Yeah, sounds good. Well, again, thanks for having me, John. I'm Ken Malera, the federal director of Socrata. Socrata is a small business. We're based out of Seattle. I'm based out of Washington, D.C. We've got a nice little office here with about 30 people in it.
00:01:00
Speaker
And we focus on open data and performance management. So really focused on taking data, putting it, and helping governments make it more consumable for wide audiences. So citizens, media, journalists, researchers, scientists, and other folks that want to take data and really
00:01:27
Speaker
really understand it and present it in a way that's important to them.
Socrata's Mission and Focus
00:01:33
Speaker
Now you're focused mostly on federal government clients, but what about Socrata more generally? Do you have folks doing sort of private sector, doing non-profits, all those different groups, and are they all sort of split up?
00:01:48
Speaker
Well, so we at Socrata focus on government. So government of all levels. So cities, counties, states, federal, like Iran. And we also support NGOs, multilaterals, nonprofits. We actually don't sell the commercial. So we really do feel like it's a government-focused business.
00:02:16
Speaker
Right. And do you or the Socratic, I guess more generally, have a philosophy, as it were, about how to open data and what open data means?
00:02:25
Speaker
Yeah, so we truly believe at Socrata that it's the mission of government to kind of lead society in using data to transform how they're servicing citizens. Governments of all these different sizes are in a position to lead and use kind of
00:02:53
Speaker
within the organizations their own natural resources. And we view data as this natural resource. And where governments have traditionally taken things like water and turned it into utility, electricity, transportation,
00:03:15
Speaker
and really harness that power to use it to fuel the economy for the next generation. We feel like data is that next natural resource for them. And so our philosophy is, you know, government taking this data
00:03:33
Speaker
Making it a utility and bringing better quality of life, you know improving economic impact to to cities and states and and localities and Doing all of this by really becoming more operationally efficient and and in what they're doing modernizing kind of their digital government and
Challenges in Open Data for Federal Agencies
00:03:58
Speaker
And are you finding working with federal agencies that are folks reluctant to do that? I mean, I know having worked at a federal agency for a long time, I sort of know there were some reluctance to put data out in different ways and there's always these sorts of restrictions on whether you can put things out. Are you finding that those are the biggest challenges when it comes to open data? Is it the personnel or is it technology or is it just a culture of organizations?
00:04:23
Speaker
You know, it's a variety of things. One is quality, quality of the data. The thought is always, oh, my data is not good enough to go out. There may be things like it doesn't have proper metadata, or it's not in a standard format. And so they have initial concerns. The stakeholders internally, the data owners don't want to put that data out there because of those things.
00:04:52
Speaker
Other things are more around privacy, right? You know, there's sensitivity towards what data should go out there and what shouldn't. But I think at the end of the day, I think it's kind of, you know, a lack of use cases. Because at the end of the day, there needs to be a reason that they're putting the data out there and it needs to be impacting something. And, you know, is the data
00:05:18
Speaker
good enough to go out or do we even need to put data out there? That's the question. And so those are really the challenges that we see within federal agencies. I mean really all government organizations.
00:05:33
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think in my experience, there's sort of this idea that open data meant posting Excel files. And, you know, I think that's, you know, and I think for many agencies, that traditionally has probably been fine, because the people who were using the data probably just wanted an Excel file or, you know, a Stata file or SAS or some statistical package. But now things
00:05:58
Speaker
you know sort of the data visualization tools and open source software sort of changing the way people interact with data. And I'm not sure whether those tools are sort of making their way into these government agencies quite yet. I think it's coming about. I mean I think a lot of these agencies are realizing that in order to have people take the data and use it in a way that's you know impactful to them they have to
00:06:27
Speaker
They have to understand that user, right? So they build these. Now, you know, there's a great movement around to build user personas and build a persona for these different type of experiences that are being built.
00:06:44
Speaker
And now these government agencies have to not only provide the data, but they need to provide it in a good experience. Either it be some dashboard or some API or some website or some app. Not everyone's going to understand the data and the context around that data in one certain way. If they do that,
00:07:08
Speaker
then the ability for that government to be impactful and kind of lead increases. So when you sit down with an agency, do you spend a lot of time, do you sit down with them and talk about their audience, like who they're thinking about specifically?
Developing Impactful Data Solutions
00:07:31
Speaker
Absolutely. So here at Socrata, I mean, we start everything from the user persona. So we start by understanding who's going to use the data, what questions are they trying to answer from that data, and we work our way back to a solution. Because really, what's so important is
00:07:56
Speaker
Whether that data that's being opened or used is going to be impactful for the question is it really going to answer their question yeah right and and we i mean we don't feel like it.
00:08:11
Speaker
Being open data right, it doesn't help anyone to just open data up just to have a bunch more data out there. It really needs to tie to what the user is trying to get done. We build products that way.
00:08:30
Speaker
our products are built for specific user personas. And when we sit down with a federal agency, we do the exact same thing. We understand is it an advocacy group? Is it a government user? Is it a researcher, a scientist? Is it a media person? Is it Congress? Who's actually needing this data? Who's actually pulling it? So we can develop a great solution for them and a great experience.
00:09:00
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's really interesting. And I think what a lot of folks are seeing is a sort of movement from data that you really couldn't get that wasn't really readable either to machines or humans, like buried in PDFs and text files. And then we've moved to this machine-readable world in which you can scrape things down or you can use platforms like Socrata or other sorts of platforms. And one of the things that I always find interesting is a lot of these platforms
00:09:24
Speaker
a lot of these open data portals, either Socrat or custom things or whatever it is, they tend to have definitions and variable names that are just completely impossible to read and understand. So you end up with like, you know, the variables are like the one, two, nine, four, three. Okay, so, you know, where do you do you sort of see a movement in open the open data?
00:09:49
Speaker
I don't know if I'll call it a movement, maybe a movement. I don't know. The open data feels like moving more towards this idea of if we're going to make data truly open, it needs to be truly open for even the most casual user.
00:10:01
Speaker
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, you know, step one was just, as you said, breaking them out of PDFs. Step two was making them machine readable, getting them into an API. Step three is providing raw access to that, right? And so, yes, you'll download these things or look at the tables of data in a platform like ours or others. And you'll see, you know, columns and variables all different.
00:10:27
Speaker
But it's the context that wraps that, that adds the understanding to that data, right? And so if you start to wrap that in a really easy to use app or a really easy to use dashboard or a wonderful visualization as you're familiar with, right? You know, it just adds an understanding to that, right?
00:10:51
Speaker
where a developer may want the raw data and they want an API to the site, my dad doesn't want that. My dad wants to come to a site where he sees a beautiful infographic with big lettering that says, this is why this capital project is happening in my neighborhood across the street. That's why the road is torn up.
00:11:15
Speaker
Right. And it's presented to him in a way that he just instantly, intuitively knows what that is. Yeah. And then, you know, on the city and the state and the local side, it's really about driving a better economy and driving a better improved quality of life within those cities. So the push there, it really is
00:11:45
Speaker
taking that data and making it more of like a utility, just like water or electricity or transportation. You get it from the government and it just helps you in your everyday life. It improves your life, right? Yeah, interesting.
Internal Use of Open Data
00:12:00
Speaker
So do you find that these organizations or agencies that they're interested in sort of opening their data internally as well? Sort of, you know, there's a sort of siloing effect that a lot of places have. Do you guys spend a lot of time working on just opening data so that people within the organizations can share them and view them more easily?
00:12:21
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Especially within federal. So you have a lot of agencies that they're trying to focus more on data sharing. And they're looking at specific experiences for internal uses.
00:12:38
Speaker
So for them, things like dashboards and easy rolled up tables and infographics to brief an executive or Congress or the Hill, it makes a lot of sense for them and that's what they're pushing towards. But interestingly enough, at Socrata,
00:12:59
Speaker
we service over three hundred plus governments around the world and our analytics on those government sites are that sixty percent of the use of that data is by internal people you know so it's it's actually every time we we stand up a uh... an open budget app and we put the the city's budget data online for
00:13:24
Speaker
public consumption, 60% of the users coming to that are actually internal accountants for the city saying, oh, now I can understand the budget. And so it's interesting. External users want, it's more targeted towards developers and APIs and things like that.
00:13:47
Speaker
for those communities of interest, but they need understanding and they need context and they need a great experience around the data as well. Right, really interesting.
00:14:01
Speaker
Yeah, those internal challenges I would suspect are one of the bigger challenges organizations face. I mean, I know not just, oh yeah, I'm not at Urban Institute. We have constant conversations about how do we get people sort of on a similar basis for sharing and using data? Because people have different experience and different expertise. And I may not know that the guy two floors up really knows how to use this data set. And it's not so much necessarily about opening the data per se, just opening sort of the knowledge base.
00:14:30
Speaker
Yeah, and it's, exactly, it's making it easier to use, right? Easier to use, understand. Right. So what, so sort of a global philosophical question, so what do you think makes an effective open data
Key Elements of Open Data Policies
00:14:46
Speaker
policy? Either, well, I guess maybe, okay, so let me ask this. So what makes an effective open data policy, either internally or externally, whether there are differences between the two?
00:14:57
Speaker
Well, I mean, there's the traditional open, I don't know if traditional, but what's led us into this whole open data market space. It's really been these open data policies coming to governments of all different sizes. And, you know, it started on with the open data mandate on the federal side, but now a lot of states and cities as well are adopting their own open, their own open data policies.
00:15:25
Speaker
And they're usually around things that we recommend are, one, having clear and measurable goals. So why are you even launching an open data program? What are you trying to achieve? How are you going to measure the performance of that once you get it out there? So just because you open up a data set for, I don't know, potholes in your city,
00:15:53
Speaker
does it really affect anything, right? Is it going to make an impact? Is it going to improve the quality of life of those citizens? And then, you know, and open data policies are great tools for getting
00:16:09
Speaker
stakeholder buy-in internally. So the policy might be a bridge for establishing working groups or engaging stakeholders and data owners within a larger agency. So in federal, if you have lots of different data owners in different departments and things, and you can use the policy
00:16:32
Speaker
across the agency to bring those people together internally to open and share that interest and those understandings and those knowledge of the guide two floors down that knows the data and view two floors up that don't. Then the policy could be a tool for that.
00:16:54
Speaker
You know we have on the Socrata website we've got something called the open data field guide. It's got you know it's like open data policy in a box which is great so folks can look at that. Also sunlight has
00:17:09
Speaker
Sunlight Foundation has the open data policy guidelines, which was also put out there for some guidance, which is great. So there's a bunch of resources out there in guiding that. Great. Well, I'll put those up on the site so people can take a look.
00:17:29
Speaker
This is great.
Upcoming Socrata Summit
00:17:30
Speaker
Well, thanks for coming on. So what else do we have going on? You guys have a summit coming up right in the fall? Yeah, we have our annual summit. It's called our customer summit. And this year is going to be big. It's going to be on October 26 and 27 in the Reagan Center in Washington, D.C. And we're going to have about 400 customers.
00:17:55
Speaker
from all across the world that are working on open data, gather, open data and performance management. And we'll have some great speakers. I mean, we'll have some great open data leaders. David Eaves is coming back, Stephen Goldsmith, Ben Wellington, and others. And then we've got some great customers from cities, counties, states, federal agencies, and others, and even some people from the Hill.
00:18:23
Speaker
popping in to say hello, so there'll be a lot of great conversation between customers. Cool, should be great. Alright, well, this has been great. Thanks for coming on the show Ken, I appreciate it.
00:18:36
Speaker
Yeah, any time. I appreciate it. Thanks for the invite.
Podcast Conclusion and Feedback Invitation
00:18:39
Speaker
Yes, and thanks to everyone for listening. If you have comments or questions or suggestions for guests, please let me know. You can send me an email or hit me up on Twitter, or you can visit the website at policyvis.com. And I am John Schwabisch, and this has been the Policy Vis Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.