From nothing to something - moving to an Open Data Site

[Greg_Mattis]

Recently the city I work for has taken great strides to implement a more modern GIS. Part of that was to develop a better understanding of the technology that is currently out there and how can we utilize this. I should note that we moved from nothing to something without spending any additional money with Esri as it was included in our annual maintenance. 

I came on board on April 24, 2017 and the GIS environment at that time was minimal due to low staffing and just trying to keep the ship from sinking. The City had Geocortex and a typical 90’s approach to the creation of web maps in that you throw everthing onto one map service and just have people toggle on and off what they need. This worked but it created ArcSOC’s that were 300-500 mb. Plus from a security standpoint, we weren’t too fond of the public hitting our Servers and having our DMZ taking the brunt of the traffic. So, the decision in June was to move our public interactive maps over to ArcGIS Online and allow anonymous access and by doing so, ArcGIS Online took the brunt of the traffic and we had the connection between our server and Esri to secure.

I’m not going to lie that this change was seen by the public in mixed regards because people were breaking away from their muscle memory but after we got past the building of a new muscle memory, our maps in ArcGIS Online were well received! We followed the process of build first then customize and it worked beautifully! We now have 7 different mapping apps deployed to the public using ArcGIS Online and have replaced outdated fill in the field and it will query our data but not show you a map forms to not allow for an interactive mapping experience based upon our authorative GIS information.

Fast forward to January 2, I received a request for data from a citizen where all they wanted was the City Limits in a GIS format. This was not a problem for us to fulfill this request they just needed to pay the staff time to generate the request. But when I realized that it would be roughly $30 for the staff time alone, it dawned on me that the staff time is making the data not worth requesting from businesses and users in our community. So, I floated the idea by our IT Manager and he loved the idea and I started to build our Open Data Site. After getting the different stakeholder buy in and after talking with the City Administation, we received approval to move forward with our Open Data site!

It isn’t live yet because of some changes I need to make. But I just want to recap the amazing part of this:

In less than 1 year, we have realized and started to deploy a Web GIS. First to the public the next step is internal.

In less than 1 year, we provided some of our most popular datasets to our citizens and to other ArcGIS Users at no cost through Open Data.

And in less than 1 year, our payments to Esri have stayed the same and within the next year, our we are hoping that our GIS expenditure will go down due to moving off of other platforms into one centralize system of record!

arcgisonline arcgis opendata‌ localgovernment‌ localgovernmentdatamodel‌

Huge thanks to Matthew Twietmeyer‌ for all his help!