Baltimore Open Data Efforts Aim to Rebuild Public Trust

Mayor Brandon Scott is spearheading efforts to increase transparency in city government. Data-driven tools are helping Baltimore residents drill into how the administration is meeting its goals and a range of other topics.

In recent years, the city of Baltimore has grappled with the heel-toe resignation of three chief information officers and two large ransomware attacks in 2018 and 2019, eroding public trust and inspiring a push for more transparency.

Mayor Brandon M. Scott, who took office in December 2020, is spearheading that charge for a more open city government. On Feb. 3, he announced the 100 Days of Action Tracker, which allows the public to track the status of the various accomplishments of his administration.

In a written response to Government Technology, Scott said that the 100 Days of Action Tracker emerged as part of this guiding effort to increase transparency, emphasizing the importance of ensuring residents can track the work of their elected officials.

The code and data used by the city was made open source so that other governments could implement their own versions of the tool, Director of the Mayor’s Office of Performance and Innovation Dan Hymowitz said in a press release. Baltimore’s code can be viewed on and downloaded from GitHub.

According to Scott, increasing transparency within city government is his highest priority as mayor.

This effort to increase transparency goes back to 2016 and his service on Baltimore’s City Council, where he introduced and passed legislation to create a city open data policy. This legislation required the regular release of city data, including crime statistics and salary information.

“The open data policy was a great first step, but even in 2021, we know that we still have a long way to go,” explained Scott in his response. “The inner-workings of city government should not be a secret, and the open-data policy strengthens the public’s right to obtain information about what’s going on.”

As council president, Scott explained, he used a similar platform to the 100 Days of Action Tracker to involve residents in the city’s governing process, which received positive feedback.

The mayoral transition team, made up of over 250 Baltimore residents, developed recommendations for short- and long-term goals for the administration; Scott and his executive team turned those recommendations into a first-term strategy, leading to the tracking tool.

There were 58 planned actions for the first 100 days, and Baltimore residents were able to view which of these were complete, in progress or not yet started through color-coded status descriptions at any time. The data can be downloaded and viewed in spreadsheet format.

The tool, produced by the Office of Performance and Innovation, is focused on six priority areas: public safety; making the city equitable; prioritizing youth; building public trust; COVID-19 recovery; and the responsible stewardship of resources. Of the 58 planned actions in these priority areas, 23 were completed and 31 were in progress as of the final day of tracking, March 18, 2021.