Two years ago, the city of Chattanooga adopted an “open data” policy that made public huge amounts of information gathered every day by local government agencies.
Now a small nonprofit organization is calling on Hamilton County government to follow suit.
Metro Ideas Project, an independent, nonprofit research startup based in Chattanooga, has released a new project, Open Hamilton, that argues as much.
A report and tool kit presents what benefits the group sees in adopting such a policy, which members say would enhance public access to information ranging from sheriff’s office incident reports to tax and appraisal data.
The county already has multiple resources available online, such as property records, but Metro Ideas Project members think more can be done, and hope that by centralizing how that information is accessed the public will be able to take greater advantage of it.