Travis County Open Data Portal

Travis County has launched its Open Data Portal initiative so that we may increase public access to all publicly available county data. Our goal over the next year is to work with each County Office and Department to bring data to this forum which may engage public participation in government, increase transparency, better inform decision making and even create innovation through community participation and engagement.

Open Data is data that is freely available, machine-readable, and formatted according to technical standards to facilitate visibility and reuse of published data. Many agencies that have adopted Open Data practices have benefited from community engagement through innovative application development and “think-tank” problem solving approaches which have saved tax payers substantial dollars and have provided outcomes that might have otherwise taken a lot longer to get to.

Travis County’s initial goal was to prioritize dataset to those participating Offices or Departments in the pilot by those which are most frequently requested in Formal Open Information Act (FOIA) requests. This will remain a priority going forward as participating Offices noticed a significant reduction in staff time spent preparing these requests once the information was available on the portal. Going forward however, we want to hear from the community about the types of data most interesting and of the greatest value to you. For questions or issues related to Open Data please email: [email protected].