Mayor Kirk Caldwell signs Bill 53, CD2, FD1


On November 27, 2013, Mayor Kirk Caldwell signed Bill 53, CD2, FD1 – Relating to Open Data in law. It now becomes Ordinance 13-39 going into effect immediately. This process that started in August was quite different from what happens in the State Legislature. In some ways it is much simpler although monitoring the status of your bill and testimony on the City Council site could use much improvement.

Bill 53 went from it’s first reading in the full Council meeting in August, then was heard in the Public Safety & Economic Development Committee, Chaired by CM Carol Fukunaga, the Bill’s sponsor. It then went to a second full Council hearing, back to the PSED committee and then to a final hearing at the third full Council. After passing the full Council with 9 ayes and 0 nays, the bill goes to the Mayor’s desk for approval or disapproval. He has 10 business days to complete this process.

Now the work to liberate data starts. I was encouraged to see Mark Wong, CIO of the City, support the passage of Bill 53. When I spoke to him this week he asked, now that the bill is signed, what datasets does the community want to see? So the call is out but how do we place our requests? I looked at data.honolulu.gov and the Suggest a Dataset tab is now missing. You can backdoor it by going to this link.

Another opportunity will come on Monday, Dec 9th when Mayor Caldwell holds his Twitter Townhall. On that date the Mayor’s public schedule has:

  • Noon to 1 p.m. – Twitter Town Hall.  Participants can tweet questions to @MayorKirkHNL and Mayor Caldwell and his Cabinet members will answer as many as possible.

If you are interested I will send out a reminder on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. You can also sign up for the HOD newsletter. Now with both the State and the City with their respective laws in place, Act 263 and Ordinance 13-39, 2014 is looking to be a very busy year.

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