SF: BART board approves ‘gold standard’ open data policy, despite misgivings

BART is set to open the data floodgates.

Agency information that could include employee salaries, capital spending and parts inventory will soon be released in a user-friendly way after the BART Board of Directors unanimously approved a transparency measure Thursday morning.

“There are few things I can think of as important for government agencies, and government as a whole, as being transparent with the public,” said Nick Josefowitz, a BART board director. “We need to be a data-driven agency.”

The open data policy directs BART’s information staff to begin drafting a “road map” to show what an online data portal would look like for the agency, and to research what kind of data they could begin “scraping” to make public, which may even be updated in real time.

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