Open Data

Open data — public, machine-readable government datasets — is the load-bearing thread running through Tom Schenk’s work as deputy IT director for the City of Chicago. Schenk expanded Chicago’s Open Data Portal and built tooling on top of it: Open Grid (the public-facing interface) and Windy-Grid (its internal counterpart). His open-data agenda extended into policy — he co-wrote the legislation that legalized ride shares in Chicago, which mandated per-trip data, turning a regulatory question into a data-collection mechanism.

In Kyle’s notes, open data anchors Chicago’s standing as a mature municipal data operation spanning the full lifecycle from database management to publication to advanced analytics. It sits inside the broader GovTech and The New City threads, where municipal data is one of the levers cities pull to modernize — alongside procurement reform, mobility, and civic-engagement tooling. Notably, Schenk’s enthusiasm is for practical analytics built on the data (food-inspector routing, lead-paint prediction) rather than open data as an end in itself or technology-for-its-own-sake.

Context: Open data is a movement and policy practice in which governments and institutions publish datasets in freely accessible, reusable formats. Chicago’s Open Data Portal is one of the most-cited municipal examples in the US civic-tech community.

Where this appears

• Tom Schenk — the deputy IT director who expanded Chicago’s Open Data Portal and built Open Grid / Windy-Grid.
• Chicago — the city whose mature data operation is described in terms of its expanded open-data portal and tooling.
• The New City — open data is one of the municipal-modernization levers in Kyle’s smart-cities thread.