Collaborative, Interoperable and Open Government Platform

Last January, the public entity Red.es -belonging to the Ministry of Energy, Tourism and Digital Agenda- started together with the local governments of Zaragoza, Madrid, A Coruña and Santiago de Compostela the project "Collaborative, Interoperable and Open Government Platform" One of the fourteen beneficiary initiatives of the second Call for Smart Cities organized by the Digital Agenda, with an investment of approximately two million euros to promote the development of Smart Cities in Spain.

The project "Collaborative, Interoperable and Open Government Platform" has as its general goal the development and implementation of an open government policy in the participating cities based on three action plans -open data, citizen participation and transparency- and a transversal axis based on the development of open government services in a collaborative and interoperable way among the four municipalities.

This initiative consists of three action plans, each of them led by one of the cities, although all of them will work together in the actions associated with the following areas:

Action Plan 1: Open Data

The necessary technical and strategic means will be provided to carry out an adequate open data policy. To do this, first a technological infrastructure will be created to enable the publication of the open data by default and georeferenced, which will be adapted to the technological environment of each of the localities.

This process, which has already been implemented in the City of Zaragoza, will be carried out using a REST API, a SPARQL access point that allows complex queries on multiple datasets simultaneously and a search and indexing service for the creation of applications that re-use the public information.

In parallel, a common vocabulary catalog and data structures for cities, available in several languages of representation (OWL, JSON-LD contexts, CSV on the Web descriptors, among others) will be created through a specific portal and a repository in Github.

Action Plan 2: Citizen partnership

Included in this action plan, we can also find the design, development and implementation of procedures and systems that facilitate citizen participation in the preparation of budgets and local regulations, and day-to-day management of local governments, such as public contracts.

In order to promote the citizen participation in the local government processes, a system to channel the proposals of citizens who, after being submitted to a popular vote, can be audited by the city council or independent entities, guaranteeing transparency in the process will be carried out. In addition, all information obtained in these procedures will be published in open format in the portals as datasets and API open data, following the models of Madrid and Zaragoza.

The design, development and implementation of procedures and systems that facilitate citizen participation in the ellaboration of local budgets, local normatives and daily management, as in the case of public procurement, are also included in this second action plan. 

Action Plan 3: Transparency

Finally, transparency portals linked to open data will be created, which will meet both the indicators established by national and international evaluation bodies and those developed together with citizens. In its efforts to open up local government information, the cities will work to ensure that the data published on such platforms are also available in the open dsata portals APIs of each locality.

In order to facilitate the understanding of the different types of data, visualizations will also be generated, in languages ​​like javascript, with frameworks like D3.js or similar, that will be visible and reusable in the different portals of the consortium.

The project "Collaborative, Interoperable and Open Government Platform" will last three years, during this time the cities will collaborate in action plans described above, sharing their experiences  as a starting point for the other participating cities in the national initiative.