Connecting Communities with Open Civic Data: Roles for Libraries and Civic Data Partners

The first event in the Summer 2025 Webinar Series with the Ohio State Library Research Commons is on Friday, May 16.

Globally, governments and civic organizations are making data about our communities – or “civic data” – available as open data. Goals of government transparency, accountability, civic participation, and research have motivated this opening of data, but meeting these goals has been constrained by data fluency barriers and lack of awareness of data. To support use and advance democratization of open civic data, the Civic Switchboard project works to build capacity in libraries to serve as local data intermediaries, connectors between communities and data about communities. 

This presentation will introduce concepts underlying the Civic Switchboard project’s work - data intermediaries and local data ecosystems - and the guiding premise of our work: that cultivating a healthy local civic data ecosystem depends upon the coordinated efforts of a variety of data intermediaries and that libraries are well-positioned to serve in intermediary roles. The presentation will share examples of data intermediary roles that involve open civic data, strategies for developing local civic data partnerships, and the opportunity to approach open civic data work through a data justice lens. 

The presentation will also highlight adjacent work focused on expanding adoption of and community around the open source technology CKAN, a software program that supports open civic data initiatives internationally.

Register for this Center for Urban and Regional Analysis webinar.