Why the City of Philadelphia hasn’t yet released property tax data

The City of Philadelphia‘s property assessment data has been ready to release since October, but it’s still not on the city’s open data catalog, Open Data Philly. The same goes for property tax balance data.

Why?

The city offices that control that data aren’t ready to release it, AxisPhilly reported. They’re still working out the kinks, like “legal consideration” and “data quality.”

It’s a challenge that Chief Data Officer Mark Headd always knew he’d have to tackle — working with skittish city agencies.

One year into his tenure, Headd said he’d accomplished the easier stuff and now planned to target more controversial data sets. And it wasn’t just about releasing data. It was about getting city officials to understand why the city should release data at all.

More recently, Headd underscored that point in a blog post about the realities of running a city open data program. 

“Though it may sometimes seem easier to shame people into releasing data, or to find ways around seemingly unreasonable objections, getting public officials to ‘own’ the process of opening up their data is a key part of building this culture,” he wrote.

Read the AxisPhilly story here.