Heather Hudson named Chief Data Officer for Baltimore

Heather Hudson is the City of Baltimore’s new chief data officer, announced Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake on Saturday at the start of the weekend’s Hack for Change civic hackathon. It’s the first chief data officer role in the city’s history.
Presently the IT project manager for the Mayor’s Office of Information Technology, Hudson is responsible for overseeing the OpenBaltimore data portal and ensuring that new datasets are added. She’ll continue in that role in her new position, still within the city IT office, as well as create new data and work with city data.
“This is a new position I created since data is one of MOIT’s priorities,” said chief information officer Chris Tonjes, which he described as “the integration of data, governance of data, publishing of data,” among other tasks.
The announcement comes a little less than one year since the resignation of the city’s former chief digital officer, Lillian Buie, who was named to the position shortly following the resignation in March 2012 of Baltimore’s former chief information officer, Rico Singleton.
Buie resigned before new city CIO Tonjes came on, he said in an e-mail.