The datafication of transparency work: A report from Los Angeles. Proceedings for the Interactions Symposium on Big Data

Open government data answers cities' need for new capital resources in a post-recession context and addresses a self-conscious concern about the lagging technological modernization of public institutions. This understanding promotes data-centric management strategies and encourages a mechanistic understanding of how to solve city problems; it leads to new data hybrids born out of data-sharing partnerships between government and the private sector. This proceeding focuses specifically on how, through open data work, staff view their records as administrative and commercial assets and fonts of innovation that improve private and public sector services. Some employees see city records as a source of easy capital, whether cost-saving efficiencies internally or innovation by the private sector. Others see open data as a solution for managing outsized, complex city problems.