In partnership with a local start-up, Palo Alto today launched a service called Open Budget that pulls up the hood on the city’s finances and lets people see how it runs. While towns across the country are making efforts to share their documents, Palo Alto’s new tool stands out for its clean, comprehensive charts.

The tools let people use filters to view the revenues and expenses for different departments and see how they change year over year. For example, here’s a quick look at Palo Alto’s recent expenses for city officials:

And here’s a look at the city’s growing obligation to retired workers;

The Open Budget tool also provides ways to examine budget items like capital expenses or debt servicing in a ways that PDFs do not. The numbers will be updated to reflect changes during a fiscal year, and users can easily download the data to a spreadsheet.

The city as platform

The open budget project is just one way that Palo Alto uses data and technology to remake its civic infrastructure. The city has also worked with cloud service, Junar, to harness its data on everything from zoning to street sweeping to water levels and offer it up as an API. In practice, this means someone could use the API to make an app to help explore the city’s parks or real estate.

“It’s about building and enabling a leading digital city by eliminating barriers between government and citizens,” said Jonathan Reichental, a longtime O’Reilly Media executive who became Palo Alto’s CIO last year. In a phone interview, he explained that cities can use the data they possess to become a “platform” for their citizens and that financial data is a “sweet spot” for such initiatives.

To make Open Budget a reality, Palo Alto entered a public-private partnership with Delphi Solutions, a company launched by Stanford students that aims to improve government performance. Reichental says that some of the information can be offered through its existing Junar API, but that Palo Alto turned to Delphi for Open Budget because of the complexity of financial data.

According to Reichental, Delphi’s tools not only provide transparency but offer an opportunity for cities to save money in managing their data.  Delphi is also working on benchmarking tools that will make it possible to compare the performance of different cities, he added.

Can data save California’s cities?

Palo Alto may be an inspiration but it could also be an outlier. While its citizens revel in digital plenty, their counterparts in bankrupt Stockton and Vallejo face the prospect of turned-off traffic lights. And in blue collar Bell, California, city officials await trial for pocketing the town’s budget.

If these cities can’t even manage basic services, is it realistic to expect them to embrace new-fangled data tools? And could places like those in the hard luck Central Valley even find people like Reichental to implement them?

They may have to try. As my colleague Derrick Harris has reported, cities who can collect and analyze data have been able to improve efficiency and save money on everything from streets to sewers.

• See also: Managing sewage like traffic thanks to data

There is also hope in the fact that tools like Open Budget provide citizens and journalists with unprecedented opportunities to demand accountability from city leaders. Even in an age when newspapers can no longer afford to send reporters to council meetings, the power to parse reams of data with the click of a mouse is as a check on power.

If Open Budget spreads to cities across the state, citizens may soon be able to compare their towns’ respective police and library budgets and create a virtuous cycle of civic improvement. Alternately, we may see yet another form of the digital divide in which Palo Alto residents get apps while Stockton residents work to keep the street lights on.

(Image by DJ40 via Shutterstock)

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That’s surprising because it is local governments — towns, cities, counties — that could save the most from moving pricey on-premises IT into a shared-resource model.

Of the 400 IT employees in state, local, and federal government surveyed,  the local folks were the “least optimistic” about cloud of all with 14.7 percent saying that cloud “wasn’t at all important” to them.  The percentage responding that way among civilian federal IT respondents was 10.4 percent; for defense department federal IT officials the number was 8 percent; and for state IT the figure was 7.1 percent.

IDC analyst Shawn McCarthy, who directed the survey, was himself a tad taken aback by the finding. “The biggest likely growth area for cloud is at the state and local level so I was surprised to see local lacking,” McCarthy said in an interview Monday.

On the other hand, it makes sense that the federal government — with its cloud-first initiative — moves faster to adopt new technology, and local interest will grow, McCarthy said.

Feds lead, locals follow

“I don’t want to call any solution ‘cookie cutter’ but most cities have similar needs and most states have similar needs — they need to issue licenses, they have HR systems for their own employees — these are common tasks and could be shared,” he said.

Given the budgetary pinch most localities find themselves in — as states and federal governments cut local aid — it’ s not surprising that they’re not cloud deployment happy. Afterall, they’ll have to spend money to save money.

Some regions — the state of New Jersey and parts of New York come to mind — are pushing to streamline municipalities to reduce overlapping or redundant taxing authorities. New Jersey, for example, is home to 566 municipalities — soon to be 565 as the township and the borough of Princeton finally agreed to merge. In theory, the ability to also converge that welter of various IT systems onto cloud infrastructure could also mean huge cost savings.

Jonathan Reichental, CIO of the city of Palo Alto, CA., said IDC’s findings echo what he hears from other municipal IT leaders.

Palo Alto is working with Junar on an open data project.

Palo Alto, being at the epicenter of Silicon Valley, is probably further along this new tech path than other municipalities — in fact the city just launched an open data project with Junar that will make public information more easily accessible.

Local IT people are often so busy just keeping things running that broader strategic planning gets short shrift, he said. “They need to have confidence that they can get the same results and have the same management capabilities in the cloud that they have now on premise,” he noted.

Consolidating workloads, communities on the cloud

In talking to localities, you also have to define your terms, Reichental said. Use of public cloud a la Amazon may be a stretch for cities and towns, but many of them have already virtualized their servers and have some private cloud implementations in place, he said. And many may already use software as a service for targeted applications.  Palo Alto, for example, uses Saleforce.com’s Chatter social networking application and Neogov for recruitment and hiring.

But Reichental said local governments are just scratching the surface of what cloud could do for them. Thinking bigger,  he could imagine huge cost savings if the 40 towns in Silicon Valley could consolidate their buying power for cloud applications — something that could happen if parochial concerns could be put aside. Admittedly, that’s a big “if.”

An early test case for how efficient cloud computing could be for towns that agree to consolidate their workloads may be the UK’s Project Athena  which will run services of seven town councils on cloud infrastructure. As reported by the CloudPro site:

Under Project Athena, Lambeth, Lewisham, Barking and Dagenham, Brent, Croydon and Havering councils are moving finance, procurement, HR and payroll services to a single shared cloud-delivered platform and, if the project is a success, there could be more opportunities for other councils to share resources.

Given the ongoing financial constraints localities face in this bad economy, local IT pros will trust more of their workloads to the cloud provided they can be reassured that the resulting services will be as good of better than what they’re getting now and if doubts about security and management can be assuaged.

Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user Editor B

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Junar CEO Diego May.

With more government agencies, NGOs, businesses and academic institutions making their information public, the data floodgates are opening. Now what’s needed are better tools to cull that  “open data” and present it in a meaningful way. That’s the problem Junar will attack with $1.2 million in seed money from Aurus, Austral Capital as well as unnamed angel investors from the U.S. and Latin America.

The open data movement holds that much of the information garnered using public funds should be freely accessible to interested parties as long as what they do with that information is also made available to everyone. Organizations that are opening up at least some of their data include NASDAQ, the New York Stock Exchange, the UK’s data.gov.uk, and Data.gov.

“A ton of data has been opened up by governments, think tanks, academia, NGOs — it’s an iceberg of data,” said Junar CEO Diego May in an interview last week. The issue is finding the right ways to look at that data to attack real-world problems. Open data projects have grown around genomic data, other public and private health data, even around food data.

“Many organizations are opening their data up to be more transparent, to foster collaboration, to help innovation … Many put out HTML tables or PDFs on their web sites, but they do a crappy job and it’s not really their fault. The tools [for really good visualization] are lacking,” May said.

Junar’s Open Data Platform promises to make it easier for users to find the right data (regardless of its underlying format); enhance it with analytics; publish it; enable interaction with comments and annotation; and generate reports.  Throughout the process it also lets user manage the workflow and track who has accessed and downloaded what, determine which data sets are getting the most traction etc.

The most direct competitors to Junar’s software as a service are Tableau and Google visualization tools, and Socrata but those products focus on the display/visualization piece of the solution, not all the other components, May said.

Junar, founded in 2010 in Chile but transplanted last year to Palo Alto, Calif., says its differentiator is that it offers an end-to-end SaaS solution to data discovery, analytics, visualization, and reporting. Some 200 agencies and other entities have used an early version of the product in the past a few months, and the company is opening up access to anyone wanting to try it out as of Tuesday. Fees for the service starts at $290 per month and depends on the amount of data accessed and varies by types of data sets generated.

Given the combination of the big data deluge — which contributes machine or sensor data from devices inside and outside the traditional computer realm to the mix — and the drive to open up more of that data for public use, the need for affordable, flexible tools to find the right data and display it in meaningful ways, will only grow.

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