This open source tool is tracking Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s first 100 days

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration has created a web-based tracking tool to follow the progress made  toward goals set for his first 100 days in office. It’s available here.

Developed by the Baltimore Office of Performance and Innovation, the 100 Days of Action Tracker allows the public to monitor progress on 58 action items in six categories, including: building public safety, making Baltimore equitable, prioritizing youth, building public trust, COVID-19 recovery and responsible stewardship of city resources. When it was announced on Wednesday, which was day 58, 10 of the action items were completed and 20 were in progress.

The actions grew out of recommendations made by a 250-member transition team, which was convened with more than 10 committees as Scott got prepared to take office in early December.

“In my conversations with my transition team, I knew we needed to show progress over time, not just tell people what we accomplished when it was done,” Scott said at a news conference on Wednesday. “With my team, I assembled a list of actions we could accomplish over the first 100 days, so that residents could see transformation in their City government immediately.”

With the tracker, the city wants to provide visibility into what Baltimore’s government is doing, and hopes the tool can provide civic tech inspiration and resources for others.

“We were excited to develop this tracker because it gives increased transparency for residents around what our government is committed to achieving,” said Dan Hymowitz, director of the Mayor’s Office of Performance and Innovation said in a statement. “We’ve also made the code and data open source in part to allow other governments to easily follow Mayor Scott’s lead in creating tools for the public to follow progress on Baltimore’s policy agenda.”

The open source tool was made using R Shiny, an open source web app development tool built on the R statistical computing language. The code is available on the City of Baltimore’s Github page.

Donte Kirby is a 2020-2022 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.