In an effort to help public sector organizations grow their open data and geospatial programs, PSD Citywide has been conducting the Open Cities Index (OCI) and the Geospatial Maturity Index (GMI) since 2015 and 2017, respectively. These surveys aim to benchmark open data and geospatial initiatives each year to provide insight and help organizations measure their progress.
Since beginning these programs, we’ve seen growing participation—including a large, dedicated group of returning participants—from organizations all over North America and as far as Australia. We have been continuously impressed by the improvement of each organization and seeing the innovative ways they apply open data strategies and GIS technologies.
With big changes happening in our company and excellent feedback from participants, we are making changes to how we conduct our benchmarking programs. We have decided to host the OCI and GMI every other year on an alternating basis.
Releasing the surveys every other year gives participating organizations more time to implement suggestions from the previous survey results and better prepare for the next iteration in order to truly measure program growth. The new timeline also allows our researchers and analysts to monitor longer-term trends and changes in the open data and GIS spaces to create an even more thorough survey.
In light of this decision, we are now announcing the 2022 Geospatial Maturity Index and the 2023 Open Cities Index!
