Background
Publicly available, freely accessible data is known as Open Data. Government agencies, including local councils, own a diverse range of data. Making this data open helps citizens, businesses, entrepreneurs and industry use the data and transform it into ideas, applications and visualisations which benefit the community and often even the government agencies.
All Australian Government agencies are encouraged to make their data available using the data.gov.au website. A number of datasets are also available from the Victorian equivalent data.vic.gov.au.
The Project
Beginning in mid-2016, Wyndham City started publishing data on the data.gov.au website.
Wyndham City is one of the top local council contributors to the data.gov.au repository with over 40 data sets currently available. These data sets include council facility locations, road reserves and responsibility, waste collection boundaries, tree and inspection data, playgrounds and sport fields locations, library membership by postcode.
Future plans for the project
Wyndham City will continue to make datasets available via the data.gov.au platform as and when they become available. Staff are currently implementing processes to ensure data is always current.