GovDelivery Answers the White House’s Call to Deepen Community Engagement With Open Data

Leading Digital Communications Provider Joins Police Data Initiative, Offering Free, Open Source Public Safety Solution


ST. PAUL, Minn., April 22, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GovDelivery, the leading provider of cloud-based software solutions enhancing the citizen experience, is answering the Administration’s recent call to join the The Police Data Initiative, a new effort to use “open data to increase transparency, build community trust and support innovation.” With today’s commitment, GovDelivery announces that it will develop and contribute to the open source community a full featured Police Data Initiative (PDI) solution to enable partner law enforcement agencies to use their existing data to better engage citizens in their jurisdictions.  The platform, DKAN Public Safety Edition, will be fully open source and available to agencies at no cost.

The Police Data Initiative launched in 2015 to enable and support efforts by law enforcement to better use data and technology to build community trust. Since, the program has expanded rapidly, with participation by more than 25 leading police departments committed to using open data and engagement tools to increase transparency and accountability, helping to rebuild trust in law enforcement.

“We’re impressed by The Police Data Initiative and excited to join the President in this endeavor to harness open data and civic engagement technologies to help improve policing outcomes and rebuild public trust in law enforcement,” said Andrew Hoppin, president of GovDelivery Open Data. “Given our work connecting government with millions of citizens and opening up tens of thousands of government datasets, we understand the that data-driven civic engagement can make a tremendous difference in addressing government’s most pressing problems and we’re proud to join an initiative designed in line with that idea as well as GovDelivery’s key goal of helping government connect even more citizens with the resources and information they need.”

In its commitment to The Police Data Initiative, GovDelivery will offer the comprehensive DKAN Public Safety Edition package, which includes everything an agency needs to showcase data in a user-friendly way, federate data to the USG’s Data.gov and reach large audiences of constituents with this data through email, SMS and social media.  It allows law enforcement agencies to leverage existing web content, as well as communication tools and skills, to catalyze their new open data initiatives and ensure maximum reach and effect, without any technical burden.

DKAN Public Safety Edition will be comprised of:

  • PDI Dashboards – newly developed open source data story and data dashboard templates designed specifically to deliver intuitive visual insights from police data.
  • DKAN – a full featured open source data portal based on the same Drupal technology that powers tens of thousands of government websites worldwide, including WhiteHouse.gov, which can optionally incorporate PDI Dashboards.
  • PDI Data Module – a new Drupal module, optionally integrated with DKAN, that enables police data to be easily published in a manager that complies with the metadata schema developed by the White House Police Data Initiative, and enables this newly published data to be discovered and harvested by Data.gov, so that even more people will see it.  This module may also be independently installed and used by any existing Drupal website.

About GovDelivery
Over one thousand public sector organizations use GovDelivery’s highly-secure cloud solutions every day to enhance the citizen experience for more than 100 million people. GovDelivery offers leading solutions for managing government communications, internal and external learning, and open data. The GovDelivery Network offers a unique and impactful way for public sector organizations to work together to cross promote content and increase digital reach. Organizations using GovDelivery see higher utilization of citizen services and greater citizen engagement. GovDelivery is an Actua (Nasdaq:ACTA) company.


            

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