What can Maryland do to make the data it collects more accessible to you? How could you use it? We talk with State Senator Bill Ferguson about creating a new Open Data Policy for Maryland.
Maryland’s state government creates massive amounts of data; everything from the number of violent crimes to the number of tolls paid on state roads. Those numbers are available at the state's open data portal, data.Maryland.gov.
But, there's a lot of data the state generates that you don’t have access to. Maryland ranked 46th among the states for public access to information, according to the State Integrity Investigation. It’s a nonprofit collaborative that looked at corruption, transparency, and openness in all 50 states governments last year.
State Senator Bill Ferguson, a first-term Democrat representing southeast Baltimore City, has introduced a bill in the General Assembly that would create a new state Open Data Policy; it might allow more public access to state data. He joins Sheilah Kast in the studio to talk about it.
