Quality Data Enhances User Experience & Trust in Government

The state of Washington and King County, Washington, join the Western U.S. Community of Practice to present best practices in data removal, data governance, and building trust around these policies.

Led by the guiding principles of quality data, user experience, and agency experience, Matt King from the state of Washington has partnered with Kathleen Sullivan from the Washington State Library to create processes around data quality, management, and removal. The process, rooted in similar approaches taken in library science, helps government leaders adding data to the platform think of the end user and how they will interact with the data. The work done in partnership with the library has helped build support across state departments and resulted in a transparent process that increases trust in the data shared on and removed from the platform.

During the webinar, the theme of trust was strong as Paul Alley from King County, Washington, shared how to build long-term trust and enable future partnerships on the King County Open Data Portal. Alley's metrics to consider when working with other departments to publish data: prioritize quality over quantity of datasets, prioritize getting data correctly on the portal, make sure the owners of the data are the ones publishing it. By using these metrics, open data partnerships become more about celebrating the work done by partners in other departments than it does checking a required box.

If you’d like to join the Western U.S. Community of Practice, sign up here.