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Edited by Brett Goldstein with Lauren Dyson
Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation

Beyond Transparency: Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation
Edited by Brett Goldstein with Lauren Dyson
Code for America Press, San Francisco, CA.
© Code for America 2013. Some rights reserved.
Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under Creative Commons At-
tribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. For more information,
see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Read this book online at codeforamerica.org/beyond-transparency
Editors: Brett Goldstein, Lauren Dyson, and Abhi Nemani
Assistant Editor: Rachel Lehmann-Haupt
Cover Designer: Angel Kittiyachavalit
Web Designer: Angel Kittiyachavalit
Web Producer: Mick Thompson
Interior Layout: Christopher Derrick for Unauthorized Media
ISBN-13: 978-0615889085
Table of Contents
Preface IX
By Brett Goldstein
PART I: Opening Government Data 1
1. Open Data and Open Discourse at Boston Public Schools 3

By Joel Mahoney
2. Open Data in Chicago: Game On 13

By Brett Goldstein
3. Building a Smarter Chicago 27

By Daniel X. O’Neil
4. Lessons from the London Datastore 39

By Emer Coleman
5. Asheville’s Open Data Journey:

Pragmatics, Policy, and Participation 51
By Jonathan Feldman
PART II: Building on Open Data 63
6. From Entrepreneurs to Civic Entrepreneurs 65

By Ryan Alfred and Mike Alfred
7. Hacking FOIA: Using FOIA Requests to Drive Government

Innovation 81
By Jeffrey D. Rubenstein
8. A Journalist’s Take on Open Data 93

By Elliott Ramos
9. Oakland and the Search for the Open City 105
By Steve Spiker
10. Pioneering Open Data Standards: The GTFS Story 125

By Bibiana McHugh
PART III: Understanding Open Data 137
11. Making a Habit Out of Engagement: How the Culture of

Open Data Is Reframing Civic Life 139
By Eric Gordon and Jessica Baldwin-Philippi
12. The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship: Data and Design in

Innovative Citizen Experiences 151
By Cyd Harrell
13. Generating Economic Value through Open Data 163

By Michael Chui, Diana Farrell, and Steve Van Kuiken
14. Local Scale and Local Data 173

By Alissa Black and Rachel Burstein
PART IV: Driving Decisions with Data 183
15. Beyond Open Data: The Data-Driven City 185

By Michael Flowers
16. Why Data Must Drive Decisions in Government 199

By Beth Blauer
17. Beyond Transparency: Louisville’s Strategic Use of

Data to Drive Continuous Improvement 211
By Theresa Reno-Weber and Beth Niblock
18. Benchmarking Performance Data 233

By Ken Wolf and John Fry
PART V: Looking Ahead 253
19. Towards a Community Data Commons 255

By Greg Bloom
20. The Bigger Picture: Ten Lessons for Taking Open

Government Further 271
By John Bracken
21. New Thinking in How Governments Deliver Services 277

By Mark Headd
22. Open Data and Algorithmic Regulation 289

By Tim O’Reilly
Afterword: What’s Next? 301

By Abhi Nemani
APPENDIX I: Further Reading 303

Preface
By Brett Goldstein
The rise of open data in the public sector has sparked innovation, driv-
Open Government Initiative, more and more governments at the local
open data policies, and open data catalogs.
While still emerging, we are seeing evidence of the transformative po-

tential of open data in shaping the future of our cities. It’s at the city
level that government most directly impacts the lives of residents—
business. This is where there is the biggest opportunity to use open

data to reimagine the relationship between citizens and government.
And as momentum grows and norms are set, we reach a critical turn-
ing point in the trajectory of the movement. As a community, we need
worked so far and what we still need to learn in order to ensure we are
driving towards meaningful, sustainable outcomes.
Beyond Transparency is a cross-disciplinary survey of the open data

landscape, in which practitioners share their own stories of what they’ve
accomplished with open data. It seeks to move beyond the rhetoric of
transparency for transparency’s sake and towards action and problem
solving. Through these stories, we examine what is needed to build an
ecosystem in which open data can become the raw materials to drive
-
nomic activity, and empower citizens to take an active role in improv-
ing their own communities.
IX
PrEfacE
How This Book Came to Be

The idea for this book originated while I was in my role as Chief In-
-
quests of how to replicate the Chicago “success story” with open data.
Some essays had been written to talk about implementations using spe-
-
er approach. The more I thought about it, the more I came to believe
that the moment was right for a “guidebook” of sorts that documented
the successes and lessons learned of open civic data so far.
I had become acquainted with Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for

America, through the City of Chicago’s engagement as a Code for
America Fellowship city in 2012. We had built a trusting relationship
through our discussions related to Code for America’s work in Chicago,
and continued to get to know each other at the ongoing stream of open
government and civic innovation conferences, meetings, and events that
we both frequented. As I pondered how to push forward this idea of
marking a milestone in civic open data, Jen was an obvious ally.
I reached out to Jen with a big idea: let’s write a book on open data. For
two busy professionals, this seemed like a herculean task, but a plan
came together that leveraged the resources of Code For America along
with the insights of key players in the data space. Jen was enthusiastic
and pulled together a team from Code for America to support the proj-
ect. Within a few weeks, we had an initial list of contributors signed on.
Within a few months we had chapter drafts in hand and a working out-
line of the book. A good idea coupled with agile execution—in many
ways, the way this book was created embodies principles of the open
data movement in and of itself.
What Does This Book Seek to Do?

Beyond Transparency is a resource for (and by) practitioners inside
to the community organizer to the civic-minded entrepreneur. We aim
X
BrETT GOLDSTEIN
For a local government looking to start an open data program, we hope

the lessons outlined here will help them do exactly that.
We want to spark a discussion of where open data will go next—and

how we, as practitioners, can be smarter, more effective, and more
broadly impactful.
We want to help community members (technologists and otherwise)

outside of government better engage with the process of governance
and improve our public institutions.
And we want lend a voice to many aspects of the open data community.
In this book, you’ll see perspectives from many different participants
that comprise an open data ecosystem: public servants, community or-
ganizers, NGOs, technologists, designers, researchers, journalists, and
citizens. With Beyond Transparency, we’ve brought together a diverse
-
ries of what has been achieved with open data so far, what they’ve
learned along the way, and how we can apply those lessons to realize a
more promising future for America’s cities. As they look back on what’s
been accomplished so far—and what is yet to come—emergent themes
resonate throughout their stories.
As the title of this book suggests, the community is realizing the need
to look beyond the rationale of transparency and instead align open
data efforts with policy objectives, applying it to solve problems that
really matter and make better decisions about how to allocate scarce
resources. We also hear again and again the need for citizen-centered
from data that is open to data that is truly usable and accessible by
the public. Many practitioners cite the need for open data standards—
across various types of civic data—to increase interoperability and
make impact scalable. These are just some of the ideas and lessons that
emerge from the stories gathered here.
As we look forward, this is an exciting point in time. We have proven

the value of open data. We have shown it can be done in short order, in
cities of all sizes, from Chicago to Asheville, North Carolina. And now
it is up to all of us to carry on the work that has been started.
XI
PrEfacE
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my wife Sarah—as I continue to pile on projects, her tol-
erance is remarkable. Thank you to Lauren Dyson and the rest of Code
for America team who helped bring this vision to fruition. Thanks to
Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose support laid the foundation that allowed
open data in Chicago to become what it is today. And above all, thank
you to the community of practitioners whose work is featured in this
book. Your ingenuity, hard work, and commitment to innovation illumi-
nate a path forward to a stronger public sphere powered by open data.
XII
PART I:
Opening Government Data
Editor’s Note
-
ing government data through a series of practical case studies.
In Chapter 1, civic software developer Joel Mahoney tells the story

of how opening government data changed the conversation around
Boston’s school assignment policies, which have been a topic of debate
since the 1960s. Open data, he argues, not only contributes to a more
informed public discourse, but can play a key role in upholding core
democratic values, like aligning policy with societal goals.
Next, in Chapter 2, we turn to the City of Chicago, which pioneered

one of the most comprehensive municipal open data programs in the
tells the story of building Chicago’s open data efforts from the ground
he shares what they learned about building sustainable technical infra-

structure for open data.
In Chapter 3, we examine another angle of Chicago’s open data ini-

tiative. Daniel X. O’Neil, Executive Director of the Smart Chicago
Collaborative, has worked closely with the City of Chicago’s open data
team and local open data activists to advance the city’s progress in this
space. He breaks down the key components of data, policy, developers,
capital, and products that have allowed a sustainable open data ecosys-
tem to develop in Chicago.
open data efforts in a major city—tells us about open data in a non-US

context in Chapter 4. She gives a personal perspective on the estab-
lishment of the Datastore, the policy context that preceded it, and the
2
challenges of data release in the public sector.
Finally, we examine how open data can have big impact in smaller
cities—not just highly resourced urban areas. In Chapter 5, Jonathan
-
ulation 85,000), writes about open data as a long-term investment and
local governments. Through a case study of how Asheville’s emerging

open data efforts can save city resources, he urges other small cities to
consider the pragmatics of open data.
CHAPTER 1
Open Data and Open Discourse at

Boston Public Schools
By Joel Mahoney
depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to

bring them the real facts.
—Abraham Lincoln
Inside the Maze

In March of 2011, the City of Boston had a problem: the Boston Globe
had just published a special multimedia series titled “Getting In: Inside
Boston’s School Assignment Maze” that offered a critical view of Bos-
ton’s school assignment policies (Boston Globe, 2011). The report pro-
traced their hopes and frustrations as they navigated the complicated

school selection process. The following quotes from interviews with the
families are indicative:
I don’t have a lot of faith in the process being logical, so I just hope
that in that mess we somehow get something that works out.
—Malia Grant
Just the word ‘lottery’ when it comes to schools—what, you just

roll the dice and take a shot with your kid and hope for the best?
That’s pretty much where we’re at.
—Steve Rousell
4 OPEN DaTa aND OPEN DIScOurSE aT BOSTON PuBLIc SchOOLS
Ultimately, it’s possible that we will leave the city if things don’t
work out the way we want them to.
—Andy Berg
The report used interactive maps, school performance data, and per-
sonal stories to paint a compelling picture of the complexity of the
school assignment process. It also showed that the stakes—in terms of
citizen satisfaction and trust in government—were high.
These complaints weren’t news to the School Department. The school

assignment policies dated back to the Racial Imbalance Act of 1965,
which required forced integration in Boston public schools, and pro-
voked riots and protests throughout the city (Hoover Institution, 1998).
The opposition was so persistent that it made the cover of Time Maga-
zine in 1971. It led to a District Court ruling in 1974, which found Bos-
ton Public Schools to be unconstitutionally segregated, and imposed
forced busing on the city to remedy the situation. It wasn’t until busing
the school district had shrunk from 100,000 to 57,000 students, only
twenty-eight percent of whom were white (Hoover Institution, 1998).
What appeared to be a logistical issue—distributing a large number of

students to a limited number of schools—touched on challenging social
questions of race, equality, and opportunity. Should diversity be pur-
sued at the expense of neighborhood cohesion? Should desegregation
be enforced at a local level when wealthier parents could leave the city?
Should cities be responsible for determining the proper balance? As
indicated by the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board
of Education in 1954, these questions had a long and contentious histo-
ry. The simple act of sending a child to school involves some of society’s
most divisive issues.
By highlighting the school assignment problem in their 2011 report,

the Boston Globe brought a longstanding issue back into the public
spotlight. The report sparked high-level conversations in City Hall and
criticism demanded a response.

JOEL MahONEY 5
Coding for America

In January 2011, Code for America began work in Boston as part of
Fellowship team tasked with building innovative applications around
Mechanics and Boston Public Schools (BPS). Our goal was to make
educational services “simple, beautiful, and easy to use,” to quote my
teammate Scott Silverman.
Our main project was a “trust framework” that would allow developers
to build innovative services on top of student information—a kind of
“app store for students.” By the time the Globe article was published in
March, however, the viability of the project was in doubt: BPS lawyers
were taking a conservative stance toward the possibility of opening
data, so we shifted our focus to other projects that would be less reliant
on open data.
After the Globe report was published, however, we sensed an opportu-

nity to make progress with the city around the sensitive topic of open
data. In an early meeting with the School Department, the Superinten-
dent suggested that we build an application to help parents through the
school discovery process. We realized that the project would be an ex-
cellent opportunity to clarify the eligibility rules in context, especially
considering the existing tools—a twenty-eight-page parent handbook,
and a home-grown BPS website called “What Are My Schools?”—left
much to be desired. In July of 2011, we began work on a project that
allows parents to enter a home address and grade level and see a per-
sonalized list of eligible schools. We called it “DiscoverBPS.”
Our research showed that parents had two primary concerns: school
quality and school location. To address those concerns, we included
detailed information on commute distances and times (by foot and by
bus), as well as MCAS scores, teacher-to-student ratios, school hours,
after-school programs, and other performance metrics. We built “walk-
shed maps” to help parents make sense of the complicated walk-zone
policy (which gave a higher precedence to students who lived within
a certain radius of a school), and we added historical acceptance rate
data for each grade level in each school. This latter statistic proved
to be the most controversial: the School Department worried that

the odds of admission would add to the sense of “gambling with your
child’s future.” We countered that it was impossible for parents to make
informed decisions without relevant information, and that transparent
data would make the lottery process more comprehensible. Even after
we received permission to publish the data, the School Department
-
ry, and asked us to refer to the statistic as “applicants per open seat”
(which meant that we had to present the number as a ratio instead of a
percentage). Apparently, “open data” had shades of grey.
DiscoverBPS launched in November of 2011 and has received up-

wards of 15,000 unique visitors since then, with a substantial increase
same number of people register for school in Boston each year. It won
and data-driven content made the complicated school selection pro-
year and a half later, when Superintendent Carol Johnson told me that
DiscoverBPS had “changed the way [the School Department] relates to
parents.” In thinking about the goals of Code for America—improving
-
cient and participatory—I can’t imagine a much higher form of praise.
Algorithmic Regulation
It is important to note the backdrop for the Superintendent’s remark:
-
cials were presenting proposals to overhaul Boston’s school assignment
policies. These plans had been a topic of discussion for years, but had
problem in his “State of the City” speech in January of 2012:
The Boston Public Schools have come a long way in the last twenty
years. When I became mayor, many parents considered sending
their children to only a handful of schools. Today, more than 100
of our schools have waiting lists because they are so popular with
JOEL MahONEY 7
parents. Our graduation rate has never been higher, and our drop-
out rate hasn’t been lower in two decades.
But something stands in the way of taking our system to the next
level: a student assignment process that ships our kids to schools
across our city. Pick any street. A dozen children probably attend a
-
dren might not play together. They can’t carpool, or study for the
same tests. We won’t have the schools our kids deserve until we
build school communities that serve them well.
I’m committing tonight that one year from now Boston will have
adopted a radically different student assignment plan—one that
puts a priority on children attending schools closer to their homes.
I am directing Superintendent Johnson to appoint a citywide group
of dedicated individuals. They will help design the plan to get us
there and engage the community on this transition.
I know I have talked about changing the student assignment plan

before. We have made many improvements over the years. 2012
This directive laid out the School Department’s agenda for the next
year, including the town hall meetings like the one I attended in Feb-
solicited feedback from parents. Most of these proposals aimed to solve

the busing problem by dividing the school district into smaller assign-
ment zones (see http://bostonschoolchoice.org/explore-the-proposals/
original-bps-proposals/). Boston had traditionally consisted of three
zones: North, West, and East. The new proposals ranged from nine to
twenty-three zones. Like any redistricting effort, there was no easy way
to redraw the lines: the number of schools would still be the same, and
some parents or groups would always feel short-changed. The meetings
were contentious, and parents vented frustrations about the current
and proposed assignment systems. And although the Superintendent’s
comments were complimentary, when I was sitting in the town hall
session, where a long line of parents were venting frustrations about
the school selection process it was hard to believe that a website like
DiscoverBPS could really have an impact on such deep and intractable

problems.
Interestingly, the winning proposal was not on the School Depart-

ment’s original list. It was submitted by Peng Shi, a doctoral student
at MIT studying the use of algorithms to address social problems, who
had started attending the town hall meetings out of curiosity. Like us,
he came to the conclusion that the problem centered on school quality
-
graphical zones. His solution used an algorithm to ensure that each
student had access to a guaranteed number of high-quality choices (as
no matter where in the city the student lived. According to a New York
Times article on the topic by Katharine Seelye (2013), “He started say-
ing things like, ‘What I’m hearing is, parents want close to home but
they really care about quality… I’m working on something to try to
meet those two goals.’ He didn’t have a political agenda.”
Peng proposed his algorithm to the School Department and they in-
cluded it in their proceedings. Parents were receptive to the idea, and
the School Committee eventually voted it into policy in March of 2013
(the algorithm will be put into effect at the end of 2013). The decision
As Seelye’s article noted:
That it took a dispassionate outsider with coding skills but no po-

litical agenda to formulate the model is a measure of the com-
plexities facing urban school districts today. Many such districts,
like Boston’s, are plagued by inequities, with too few good schools
and children mostly of color trapped in low-performing schools.
Overcoming that legacy here has been so emotionally charged that
previous attempts to redraw the zones have failed (though in 2005
the district did change the algorithm it uses to assign students).
(Seelye, 2013)
This description would have applied equally well to our work in Boston
as Code for America Fellows.
JOEL MahONEY 9
Data and Discourse

The Boston school assignment story shows the power of open data to
shift the public discourse around social issues. The Boston Globe made
its case against the School Department using data made publicly avail-
the School Department responded by opening up new data in Dis-

coverBPS, and by engaging in an open dialogue with parents around
proposed solutions. This process involved town hall meetings and a
website called www.bostonschoolchoice.org, which includes an entire
section devoted to “Raw Data.” As Chris Osgood, co-chair of the Bos-
third parties like Peng Shi to make informed contributions to the pro-
cess. The open data served as a kind of API endpoint into the school
selection debate.
The Superintendent’s comment that DiscoverBPS “changed the way
that user-friendly interfaces to open data (such as DiscoverBPS) play in

facilitating that discourse.
By changing the way the school department relates to parents, Discov-

erBPS also changed attitudes within the school department about the
role—and value—of technology. Based on the success of version 1.0 of
DiscoverBPS, the City recently retained me to develop version 2.0 of
the software, which will include new data and new tools for parents.
I am now continuing conversations at BPS that began in 2011, and
have noticed a greater tolerance toward the use of open data, as well
as toward the tools and technologies that make open data possible (the
BPS IT department is currently building a RESTful API to expose a
canonical repository of school and student information). Lastly, the
School Department’s choice of an assignment policy that can only be
administered by a computer strikes me as a hugely symbolic step to-
ward embracing technological solutions—consider what it means that
the School Department can no longer pin assignment zone maps on
the wall, since the algorithm generates a unique list of eligible schools
for each address.
Conclusion
Our work in Boston shows how open data can catalyze change around
directly by opening up all student information in an app store, but en-

countered resistance around privacy issues, and had to take a roundabout
approach. By instead applying open data to real and existing problems,
we were able to demonstrate the immediate value of the data, and make
meaningful contributions to a longstanding public debate.
Two and a half years later, the School Department is investing in the
continued development of DiscoverBPS, and is demonstrating a deep-
er understanding of the role that open data can play in governance.
Democracy relies on our ability to frame policy—and regulation—

around our broad societal goals. Open data plays an important role
in this process by encouraging constructive public discourse, and by
proving a transparent measure of progress towards those goals. Indeed,
as Abraham Lincoln noted, with “real facts” even the most challenging
social issues can be met.
About the Author

Joel Mahoney is an entrepreneur and former Code for America Fellow.
He is the creator of DiscoverBPS.org, which helps Boston parents to
-
Counter.us, which helps entrepreneurs to navigate business permitting.
His work on DataDonor.org explores the use of personal data as a new
medium of charitable contribution.
References
Boston Globe Staff (2011). Getting In: Inside Boston’s School Assign-
ment Maze [Multimedia series]. The Boston Globe. Retrieved from
http://www.boston.com/news/education/specials/school_chance/index/
City of Boston. (2012). The Honorable Mayor Thomas M. Menino:

State of the City Address, January 17, 2012. Retrieved from http://
JOEL MahONEY 11
www.cityofboston.gov/Images_Documents/State_of_the_City_2012_
tcm3-30137.pdf
Hoover Institution, Stanford University (1998). Busing’s Boston Massa-

cre. Policy Review, 98. Retrieved from http://www.hoover.org/publica-
tions/policy-review/article/7768
Seelye, Katherine Q. (2013, March 12). No Division Required in This

School Problem. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.ny-
times.com/2013/03/13/education/no-division-required-in-this-school-
problem.html?_r=0
CHAPTER 2
Open Data in Chicago: Game On

By Brett Goldstein
Before I joined Chicago’s government administration, I knew very lit-

tle about open data. I certainly had been immersed in the world of
data and analytics for some time, but I didn’t substantively understand
the concept of “open” as it applied to this context. In fact, because
I’d worked at the Chicago Police Department in the Counterterrorism
and Intelligence Section, open data seemed completely counterintui-
tive. So when Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel’s transition team reached
out to me to discuss ramping up an open data program at the City
of Chicago, I had to do some quick and hasty internet research to be
properly prepared.
During the mayoral campaign, Mayor Emanuel had held an event at

Microsoft that highlighted the importance of open government, citing
open data at the heart of his vision for a more transparent Chicago.
(CDO) and to implement his vision of a more transparent government

that not only makes its data available to the public, but also uses data
analysis as a tool to inform policy and improve services.
The new administration started on May 16, 2011, with open data as
a top priority from day one. The weekend prior, the policy group had
data was listed as an early goal. My mission was to take the bones of
the city’s existing program and make it a cornerstone of the city’s trans-
decide where I wanted to take the vision and direction as the CDO for
the City of Chicago.
Before we dive into the details of what ensued, it is worth discussing

-
14 OPEN DaTa IN chIcaGO: GaME ON
point a CDO. This was a clear and immediate statement about the im-
portance of these initiatives to the new administration. Mayor Emanu-
el had decided early on that he wanted a team that used the city’s vast
and rich data resources as a tool and that empiricism would inform
policy. To achieve that goal, he created a senior-level post within his
for a data-driven and transparent government, Mayor Emanuel laid the

foundation for Chicago to go from lagging behind other governments
to being at the forefront of open civic data and transparency.
The City of Chicago did have an existing open data program so I wasn’t
starting from scratch. Prior to the new administration it was managed
by Danielle DuMerer, a project manager in The Department of Inno-
vation and Technology (DoIT). The city had already secured the Soc-
publishing logs of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests

submitted by the public, as well as an assortment of facility and geo-
graphic datasets.
DuMerer had substantially engaged the local open government com-

munity with the city’s open data. However, the prior administration
-
er competing issues, and even with DuMerer’s efforts the program
came on board with a clear mandate from Mayoral Emanuel to make

open data a priority, the city’s open data program began to immedi-
ately change.
to learn the ins and outs of the program I had inherited. I found it
frustrating that the data platform had already been chosen. While I ap-
-
I am also a strong believer in utilizing open source technologies and

was disappointed that we were doing little to support the community
around CKAN, a widely used open source open data catalog. But be-
cause I needed to deliver results immediately, I was not in a position
to make a sharp pivot. It wasn’t practical to consider other alternative
platforms at that point.
BrETT GOLDSTEIN 15
There were also the upcoming Apps for Metro Chicago contests, plans
for which had been initiated during the prior administration. The John
D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation was funding three the-
matic competitions to encourage businesses and software engineers to
use City of Chicago and Cook County open data to create useful appli-
cations for residents. We greatly appreciated the philanthropic support
of this initiative, but the competition imposed a hard timeline to roll
out our program.
It would have been simple to give it just enough attention to meet the
requirements of the project and not offend the supporting foundation,
allowing us to focus on the ideas coming from the new administration.
However, we ended up seeing this competition as a great way to help
launch the new open data program in Chicago and it helped us get mo-
mentum quickly. (MacArthur has continued to be a fantastic supporter
of these forward-thinking programs.) Kicking off the Apps for Metro
Chicago competition so soon after the start of the new administration
was consistent with the strategy of rapidly expanding the existing open
data program.
We immediately found that while technology was relevant to the proj-

ect, clear executive sponsorship allowed for this initiative to rapidly
accelerate. We achieved a couple of key milestones early on that ended
up laying the foundation for the future of the program.
First, the city released its crime incidents dataset. Historically, crime
data was hard to obtain in Chicago. While Chicago had been a lead-
er in front-facing technologies, its raw data was not easily accessible.
The Chicago Police Department’s CLEARpath website offered ninety
days of historic incident-level crime data via a mapping interface and
was a great start in terms of information access. However, if third
parties wanted to use the data, they had to do a substantial amount of
scraping.
Crime data is historically one of the most demanded datasets and is

often too limiting in a few different ways: it is of too short an interval
to provide utility for anything other than immediate-term situational
Chicago endeavored to solve all of these issues in one swift move. The
designed release sought to open all incident-level crime data from Jan-
uary 1, 2001, to the present and update the dataset on a twenty four-
hour cycle. Holding 4.6 million records, Chicago’s published dataset
would be the largest automatically updating set of incident-level crime
data ever released.
The technology behind the release was not complex, but nor was it triv-
ial. Crime data is recorded in the Chicago Police Department’s trans-
actional system and then replicated into their data warehouse. Our
data from one place to another) from an internal utility server to pull
data from the police warehouse and load it into the city’s data portal
via Socrata’s API.
However, along the way, a couple of critical items needed to happen in

order to ensure that the data was secure and could be rendered into a
releasable form:
• The addresses needed to be block-reduced to protect privacy.
• Spatial coordinates also had to be scattered to assist with pri-

vacy protection.
• Updates needed to be captured and replicated into the data-

set as the source system records were updated.
handle uploads, updates, and queries.
We successfully completed all of these steps, experiencing some pain

along the way, but the process eventually came together. As of April
2013, the dataset includes nearly 5.2 million records, continues to be
automatically updated daily, and serves as a good example of the imple-
mentation of open data.
This data release brought substantial attention to Chicago’s open data

program, much of which was due to the press around that release. So-
BrETT GOLDSTEIN 17
phia Tareen, a reporter with the Associated Press, covered the story.
She wrote a thoughtful piece on the enormity of the release and not-
ed that it was a clear turning point for Chicago (Tareen, 2011). While
written locally, the article was sent out en masse by the AP and, within
a few hours, became an international story. As a result, Chicago’s open
data program became very real and was validated by the broader com-
release of a high-interest dataset early on. I view this as another semi-

nal moment for the program, providing a solid foundation from which
to launch. This release worked very well for Chicago, and I suspect it
would work for other jurisdictions as well.
Second, the Apps for Metro Chicago competition provided a frame-

work to engage the Chicago community. The competition demonstrat-
ed that many Chicagoans were deeply excited about open data and
really wanted to engage with government to build tools to help their
neighbors. In order to achieve the latter, we had to provide data in
machine-readable formats, and it needed to be consistently refreshed.
Prior to the re-launch of Chicago’s data portal, data had been made
available, but usually in the form of a PDF, which technologists know
can be somewhat less than friendly.
Our release of street sweeping data during the Apps for Metro Chica-
open data hackathon in 2011, Scott Robbin approached DuMerer and

I to ask about the city’s street sweeper dataset. He was interested in
building an application that would notify users the night before their
street would be swept. I thought this was a fabulous idea, since I had
personally received a series of tickets for failing to move my car. How-
ever, the path from idea to implementation required some of the city’s
data. The street sweeping schedule existed, but it was not published in
a format easily used by software engineers or technologists. The De-
partment of Streets and Sanitation had taken an Excel spreadsheet and
created a calendar, using the software’s formatting tools. The result-
ing spreadsheet was then printed to a PDF and posted on the City
of Chicago’s website. This format made it impossible to reverse engi-
neer. Fortunately, in situations like these, interns are great at assisting
data.cityofchicago.org. From there, Scott produced an excellent site,

sweeparound.us, which has assisted many of us in being mindful of the
city’s cleaning schedule.
-
ue to hold true. First, we, as a city, needed to learn to produce data in
machine-readable formats as part of our standard business practices.
Second, a variety of communities demonstrated an enormous appetite
for government data, including civic developers, researchers, and jour-
nalists. We saw the emergence of the civic developer community both
at the University of Chicago had been struggling for years to extract

administrative data for the purpose of research. Open data programs
make it substantially easier, removing the need to negotiate non-disclo-
sure or other types of agreements. Open data also has also stimulated
now embarked in multi-year studies, based on what has been released

on the City of Chicago’s data portal.
The last lesson is one coined by Tim O’Reilly (2010): “Government as a

Platform.” I did not completely understand this idea for some time, but
now it’s one I greatly appreciate. Chicago’s data portal is designed to
provide raw data in machine-readable formats. By providing an API to
this data, any developer can access, use, or integrate all of this raw ma-
terial for whatever purpose they can imagine. As the City’s Chief In-
app development business and, instead, preferred to grow the portal

to offer both diversity and depth. This strategy prevents us from being
in the business of maintaining apps that require various programming
data portal allows us to be the platform, as O’Reilly suggests, and sup-

port the innovative ideas cultivated by various communities.
BrETT GOLDSTEIN 19
Successfully Implementing an Open

Data Program
After two years of building a successful program in the City of Chica-
go, there are a series of critical points that can be leveraged as other
cities consider implementing or expanding open data.
Architecture
Building a large, useful, machine-readable, and meaningful data por-

tal is a non-trivial technical task. First, of course, comes the question
with available funding to make this decision. Here are some points
to consider.
If you need a turnkey solution, there are few options are available. Soc-
rata is the dominant platform, and they are good at what they do. They
provide a ready-to-go data portal. For organizations who cringe at the
idea of building their own servers and using open source, this is the
method that is going to work best for you. However, as we will discuss
later, in order to have a sustainable open data platform, you are going
to need to do some rather advanced work.
Beyond the platform comes the source of the data. For programs that
are still in their most basic stage, using a turnkey approach can make
this work incredibly easy. Your data may reside in something as simple
as a spreadsheet. You can upload that information into Socrata directly
and be ready to go in seconds, but it rarely remains that simple once
you get beyond the basics.
Much of the data that you have will come from transactional or ware-
house systems, and if your world is like mine, many of them are quite
data, understand what it means, and load it into the platform. This is
somewhat less turnkey than you might originally think.
You also need to consider how much data you will be moving and how
that will impact your enterprise network, storage, and systems. If you
are simply dealing with something like a salary list, which is small data,
the issue is trivial. However, what if you want to load something like
GPS coordinates of your assets? In Chicago, that would be approxi-
mately ten million rows a day. That would stress most environments.
Sustainability
is one of the most critical: the sustainability of the overall design. An

open data program that relies on a human to keep it updated is fun-
transparency, it’s important to ponder the role of the middleman. I

like to joke that people are often shocked when I tell them we do not
vet the data before it gets released onto the portal. There is, in fact, no
little dude in the basement of City Hall that checks every row of data
before it goes out the door. That is the beautiful part of the design be-
hind the portal.
Ninety nine percent of the data that goes onto data.cityofchicago.org

arrives there automatically. Each one of the datasets has an ETL job
that connects into the source system, takes the data, transforms it as
appropriate, and loads it into the platform. This happens daily or more
frequently. In some cases, we overwrite the entire set. For others, like
crime incidents, we do an incremental update that adds new records
and catches changes to existing records. This type of architecture ac-
complishes a series of critical points.
First, it is scalable. It is impossible to have millions of rows of data avail-

able based on manual refreshes. This makes little sense and will not
be timely. Second, as mentioned before, it keeps the platform honest.
Lastly, it creates sustainability. The program ceases to become about
a single individual and, instead, becomes a programmatic area within
the technological organization.
Fear
There is a strong institutional fear of open data. In a culture of “gotcha”

journalism, the idea of something being disclosed that could embarrass
BrETT GOLDSTEIN 21
an administration is a common worry and, therefore, barrier. It is often

a reason to not release data. My experience with this highlights a cou-
ple critical points.
We have released millions of rows of data to date, and so far, it has gone
very well. Every time the internal constituency has been concerned
about a release, we have been able to push it forward and go public
without incident.
It is critical that you develop a strong relationship with your open gov-
ernment community. By fostering this dynamic, you are able to create
a “let’s make it work together” ethos. I explained that if every mistake I
made got blown into a major incident, it would stymie our collaborative
goals. In Chicago, they took this to heart. We created a team effort,
working with Joe Germuska from the Northwestern University Knight
Lab, and formerly of the Chicago Tribune, along with Daniel X. O’Neil
of the Smart Chicago Collaborative. We would regularly convene via
Twitter, email, phone, or at meet-ups. This worked out particularly well
as we strived to conquer large and complicated datasets. These are the
Often, you will see a dynamic between government, the press, and the
open government community that can be less than pleasant because of
this “gotcha” concept I mentioned prior. Government releases some-
thing that has an error in it, and it becomes a “thing.” Maybe there is
substantial press around the error or, even worse, it is viewed as being
deceitful. Within this framework, there are typically only two strate-
data, which is not the optimal track for any of our interests. The second
is to ensure that the data is one hundred percent perfect before it goes
out the door.
If you are posting a spreadsheet with one hundred rows and it is not
terribly wide, you can go through each and every line to ensure that
it’s perfect. You can even scale the exercise to thousands of lines using
a variety of mechanisms. However, what happens when the dataset in-
cludes millions of rows and covers a decade? Even with scripts and au-
mark. This leaves most people in a quandary. When you want to release
big and important data and you cannot ensure it is one hundred percent
correct, it leads to all sorts of drama. It becomes a no-win situation.
This is where we changed the dynamic in Chicago so that we would

be able to move the open data program into high gear. It came down
to me personally developing a series of relationships within the com-
munity and investing the time to ensure that people understood and
believed in what we were trying to do. Historically, a high-level mem-
ber of the administration does not show up at an open government
meet-up to discuss open data, but this was what ultimately enabled me
to build trust between these entities. It also helped to have contacts
like Joe, within the news organization, that allowed for the relationship
building. These people believed that our open data plan was bigger
than the single story and that we were building a broader system.
Becoming Part of Day-to-Day Operations

As the open data program in Chicago became a robust and useful plat-
form, the question came as to how we should take it to the next level.
In the beginning of 2013, the mayor decided that he wanted to make
a policy commitment to ensure the sustainability of the program. He
issued an Open Data Executive Order (2012-2) that mandated that
each department would designate an Open Data Coordinator, the city
would be annual accountability as to the release of open data for trans-

parency and sustainability (Emanuel, 2013).
The release and exposure of this executive order served to reinforce the
hard work that had gone into the creation of the program. The ordering
is one that would remain an open question for administrations that are
looking to move forward in the realm of open data. Does it make sense
to issue the executive order or legislation prior to the beginning of the
initiative, or does it make sense to allow for some traction and then
create that framework around it?
My preference is around the latter, but, clearly, I am biased. My

thoughts focus on the ability to iterate and develop in an incubator en-
BrETT GOLDSTEIN 23
vironment before it becomes part of the system. Open data programs

will have to evolve and grow in different ways in various cities. Lessons
that apply to Chicago may not be relevant for a different city. The au-
tonomy to try, explore, and adapt makes a lot of sense and is certainly a
model that can be conducive to success. It is critical to create a viable
program before becoming overly prescriptive about its functions.
The Bare Minimum to be Successful

In order for an open data program to be truly successful, it requires two
key items that are, in fact, also a broader lesson for many government
-
sor—whether this is the president for the federal program or, in the
case of Chicago, the mayor. With the unequivocal support of the mayor,
roadblocks disappeared as it became clear that all parties would be ac-
countable for the success—or lack thereof—of the program.
funding in government is not, in fact, a mandate. There is a common

saying in municipal government: “Control is based on a budget line.”
Whoever controls the budget line controls the project. Chicago com-
mitted funding (not a large amount, but funding nonetheless) and re-
sources to ensure that this could be successful. In the case of Chicago,
this was able to fund the Socrata platform as a foundation and the
ongoing work that was required for ETL development. Without a data
platform and some sort of automated way to continue to keep it fresh,
it is not a true program that will be sustainable beyond the individual.
I will, however, note the corner case that invalidates my second point,
and this is, of course, a model that I admire: the scrappy do-it-yourself
shop. In this scenario, the program is based on the open source CKAN
model. The entity can build out their open data system on top of that
platform. Seeing that they already have shown the innovation to work
with open source software, it may be the case that they have the ability
to write their own ETLs or leverage some of the great open source
ETL tools that are available on the internet. From there, it would be
a function of what sort of infrastructure could be built out. There is
absolutely no reason a low-cost cloud solution couldn’t be implemented.
This type of presence does not require a substantial amount of securi-

ty, as you are not really worried about accessing the data. Rather, you
simply want to preserve its integrity.
This corner case is somewhat interesting, as one can envision a sce-

nario where one partners a strong executive sponsor with a scrappy
technologist. Given access and mandate, it would be extraordinarily
low-cost for a successful initial foray into the open data space. This is
Chicago is an excellent case in showing how one can build an open

data program where it is not expected. The role of the strong executive
sponsor is critical to a program’s success, and Mayor Emanuel played
that part. Building close partnerships with the community and strate-
gic media attention were also key components of our success. Through
tenacity and sustainable execution by the team, Chicago has been able
to put forth an initiative that has become the gold standard in open
data. These lessons from Chicago’s rapid scaling up of our program will
help inform the next generation of open data initiatives, as new models
for growth and sustainability of open data emerge.
About the Author
for the City of Chicago. In 2013, he was named the inaugural recip-
ient of the Fellowship in Urban Science at the University of Chica-
go Harris School of Public Policy. Before his appointment as Chi-
Department Predictive Analytics Group. Previously, he spent seven

years in the startup world building online real-time restaurant res-
ervation service OpenTable. Goldstein is currently pursuing his PhD
in Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
References
O’Reilly, Tim. (2010). Government as a Platform. In Open Govern-
ment. Retrieved from http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9780596804350/de-
BrETT GOLDSTEIN 25
Emanuel, Rahm, City of Chicago. (2013). Open Data Executive Or-

der (No. 2012-2). Retrieved from http://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/
narr/foia/open_data_executiveorder.html
Tareen, S. (2011, September 14). Chicago to publish crime stats on-

line. The Washington Times. Retrieved from http://www.wash-
ingtontimes.com/news/2011/sep/14/apnewsbreak-chicago-to-pub-
lish-crime-stats-online/?page=all
CHAPTER 3
Building a Smarter Chicago

By Daniel X. O’Neil
Introduction
As the open data and open government movement continues, there is
a lot of talk about building local ecosystems for the work. The general
idea is that there has to be a mildly magic combination of data, policy,
developers, capital, and products to enable the kind of growth that is
necessary to take the movement to the next level—where there is a ma-
ture market for open government products that serve real community
needs and lead to sustainable revenue.
The thing about building an ecosystem is that when it is done deliber-

ately, it can be a slog. Building a developer community from scratch,
convincing local government to publish data, getting venture capitalists
to take a look at open government projects—all of this is tough work
that takes time.
By looking at the Chicago example, however, we can see that there’s
and congeal these pieces together.
What follows is an illustrative, incomplete, and idiosyncratic look at the

ecosystem in Chicago. It is meant to provide a thumbnail take on how
Data: An Era of Incidental Transparency

The story starts with Citizen ICAM (Information Collection for Auto-
mated Mapping), the granddaddy of all crime mapping applications,
created by the Chicago Police Department in May 1995. I wrote about
28 BuILDING a SMarTEr chIcaGO
this system back in 2006 because I wanted to understand the archae-
(O’Neil, 2006). You can learn a lot about software by its backstory.
report on Citizen ICAM:
To better understand the nature and extent of criminal and social

problems in the community and improve allocation of resources, a
growing number of crime control and prevention organizations are
turning to computerized mapping. (Rich, 1996)
was the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) program. Here’s

another snip from the 1996 report:
ICAM was developed as part of CPD’s far-reaching and ambitious

community policing strategy. Unlike many other community-po-
licing programs that are limited to a single unit in the depart-
ment, the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) is de-
partment-wide. The strategic plan for reinventing CPD describes
CAPS as a “wholesale transformation of the department, from a
largely centralized, incident-driven, crime suppression agency to
a more decentralized, customer-driven organization dedicated to
solving problems, preventing crime, and improving the quality of
life in each of Chicago’s neighborhoods.
In fact, CAPS is really a city program with strong support from the
been directed to give top priority to “CAPS service requests” that

affect crime and neighborhood safety. (Rich, 1996)
This twenty-year-old project is a model for where we need to be now—

and where the movement seems to be heading. It starts with deep in-
put from residents to form a “customer-driven organization.”
In the technology world, we call these people “users.”
Adrian Holovaty’s ChicagoCrime.org—widely considered a major

impetus in the open data movement—simply would not have existed
DaNIEL X. O’NEIL 29
without Citizen ICAM (Holovaty, 2008). At the same time, Chicago-

Crime.org was certainly not well-formed public data. For instance, all
data was retrieved by scraping with obscure URL calls that ignored the
user interface, which limited searches to a quarter-mile radius.
Another example is transit data “published” by the Chicago Transit Au-

thority in the context of their proprietary Bus Tracker system. I covered
this extensively in a January 2009 blog post (O’Neil, 2009). The upshot is
that Harper Reed scraped all data driving the app, cached it, and served
it to developers. This led to a blossoming of transit-focused apps.
The culmination of this work is the publication of the CTA’s own API,
a document wherein Harper and I are explicitly called out for helping
them develop it:
Special thanks go to Harper Reed and Dan O’Neil for their sup-
port and encouragement, and to the independent development
community, for showing such great interest in developing appli-
Thank you. (Chicago Transit Authority, 2011)
This is the kind of inside/outside game that is also essential to the eco-
system. You have to work with government institutions to make their
conscious publication of data in the city) is the wealth of Geographic

Information Systems (GIS) data published by the City of Chicago. This
was another early reason why ChicagoCrime (and, by extension, Ev-
eryBlock) could exist. Their policy was formalized in July 2007, but the
data had been available long before that (City of Chicago, 2007).
the idea that public information should be public: “Wherever possi-

ble, direct requestors to publicly available internet sources of map
information.”
This is the moment when the governmental provision of data goes from
incidental to essential. Before that magic moment, it’s important for de-
velopers and citizens to look harder for data published in plain sight.
Policy: Enlightened Self-Interest Meets

the Movement
As a co-founder of EveryBlock, I spent four years (2007 to 2011) work-
ing with sixteen municipalities on publishing data. I saw some funda-
mental patterns of open data policy development that held true here
in Chicago.
First off, I can’t emphasize the power of examples enough. In Decem-

ber 2007, I was part of a meeting of open data advocates in Sebastopol,
California. The mission was “to develop a more robust understanding
of why open government data is essential to democracy.”
The output was the “8 Principles of Open Government Data” (Open

Government Working Group, 2007). This simple document was a pow-
erful, unimpeachable tool that I used every time I worked with govern-
open data advocates something to point to when they were in their in-
ternal meetings. This support of isolated pockets of policymakers was
one important pattern I saw here in Chicago as well. Building relation-
ships with public, sharable resources, like the “8 Principles,” allowed
for shared trust and shared work. This pattern of template sharing is
something that works.
There were nascent open data plans and products in the Daley admin-
istration, including Chicago Works For You, a project I worked on as a
consultant for the City in 2005. Micah Sifry discussed this project in a
2009 article titled “A See-Through Society”:
try to stand in the way will discover that the internet responds to
information suppression by routing around the problem. Consider
the story of a site you’ve never seen, ChicagoWorksForYou.com. In
June 2005, a team of Web developers working for the City of Chi-
items like pothole repairs, tree-trimming, garbage-can placement,

building permits, and restaurant inspections—and enable users to
search by address and “map what’s happening in your neighbor-
hood.” The idea was to showcase city services at the local level.
(Sifry, 2009)
Early failures often lead the way to the next policy win—that’s
another pattern.
Hot topics that receive public attention are fecund areas for open data
policy. In Chicago, Tax Increment Financing is a big topic, mainly
amounts of money with very little public information about how the
system works.
It’s no accident that a number of Aldermen sponsored the TIF Sun-

shine Ordinance in 2009 (Brooks & O’Neil, 2009). Pressure and heat
get results.
The last pattern has perhaps led to the most good: when the chief exec-
utive of a unit of government wants to make a big push. Mayor Michael
Bloomberg of New York won an unusual third term at the same time
-
and our own Mayor Rahm Emanuel embraced open data when he
made a move from the White House to Chicago City Hall.
-
ecutive branch deciding that open data is good policy. They back this
up by empowering people, like former Chicago CIO Brett Goldstein
and CTO John Tolva, to develop and implement that policy.
It’s the unique and aggressive policy of publishing data that has brought
the movement further here in Chicago.
Developers: Civic Activism

Every city has its own history and its own approach to the world, and I
think that is expressed in its technological history as well. Chicago has
been a center of civic activism and individual public creativity for decades.
It can be traced as far back as Jane Addams, who created the Hull
-
dences for middle-class “settlers” in predominantly immigrant neigh-
borhoods that aimed to reduce inequality in urban areas (Wade, 2004).
She was also a tireless scholar who studied the geographical distribu-
tion of typhoid fever and found that it was the working poor who suf-
fered most from the illness.
Chicago is the place where the drive for common standards, like the
eight-hour workday, was fought (Jentz, n.d.). It was a center for the bat-
tle against mortgage redlining (the practice of denying or raising prices
for mortgages that has played a role in the decay of cities). Activists
used data to understand the predicament and prove their case.
example of success in putting civic data to use for the public good.
Everyone loves CTA bus tracker apps, but few people know that the
installation of the GPS satellite technology making that possible is the
result of a lawsuit brought by a group associated with the Americans
Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (Chicago Transit Authority, n.d.).
Their case, Access Living et al. v. Chicago Transit Authority, required
“installation of audio-visual equipment on buses to announce bus stop
information to riders who have visual impairments or are deaf or hard
of hearing” (Equip for Equality, n.d.). When you hear the loudspeaker
system announce the next street where the bus is stopping, you have de
facto data activists to thank.
This is the place where saxophonists rise from the stage, blare out a
ten-minute solo, and calmly fade back into the band. It’s the place
where slam poetry was conceived—individual poets audaciously grab-
bing the mic for three minutes and getting judged by the crowd. It’s
also where improv comedy—with its focus on ensemble and fast think-
ing—was invented.
These are threads for us in the civic innovation movement here in Chi-
cago. I believe they’re embedded in the work. They form examples for
us to follow—the quiet humility of the worker in the crowd, the devel-
oper among the people.
-
where. Just remember that every city has unique cultural and techno-
logical histories. This is the essence of an ecosystem, and it’s why they
are local.
It’s one thing to recognize history and another to build a local move-
ment from it. Here are some of the entities that have helped form and
accelerate the work:
2007).
• Independent Government Observers Task Force was a 2008

non-conference, where many of the leaders of the movement
worked together (Independent Government Observers Task
Force, 2008).
• Open Government Chicago(-land) is a meetup group started by

Joe Germuska (Open Government Chicago(-land), 2013).
• Open Gov Hack Nights are weekly meetings that have been
critical to accelerating the pace of development (Open Gov
Hack Night, n.d.).
• Digital.CityofChicago.org is a publication at the center of city

policy and examples (“Release All the Data,” 2013).
Capital: Philanthropy Leads, Capital Must Follow

Without money, there is no sustainability.
-
ogy and data, growing means capital. In Chicago, a main source of
capital currently comes from philanthropic sources, though there are
some stirrings in the market.
-
cago—was primarily funded by the MacArthur Foundation (O’Brien,
2011). The contest was an important moment in the ecosystem—it was
the context of a project with cash prizes.
The Smart Chicago Collaborative, a civic organization devoted to im-

proving lives in Chicago through technology, is funded by the MacAr-
thur Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust. Additional fund-
ing came through the federal government’s Broadband Technology
Opportunities Program, a program designed to expand access and
adoption of broadband opportunities in communities across America
(National Telecommunications and Information Administration, n.d.).
EveryBlock was funded by a $1 million grant from the Knight Foun-

dation, and then was acquired by MSNBC. This was a test of using
philanthropic money and open source as a basis for a business. There
have not been many examples since then. This is a problem that needs
A digital startup hub in Chicago, known as 1871, has a number of civic

startups in their space, including Smart Chicago, Tracklytics, Purple
Binder, and Data Made. As these organizations deliver more value, the
entire civic innovation sector will attract more capital.
Products: The Next Frontier

In order for the ecosystem to be self-sustaining, we have to create pop-
ular, scalable, and revenue-generating products with civic data.
Developers in Chicago are making a renewed focus on users. An exam-

ple is the Civic User Testing Group run by Smart Chicago (Smart Chi-
cago Collaborative, n.d.). We’ve spent years trying to get regular resi-
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generous manner in which the Dutch officials treat those who come
to them properly recommended by the higher authorities.
After crossing the Barizan chain, and coming down into this valley
of the Musi, I have noticed that the natives are of a lighter color,
taller, and more gracefully formed than those seen in the vicinity of
Bencoolen. The men always carry a kris or a lance when they go
from one kampong to another. The same laws and customs prevail
here as in the vicinity of Bencoolen, except that the jugur, or price of
a bride, is considerably higher. The anak gadis here also wear many
rings of large silver wire on the forearm, and gold beads on the wrist,
in token of their virginity. The Resident states to me that the native
population does not appear to increase in this region, and that the
high price of the brides is the chief reason. As the price is paid to the
girl’s parents, and not to herself, she has less inducement to conduct
herself in accordance with their wishes; and, to avoid the natural
consequences of their habits, the anak gadis are accustomed to take
very large doses of pepper, which is mixed with salt, in order to be
swallowed more easily. Many are never married, and most of those
who are, bear but two or three children, after they have subjected
themselves to such severe treatment in their youth.
April 27th.—Rode five or six paals up the Musi, and then crossed it
at the foot of a rapid on a “racket,” or raft of bamboo, the usual mode
of ferrying in this island. In the centre of the raft is a kind of platform,
where the passenger sits. One native stands at the bow, and one at
the stern, each having a long bamboo. The racket is then drawn up
close to the foot of the rapids, and a man keeps her head to the
stream, while the other pushes her over. As soon as she leaves the
bank, away she shoots down the current, despite the shouts and
exertions of both. We were carried down so swiftly, that I began to
fear we should come into another rapid, where our frail raft would
have been washed to pieces among the foaming rocks in a moment;
but at last they succeeded in stopping her, and we gained the
opposite bank. Thence my guide took me through a morass, which
was covered with a dense jungle, an admirable place for crocodiles,
and they do not fail to frequent it in large numbers; but the thousands
of leeches formed a worse pest. In one place, about a foot square, in
the path, I think I saw as many as twenty, all stretching and twisting
themselves in every direction in search of prey. They are small,
being about an inch long, and a tenth of an inch in diameter, before
they gorge themselves with the blood of some unfortunate animal
that chances to pass. They tormented me in a most shocking
manner. Every ten or fifteen minutes I had to stop and rid myself of
perfect anklets of them.
I was in search of a coral-stone, which the natives of this region
burn for lime. My attendants, as well as myself, were so tormented
with the leeches, that we could not remain long in that region, but I
saw it was nothing but a raised reef, chiefly composed of
comminuted coral, in which were many large hemispherical
meandrinas. The strata, where they could be distinguished, were
seen to be nearly horizontal. Large blocks of coral are scattered
about, just as on the present reefs, but the jungle was too thick to
travel in far, and, as soon as we had gathered a few shells, we
hurried to the Musi, and rode back seven miles in a heavy, drenching
rain.
All the region we have been travelling in to-day abounds in
rhinoceroses, elephants, and deer. If the leeches attack them as they
did a dog that followed us, they must prove one of the most efficient
means of destroying those large animals. It is at least fortunate for
the elephant and rhinoceros that they are pachyderms. While
passing through the places where the jungle is mostly composed of
bamboos, we saw several large troops of small, slate-colored
monkeys, and, among the taller trees, troops of another species of a
light-yellow color, with long arms and long tails. On the morning that I
left Tanjong Agong, as we passed a tall tree by the roadside, the
natives cautioned me to keep quiet, for it was “full of monkeys,” and,
when we were just under it, they all set up a loud shout, and at once
a whole troop sprang out of its high branches like a flock of birds.
Some came down twenty-five or thirty feet before they struck on the
tops of the small trees beneath them, and yet each would recover,
and go off through the jungle, with the speed of an arrow, in a
moment.
While nearly all animals have a particular area which they frequent
—as the low coast region, the plateaus of these tropical lands, or the
higher parts of the mountains—the rhinoceros lives indifferently
anywhere between the sea-shores and the tops of the highest
peaks. This species has two “horns,” the first being the longer and
more sharply pointed, but the Java species has only one. The
natives here know nothing of the frequent combats between these
animals and elephants, that are so frequently pictured in popular
works on natural history. The Resident has, however, told me of a
combat between two other rivals of these forests that is more
remarkable. When he was controleur at a small post, a short
distance north of this place, a native came to him one morning, and
asked, if he should find a dead tiger and bring its head, whether he
would receive the usual bounty given by the government. The
Resident assured him that he would, and the native then explained
that there had evidently been a battle between two tigers in the
woods, near his kampong, for all had heard their howls and cries,
and they were fighting so long that, he had no doubt, one was left
dead on the spot. A party at once began a hunt for the expected
prize, and soon they found the battle had not been between two
tigers, as they had supposed, but between a tiger and a bear, and
that both were dead. The bear was still hugging the tiger, and the
tiger had reached round, and fastened his teeth in the side of the
bear’s neck. The natives then gathered some rattan, wound it round
them, just as they were, strung them to a long bamboo, and brought
them to the office of the Resident, who gave a full account of this
strange combat in his next official report.
These bears are popularly called “sun” bears, Helarctos
Malayanus, from their habit of basking in the hot sunshine, while
other bears slink away from the full light of day into some shady
place. The Resident at Bencoolen had a young cub that was very
tame. Its fur was short, fine, and glossy. It was entirely black, except
a crescent-shaped spot of white on its breast, which characterizes
the species.
Governor Raffles, while at Bencoolen, also had a tame one, which
was very fond of mangostins, and only lost its good-nature when it
came to the table, and was not treated with champagne. When fully
grown, it is only four and a half feet long. It is herbivorous, and
particularly fond of the young leaves of the cocoa-nut palm, and is
said to destroy many of those valuable trees to gratify its appetite.
April 30th.—At 6 a. m. commenced the last stage of my journey on
horseback. My course now was from Tebing Tingi, on the Musi, in a
southeasterly direction, to Lahat, the head of navigation on the
Limatang. The distance between these two places is about forty
paals, considerably farther than it would be from Tebing Tingi down
the Musi to the head of navigation on that river; but I prefer to take
this route, in order to learn something of the localities of coal on the
Limatang and its branches, and of the unexplored Pasuma country.
We crossed the Musi on a raft, and at once the road took us into a
forest, which continued with little interruption all the way to Bunga
Mas, a distance of twenty-four paals. Most of this forest rises out of a
dense undergrowth, in which the creeping stems and prickly leaves
of rattans were seen. These are various species of Calamus, a
genus of palms that has small, reed-like, trailing stems, which are in
strange contrast to the erect and rigid trunks of the cocoa-nut, the
areca, the palmetto, and other palms. It seems paradoxical to call
this a palm, and the high, rigid bamboo a species of grass. When
they are growing, the stem is sheathed in the bases of so many
leaves that it is half an inch in diameter. When these are stripped off,
a smooth, reed-like stem of a straw-color is found within, which
becomes yellow as it dries. The first half-mile of the road we
travelled to-day was completely ploughed up by elephants which
passed along two days ago during a heavy rain. The piles of their
excrements were so numerous that it seems they use it as a stall.
Every few moments we came upon their tracks. In one place they
had completely brushed away the bridge over a small stream, where
they went down to ford it; for, though they always try to avail
themselves of the cleared road when they travel to and fro among
these forests, they are too sagacious to trust themselves on the frail
bridges.
In the afternoon, the small boughs which they had lately broken off
became more numerous as we advanced, and their leaves were of a
livelier green. We were evidently near a herd, for leaves wilt in a
short time under this tropical sun. Soon after, we came into a thicker
part of the forest, where many tall trees threw out high, overarching
branches, which effectually shielded us from the scorching sun,
while the dry leaves they had shed quite covered the road.
Several natives had joined us, for they always travel in company
through fear of the tigers. While we were passing through the dark
wood, suddenly a heavy crashing began in the thick jungle about
twenty paces from where I was riding. A native, who was walking
beside my horse with my rifle capped and cocked, handed it to me in
an instant, but the jungle was so thick that it was impossible to see
any thing, and I did not propose to fire until I could see the forehead
of my game. All set up a loud, prolonged yell, and the beast slowly
retreated, and allowed us to proceed unmolested. The natives are
not afraid of whole herds of elephants, but they dislike to come near
a single one. The larger and stronger males sometimes drive off all
their weaker rivals, which are apt to wreak their vengeance on any
one they chance to meet. Beyond this was a more open country, and
in the road were scattered many small trees that had been torn up by
a herd, apparently this very morning.
Although they are so abundant here in Sumatra, there are none
found in Java. They occur in large numbers on the Malay Peninsula,
and there is good reason to suppose they exist in the wild state in
the northern parts of Borneo. This is regarded as distinct from the
Asiatic and African species, and has been named Elephas
Sumatrensis.
Three paals before we came to Bunga Mas, a heavy rain set in
and continued until we reached that place. Our road crossed a
number of streams that had their sources on the flanks of the
mountains on our right, and in a short time their torrents were so
swollen that my horse could scarcely ford them. Bunga Mas is a
dusun, or village, on a cliff by a small river which flows toward the
north. Near the village is a stockade fort, where we arrived at half-
past six. The captain gave me comfortable quarters, and I was truly
thankful to escape the storm and the tigers without, and to rest after
more than twelve hours in the saddle.
This evening the captain has shown me the skin of a large tiger,
which, a short time since, killed three natives in four nights at this
place. The village is surrounded by a stockade to keep out these
ravenous beasts, and the gate is guarded at night by a native armed
with a musket. One evening this tiger stole up behind the guard,
sprang upon him, and, as a native said who chanced to see it, killed
him instantly with a blow of her paw on the back of his neck. She
then caught him up and ran away with him. The next day the body
was found partly eaten, and was buried very deeply to keep it out of
her reach. The second evening she seized and carried off a native
who was bathing in the stream at the foot of the cliff. The captain
now found he must try to destroy her, and therefore loaded a musket
with a very heavy charge of powder and two bullets. The gun was
then lashed firmly to a tree, and a large piece of fresh meat was
fastened to the muzzle, so that when she attempted to take it away
she would discharge the piece, and receive both bullets. The next
morning they found a piece of her tongue on the ground near the
muzzle of the gun, and the same trap was set again; but the next
night she came back and took away a second man on guard at the
gate of the dusun. The captain now started with a corporal and eight
men, determined to hunt her down. They tracked her to a place filled
with tall grass, and closing round that, slowly advanced, until two or
three of them heard a growl, when they all fired and killed her
instantly. It proved to be a female, and she had evidently been so
daring for the purpose of procuring food for her young.
May 1st.—The rain continued through the night, and only cleared
away at daylight. In two hours I started, though I found myself ill from
such continued exertion and exposure to a burning sun and
drenching rains, and, more than all, from drinking so many different
kinds of water in a single day. I was accompanied by a soldier who
was one of the eight who went out to hunt the tiger that killed so
many natives in such a short time. He repeated to me all the details
of the whole matter, and assured me that a piece of the brute’s
tongue was found on the ground just as the captain said, and that,
when they had secured her, they found that a part of her tongue was
gone.
We had not travelled more than half a mile before we came upon
the tracks of two tigers, a large one and a small one, probably a
female and her young, which had passed along the road in the same
way we were going. The perfect impressions left by their feet
showed they had walked along that road since the rain had ceased,
and therefore not more than two hours before us, and possibly not
more than ten minutes. We expected to see them at almost every
turn in the road, and we all kept together and proceeded with the
greatest caution till the sun was high and it was again scorching hot.
At such times these dangerous beasts always retreat into the cool
jungle.
For eight paals from Bunga Mas the road was more hilly than it
was yesterday. In many places the sides of the little valley between
the ridges were so steep that steps were made in the slippery clay
for the natives, who always travel on foot. Seven paals out, we had a
fine view of the Pasuma country. It is a plateau which spreads out to
the southeast and east from the feet of the great Dempo, the highest
and most magnificent mountain in all this region. The lower part of
this volcano appeared in all its details, but thick clouds unfortunately
concealed its summit. Considerable quantities of opaque gases are
said to have poured out of its crater, but it does not appear to have
undergone any great eruption since the Dutch established
themselves in this region. It is the most southern and eastern of the
many active volcanoes on this island. Like the Mérapi in the Padang
plateau, the Dempo does not rise in the Barizan chain nor in one
parallel to it, but in a transverse range. Here there is no high chain
parallel to the Barizan, as there is at Kopaiyong, where the Musi
takes its rise, and also north of Mount Ulu Musi continuously through
the Korinchi country all the way to the Batta Lands. Another and a
longer transverse elevation appears in the chain which forms the
boundary between this residency of Palembang and that of
Lampong, and which is the water-shed, extending in a northeasterly
direction from Lake Ranau to the Java Sea. The height of Mount
Dempo has been variously estimated at from ten thousand to twelve
thousand feet, but I judge that it is not higher than the Mérapi, and
that its summit therefore is not more than nine thousand five hundred
feet above the level of the sea.
The Pasuma plateau is undoubtedly the most densely-peopled
area in this part of the island. Its soil is described to me, by those
who have seen it, as exceedingly fertile, and quite like that of the
Musi valley at Kopaiyong, but the natives of that country were
extremely poor, while the Pasumas raise an abundance of rice and
keep many fowls. During the past few years they have raised
potatoes and many sorts of European vegetables, which they sold to
the Dutch before the war began. The cause of the present difficulty
was a demand made by the Dutch Government that the Pasuma
chiefs should acknowledge its supremacy, which they have all
refused to do. The villages or fortified places of the Pasumas are
located on the tops of hills, and they fight with so much
determination that they have already repulsed the Dutch once from
one of their forts with a very considerable loss. No one, however,
entertains a doubt of the final result of this campaign, for their
fortifications are poor defences against the mortars and other
ordnance of the Dutch.
Soon after the tracks of the two tigers disappeared, we came to a
kind of rude stockade fort, where a guard of native militia are
stationed. The paling, however, is more for a protection against the
tigers than the neighboring Pasumas. A number of the guard told me
that they hear the tigers howl here every night, and that frequently
they come up on the hill and walk round the paling, looking for a
chance to enter; and I have no doubt their assertions were entirely
true, for when we had come to the foot of the hill the whole road was
covered with tracks. The natives, who, from long experience, have
remarkable skill in tracing these beasts, said that three different ones
had been there since the rain ceased; but one who has not been
accustomed to examine such tracks would have judged that half a
dozen tigers had passed that way. There are but a few native houses
here at a distance from the villages in the ladangs, and those are all
perched on posts twelve or fifteen feet high, and reached by a ladder
or notched stick, in order that those dwelling in them may be safer
from the tigers.
At noon we came down into a fertile valley surrounded with
mountains in the distance, and at 2 p. m. arrived at Lahat, a pretty
native village on the banks of the Limatang. The controleur stationed
here received me politely, and engaged a boat to take me down the
Limatang to Palembang. The Limatang takes its rise up in the
Pasuma country, and Lahat, being at the head of navigation on this
river, is an important point. A strong fort has been built here, and is
constantly garrisoned with one or two companies of soldiers. One
night while I was there, there was a general alarm that a strong body
of Pasumas had been discovered reconnoitring the village, and
immediately every possible preparation was made to receive them.
The cause of the alarm proved to be, that one of the Javanese
soldiers stationed outside the fort stated that he saw two natives
skulking in the shrubbery near him, and that he heard them
consulting whether it was best to attack him, because, as was true,
his gun was not loaded. The mode of attack that the Pasumas adopt
is to send forward a few of their braves to set fire to a village, while
the main body remains near by to make attack as soon as the
confusion caused by the fire begins. This is undoubtedly the safest
and most effectual mode of attacking a kampong, as the houses of
the natives are mostly of bamboo, and if there is a fresh breeze and
one or two huts can be fired to windward, the whole village will soon
be in a blaze. Though this seems to us a dastardly mode of warfare,
the Pasumas are justly famed for their high sense of honor, their
bitterest enemy being safe when he comes and intrusts himself
entirely to their protection. When the Dutch troops arrived here, an
official, who had frequently been up into their country, volunteered to
visit the various kampongs and try to induce them to submit, and in
every place he was well received and all his wants cared for, though
none of the chiefs would, for a moment, entertain his proposals.
My journey on horseback was finished. The distance by the route
taken from Bencoolen is about one hundred and twenty paals, or
one hundred and twelve miles, but I had travelled considerably
farther to particular localities that were off the direct route. I had
chanced to make the journey at just the right time of year. The road
is good enough for padatis and to transport light artillery. For most of
the time a tall, rank grass fills the whole road except a narrow
footpath, but the government obliges the natives living near this
highway to cut off the grass and repair the bridges once a year, and I
chanced to begin my journey just as most of this work was finished.
The bridges are generally made of bamboo, and can therefore be
used for only a short time after they are repaired. Indeed, in many
places, they are frequently swept away altogether, and are not rebuilt
until the next year. From what I have already recorded, those who
glory in hunting dangerous game may conclude that they cannot do
better than to visit this part of Sumatra. To reach it they should come
from Singapore to Muntok on the island of Banca, and thence over to
Palembang, where the Resident of all this region resides, and obtain
from him letters to his sub-officers in this vicinity. From Palembang
they should come up the Musi and Limatang to Lahat, when they will
find themselves in a most magnificent and healthy country, and one
literally abounding in game.
SINGAPORE.
CHAPTER XVII.
PALEMBANG, BANCA, AND SINGAPORE.
May 4th.—At 7 a. m. I bade my host, the controleur, good-by, and

began to glide down the Limatang for Palembang.
It was a cool, clear morning, and I enjoyed a fine view of Mount
Dempo and the other high peaks near it. The current at first was so
rapid that the only care of my men was, to keep the boat from
striking on the many bars of sand and shingle. To do this, one stood
forward and one aft, each provided with a long bamboo. We soon
shot into a series of foaming rapids, and here the river bent so
abruptly to the right and left that I thought we should certainly be
dashed against a ragged, precipitous wall of rock that formed the
right bank at that place, but we passed safely by, though the stern of
the boat only passed clear by a few inches. My boat was about
twenty feet long and five broad, flat-bottomed, and made of thin
plank. Its central part was covered over with roof of atap, like the
sampans in China, and on this was another sliding roof, which could
be hauled forward to protect the rowers from rain or sunshine. From
Lahat to the mouth of the Inem River relays of natives stood ready
on the bank to guide our boat. This service they render the Dutch
Government instead of paying a direct tax in money.
A short distance below Lahat, on the right bank, is a remarkably
needle-like peak called Bukit Sirilo. Near this hill the Limatang makes
a long bend to the north, and after we had left it two or three miles
behind us I was quite surprised to find we had turned sharply round,
and that it was now two or three miles before us. A short distance
above the Sirilo we passed a fine outcropping of coal in the left bank.
The government engineers have examined it, and found it to be soft
and bituminous, but containing too large a proportion of
incombustible matter to be of any great value. The strata dip toward
the coast. The Resident of Tebing Tingi informed me that a similar
coal is found on the Musi below that place. I believe that strata of
recent limestone, containing corals, which I observed above Tebing
Tingi, underlie this coal, and that it is, therefore, of very recent
geological age. At 4 p. m. we came to Muara Inem, a large kampong
of two thousand souls, on the Inem, at its juncture with the Limatang.
Here I had the pleasure of meeting the controleur, whom I had met in
the Minahassa, and who had been my fellow-traveller from Celebes
to Java. During the latter third of my way down the Limatang to this
point, the country is well peopled, and forms a marked contrast with
the sparsely-populated regions through which I have been travelling
since leaving Bencoolen.
At one kampong we saw three women in a small, flat-bottomed
canoe, each sitting erect and paddling with both hands. In this way
they crossed the river with a surprising rapidity, considering the
simple apparatus they used. The readiness with which they paddled
indicated that this is no very uncommon mode of crossing rivers in
this land.
As the villages became larger and more frequent, more and more
cocoa-nut trees appeared, and soon we passed several large
bamboo rafts, bearing sheds that were filled with this fruit, and in one
place two natives were seen quietly floating down the river on a
great pile of these nuts in the most complacent manner. At first I
expected to see the nuts fly off in all directions and the men
disappear beneath the surface of the river, but as we came nearer I
saw the nuts were fastened together in small bunches by strips of
their own husks, and these bunches were bound into a
hemispherical mass large enough to float the two men. The nuts on
the raft were to be taken down to Palembang, where the cocoa-
palms do not flourish. During the day we saw two or three large
troops of monkeys. This is a very pleasant time to pass down these
rivers, because they are now high, and instead of seeing only walls
and bluffs of naked mud on either hand, the banks are covered with
grass down to the water’s edge, and the bamboos and trees, that
grow here in tropical luxuriance, lean over gracefully toward the rapid
river, and lave the tips of their lowest branches in the passing
current.
May 5th.—The controleur kindly took me in his large barge, with
twenty men to paddle and two men to steer, some five miles up the
Inem River to Lingga, where there is an outcropping of coal in the
river bank. The coal found there is very light, almost as soft as
charcoal, and evidently of a very recent geological age. A similar but
somewhat better coal is found five or six miles farther up this river. At
Karang Tingi, three miles up the river from Muara Inem, the rajah of
that district gave me a bottle of petroleum, which is about as thick as
tar, and, according to the examinations of the Dutch chemists, does
not contain much paraffine, naphtha, nor material suitable for
burning in lamps. It is found about six miles back from the river. At
Karang Tingi we noticed a number of boys enjoying an odd kind of
sport. They were sliding down the high slippery bank on their naked
backs.
At Muara Inem the controleur showed me a large garden filled with
trees, from which the “palm-oil” is manufactured. It is a low palm, and
the fruit is not much larger than the betel-nut. I understood him to
say that it was the Elais Guineensis, and had been introduced from
the Dutch possessions on the west coast of Africa. The oil is
contained in the husk, and is used in manufacturing soap and
candles.
A VIEW ON THE RIVER LIMATANG, SUMATRA.
May 6th.—Very early this morning started with the controleur down
the Limatang in his barge, with twenty men. During last night the
river rose here four or five feet, and the current is now unusually
strong. From Muara Inem, to where it empties into the Musi, it is very
crooked, constantly bending to the right in nearly equal curves, the
current, of course, being strongest in the middle of each bend. This
constant curving gives an endless variety to its scenery. The water,
being high, enabled us to see the cleared places that occurred from
time to time on the bank; though generally only a thick wood or
dense jungle appeared on either hand, yet I never for a moment was
weary of watching the graceful bending of the reeds and tall
bamboos, and of the varied grouping of these with large trees. In two
places the river makes such long bends, that artificial canals have
been made across the tongues of land thus formed. One of these
cuts, which was less than a hundred yards long, saved us going
round half a mile by the river. Every four or five miles we came to a
large kampong, and exchanged our boatmen for new ones, so that
all day long we swiftly glided down the smooth stream, one relay of
men not getting weary before they were relieved by another, and the
strong current also helping us onward. The kampongs here are free
from the filth seen in those farther up in the interior. The houses are
all placed on posts five or six feet high, for sometimes the whole
country is completely flooded. Many of them are built of well-planed
boards, and have a roofing of tiles. When the sun had become low,
we came to the large kampong of Baruaiyu. At all these villages
there is a raft with a house upon it, where the boatmen waited for us.
Fastening our boat to one of these, we took up our quarters in the
rajah’s house. Like those built by our Puritan forefathers, it had one
long roof and one short one, but it was so low that a tall man could
scarcely stand up in it anywhere. The floor, instead of being level,
rose in four broad steps, and the whole building formed but one large
apartment with two small rooms at the rear end.
May 7th.—A severe toothache and the bites and buzzing of
thousands of mosquitoes made me glad to see the dawn once more,
and again be floating down the river. Before we came to the chief
village of each district, where we were to exchange boatmen, we
always met the boat of the rajah of that place, and were greeted with
shouts and a great din from tifas and gongs.
The rajahs in this region are divided into three grades, and their
ranks are shown by the small hemispherical caps they wear. Those
of the highest rank have theirs completely covered with figures
wrought with gold thread; those of the second rank have theirs
mostly covered with such ornaments; and those of the third rank
wear only a gold band. They all carry krises of the common
serpentine form. Those that have the wavy lines alike on each side
of the blade are regarded as the most valuable. The handles are
usually made of whale’s-teeth, and very nicely carved; and the
scabbards are frequently overlaid with gold. Those that have been
used by famous chiefs are valued at all sorts of enormous prices, but
are never sold. They also frequently wear a belt covered with large
diamond-shaped plates of silver, on which are inscribed verses of
the Koran, for the natives of this region are probably the most
zealous and most rigid Mohammedans in the archipelago.
The staple article of food here is rice. They also raise much cotton
from seed imported from our Southern States. Having gathered it
from the ripe bolls, they take out the seeds by running it between two
wooden or iron cylinders, which are made to revolve by a treadle,
and are so near together, that the seeds, which are saved for the
next season, cannot pass through. The fibres are very short,
compared to the average product raised in our country, but it serves
a good purpose here, where they make it into a coarse thread, which
they weave by hand into a cloth for kabayas and chilanas.
The marriage rites and laws here are nearly the same as those I
have already described at Taba Pananjong, except that the price of a
bride here is just that of a buffalo, or about eighty guilders (thirty-two
dollars). Unless a young man has a buffalo or other possessions of
equal value, therefore, he cannot purchase a wife. Near Baruaiyu
there is a peculiar people known as the Rembang people, who live in
four or five villages at some distance from the river. They are very
willing to learn to read and write their own language, but will not
allow themselves to be taught Dutch or Malay. Last night the river
rose still higher, and now it has overflowed its banks, which appear
much lower than they are between Lamat and Muara Inem. During
the day we have had several showers. At 5 p. m. we arrived at Sungi
Rotan, the last village on the Lamatang before its confluence with
the Musi. It is a small and poor village, the land here being generally
too low for rice, and the cocoa-nut palms yielding but little compared
to what they do higher up. Farther down toward Palembang they
yield still less. This is the limit of the controleur’s district in this
direction. It extends but a short distance up the Inem and up the
Limatang above Muara Inem, and yet it contains no less that ninety-
one thousand souls.
The controleur came here to settle a difficulty between the people
of this and a neighboring village. The other party had occupied a
portion of the rice-lands belonging to this people, and the trouble had
risen to such a pitch, that the government had to interfere, to prevent
them from beginning a war. I said to the rajah that, beyond Lamat, I
had passed for miles through a beautiful country, and that it seemed
to me he would do well to migrate there; but he evidently disliked
such a suggestion, and the controleur asked me not to urge him to
adopt my view, for fear that he might think the government designed
sending him there, and because he and all his people would rather
die than go to live in any distant region.
May 8th.—At 6½ a. m. started for Palembang. My own boat, which
I sent on directly from Muara Inem, arrived here yesterday a few
hours before us, having been three days in coming down the same
distance that we have made in two. We soon stopped at the request
of one of the boatmen to examine a small bamboo box which he had
set in a neighboring bayou for crawfish. Several were found in it.
Their eyes seemed to emit flashes of light, and appeared to be
spherical jewels of a light-scarlet hue. I found them palatable when
roasted. The boatmen also found some Ampullariæ, which they said
they were accustomed to eat, and I found them palatable also We
soon floated out of the narrow Limatang into the wide and sluggish
Musi, and changed our course from north to east. There are great
quantities of rattan along the lower part of the Limatang and the
Musi, and the natives gather only a small fraction of what they might
if they were not so indolent. Last night, at Sungi Rotan, the
mosquitoes proved a worse pest than the night before, and they
have continued to annoy us all day.
In the afternoon I had a slight attack of fever, almost the only one I
have had since I was ill immediately after my arrival in Batavia, a few
days more than a year ago. After three large doses of quinine I fell
asleep, my boatmen saying that we should not reach Palembang till
morning, which entirely agreed with my own wishes, as I did not care
to call during the evening on the assistant Resident, whom I had
already notified of my coming. When the last dose had disappeared I
soon became oblivious to all real things, and was only troubled with
the torturing images seen in a fever-dream. While these hideous
forms were still before my mind’s eye, I was suddenly aroused by a
loud noise, and, while yet half awake, was dazzled by a bright light
on the water, and, on looking out, saw that we were near a large
house. On the brilliantly-lighted portico above us were festoons of
flowers, and, while I was yet gazing in wonder, inspiriting music
sprang up and couple after couple whirled by in the mazy waltz. I put
my hand up to my head to assure myself that I was not the victim of
some hallucination, and my boatmen, apparently perceiving my state
of mind, informed me that we had arrived at Palembang, and that a
sister of one of the officials had lately been married, and her brother
was celebrating the happy occasion by giving a grand “feast,” or, as
we should say, a ball.
The bright light, the enlivening music, and the constant hum of
happy voices, instantly banished all possibility of my entertaining the
thought of remaining for the night in my dark, narrow cabin; and at
once, with no other light whatever than that reflected on the water
from the bright ballroom, I prepared myself to meet the Resident in
full dress. He was greatly surprised to see me at such a late hour,
but received me in a most cordial manner, and at once commenced
introducing me to the host and hostess, the bride and bridegroom,
and all the assembled guests. The chills and burning fever, from
which I had been suffering, vanished, and in a moment I found
myself transferred from a real purgatory into a perfect paradise.
WOMEN OF PALEMBANG.
PALEMBANG—HIGH WATER.
Palembang occupies both banks of the Musi for four or five miles,
but there are only three or four rows of houses on each bank. Many
of these houses were built on bamboo rafts, and, when the tide is
high, the city seems to be built on a plain, but at low water it appears
to be built in a valley. The tide here usually rises and falls nine or ten
feet, but in spring fourteen feet. This is the greatest rise and fall that I
have seen in the archipelago. It is said that in the river Rakan, which
empties into the Strait of Malacca, at spring tides the water comes in
with a bore and rises thirty feet. The principal part of Palembang is
built on the left bank. There are a large and well-constructed fort,
and the houses of the Resident, assistant Resident, and other
officials. The Resident and the colonel commanding the fort are now
in the Pasuma country. On the left bank is the Chinese quarter, and
very fine imitations of the more common tropical fruits are made
there in lacquer-ware by those people. Below the fort, on the right
bank, is the large market, where we saw a magnificent display of
krises, and enormous quantities of fruit. The name Palembang, or,
more correctly, Palimbangan, is of Javanese origin, and signifies “the
place where the draining off was done.” The “draining off” is the
same phrase as that used to describe water running out of the open-
work baskets, in which gold is washed, and the word Palembang is
regarded generally as equivalent to “gold-washing” in our language.
The Javanese origin of the first settlers in this region is farther shown
by the title of the native officials and the names of various localities
in the vicinity. The natives have a tradition that Palembang was
founded by the Javanese government of Majapahit, but the
Portuguese state that it was founded two hundred and fifty years
before their arrival, or about a. d. 1250.
Back of the Resident’s house is a mosque with pilasters and a
dome, and near by a minaret, about fifty feet high, with a winding
external staircase. It is by far the finest piece of native architecture
that I have seen in these islands, and is said to be decidedly superior
to any of the old temples in Java. Its history appears to be lost, but I
judge it was built not long after the arrival of the Portuguese. The
architects were probably not natives, but the Arabs, who have not
only traded with this people, but succeeded in converting them to
Mohammedanism. Palembang Lama, or Old Palembang, is situated
on the left bank, a mile or two below the fort. Landing with the
natives under a waringin-tree, I followed a narrow path over the low
land for a mile, and came to the grave of a native queen. All possible
virtues are ascribed to her by the natives, and many were on their
way to this shrine to make vows and repeat their Mohammedan
formulas, or were already returning homeward. Those who were
going stopped at a little village by the way to purchase bunches of a
kind of balm which they placed in the tomb. After meeting with many
worshippers, I was quite surprised to find the grave was only
protected by an old wooden building. The coffin was a rectangular
piece of wood, about a foot and a half wide, and five feet long, in
which was inserted at the head and foot a small square post, about
two feet high. Near the grave of the queen were those of her nearest
relatives. This is regarded as the oldest grave that can be identified
in this vicinity. It is supposed to have the power to shield its
worshippers from sickness and all kinds of misfortune. The
Mohammedanism of this people, therefore, even when it is purest, is
largely mingled with their previous superstitions.

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Beyond Transparency Open Data and

the Future of Civic Innovation 1st

Digitalization in Healthcare: Implementing Innovation

Accountability and the Law: Rights, Authority and

Exploring the Culture of Open Innovation Towards an

Advances in Data Science Symbolic Complex and Network

The Post-pandemic Landscape of Education and Beyond:

Food System Transparency: Law, Science and Policy of

The Enterprise Data Catalog: Improve Data Discovery,

The Enterprise Data Catalog: Improve Data Discovery,

Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation

Edited by Brett Goldstein with Lauren Dyson

Code for America Press, San Francisco, CA.

© Code for America 2013. Some rights reserved.

Read this book online at codeforamerica.org/beyond-transparency

Editors: Brett Goldstein, Lauren Dyson, and Abhi Nemani

Assistant Editor: Rachel Lehmann-Haupt

Cover Designer: Angel Kittiyachavalit

Web Designer: Angel Kittiyachavalit

Web Producer: Mick Thompson

Interior Layout: Christopher Derrick for Unauthorized Media

PART I: Opening Government Data 1

1. Open Data and Open Discourse at Boston Public Schools 3

2. Open Data in Chicago: Game On 13

3. Building a Smarter Chicago 27

4. Lessons from the London Datastore 39

5. Asheville’s Open Data Journey:

PART II: Building on Open Data 63

6. From Entrepreneurs to Civic Entrepreneurs 65

7. Hacking FOIA: Using FOIA Requests to Drive Government

8. A Journalist’s Take on Open Data 93

10. Pioneering Open Data Standards: The GTFS Story 125

PART III: Understanding Open Data 137

11. Making a Habit Out of Engagement: How the Culture of

12. The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship: Data and Design in

13. Generating Economic Value through Open Data 163

14. Local Scale and Local Data 173

PART IV: Driving Decisions with Data 183

15. Beyond Open Data: The Data-Driven City 185

16. Why Data Must Drive Decisions in Government 199

17. Beyond Transparency: Louisville’s Strategic Use of

18. Benchmarking Performance Data 233

19. Towards a Community Data Commons 255

20. The Bigger Picture: Ten Lessons for Taking Open

21. New Thinking in How Governments Deliver Services 277

22. Open Data and Algorithmic Regulation 289

Afterword: What’s Next? 301

APPENDIX I: Further Reading 303

Open Government Initiative, more and more governments at the local

open data policies, and open data catalogs.

While still emerging, we are seeing evidence of the transformative po-

business. This is where there is the biggest opportunity to use open

Beyond Transparency is a cross-disciplinary survey of the open data

How This Book Came to Be

I had become acquainted with Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for

What Does This Book Seek to Do?

to the community organizer to the civic-minded entrepreneur. We aim

For a local government looking to start an open data program, we hope

We want to spark a discussion of where open data will go next—and

We want to help community members (technologists and otherwise)

As we look forward, this is an exciting point in time. We have proven

In Chapter 1, civic software developer Joel Mahoney tells the story

Next, in Chapter 2, we turn to the City of Chicago, which pioneered