Innovation? Former Philly Open Data Chief Hates Open Data Portals

Mark Headd, the former Chief Data Officer of Philadelphia, wrote a provocative blog post about open portals, titled “I HATE OPEN DATA PORTALS” (caps original). He has four main complaints. First, no government is actually using the data it provides. If the government can simply publish data without any regard for its accuracy, the accuracy and usability of the data is bound to suffer. Second, open data portals all offer far too many superfluous features for Headd’s liking; portals should focus on providing access to data, not providing web-based statistical modeling packages which are useless for meaningful data analysis. Third, Headd finds the real-time availability of data wanting. Fourth, he expounds on the importance of revision history for data sets.