Case Study: City of Seattle achieves open-data transparency and innovation with Socrata

Seattle Embraces Open Data, Focuses on Innovation

The City of Seattle adopted the Socrata Open Data Platform in 2010 to improve public access, transparency and spur innovation, while facing limited internal resources and the choice of building an in‑house data portal versus using a turnkey solution. Leaders also wanted to engage local developers and make machine‑readable datasets available for both public use and improved internal analysis.

Seattle implemented Socrata’s cloud platform, launched data.seattle.gov and published 150+ datasets, and partnered with developer communities to produce apps such as VeloRacks, Porch.com and a Seattle 911 app. Internally, departments now build dashboards and visualizations without specialist help, streamlining processes, enhancing services and enabling data‑driven decision making while continuing to expand civic partnerships and measure performance.

City of Seattle

Neil Berry

Open Data Lead, Citywide Web Team, City of Seattle