Frankston City Council increases trust with transparency hub data marketplace
users
API calls
datasets downloads
Company profile
Situated in the Australian state of Victoria, Frankston City Council is responsible for providing services to over 140,000 people. As with every local authority, Frankston has to demonstrate its performance to stakeholders, increase trust with residents and ensure that it is delivering on their changing needs.
Sector
Local government
Location
Australia
Data leader
Challenge: Meeting the transparency needs of the community
At Frankston we quickly realized that using and sharing data was central to increasing trust. By delivering information proactively from across the organization and sharing it in understandable ways, we could demonstrate good governance and ethical behavior while increasing transparency around decision making.
"As a Council we understand that proactively sharing information is a key foundational principle in helping our local community better understand our decisions, activities and operations. Our objective is to facilitate meaningful engagement, enhance trust and support data-based governance and decision making through greater transparency."
Data Experience: building trust through transparency
We understood that the best way to share our data and increase trust and engagement was to create a data portal that would be:
- Easy to access by the community
- Easy to understand by non-specialists, such as citizens and businesses
- Council-wide, bringing together data from multiple departments
After extensive consultation across the municipality, we therefore launched our Transparency Hub in 2023. A user-friendly data portal, the Transparency Hub allows the community to easily access, understand, explore and visualize our data sets. It brings together a broad range of data sources, providing an overview of Frankston City Council’s decision-making and activities. As well as providing data stories and visualizations, there are clear links to the raw data if users wish to access this. An ongoing program, new datasets are being added over time, extending the portal’s scope and increasing transparency.
Demonstrating Ethical Behavior
Citizens need to have full confidence in their elected officials. To support this, the Transparency Hub contains information on Frankston’s councillors, including the expenses they have claimed, attendance at meetings and briefings and a summary of decisions they have taken. This is all available via interactive dashboards, allowing users to drill-down to the records of individual councillors. Demonstrating its importance, councilor data is the most viewed information on the portal, with its first publication driving a major spike in usage.
To provide a deeper insight into our performance, the Transparency Hub also contains extensive information on the council’s finances, including expenditure, income, procurement and progress on capital works projects. For example, there are full details on all contracts worth over AUS$200,000 that have been awarded, with an interactive dashboard enabling citizens to focus on individual contracts and companies and search by date range. Explanatory text provides context to increase understanding and transparency.
Turning Frankston into a smart city
As part of our commitment to enable sustainable transport and create a smart city, Frankston operates an e-bike scheme. The Transparency Hub provides full details on its usage, including average journey length, usage, sustainability benefits, and most popular times and route maps.
The aim is to show the benefits of the scheme and increase adoption.
Showing care for the city’s animals
The council has responsibility for pet registrations across the city, and shares this data via an interactive data story. Users can see how many dogs and cats have been registered, their gender, the areas where they live and even the most popular names Citizen requests related to animals (such as noise complaints and strays) are also displayed via the dashboard.
Building confidentiality into the portal from day one
While the council is committed to transparency, we clearly need to balance this with data security and confidentiality. Publishing sensitive data would be considered a data breach, and datasets such as contracts awarded, grants, finances, and major projects all have the potential to be misconstrued. We therefore adopted a Data Exchange Policy that sets out what can and cannot be published, and now applies this across all datasets and departments. We also add explanations and context to published datasets to ensure they can be easily understood and accurately reported on. This delivers a clearer understanding of how the council is performing while preserving confidentiality.
Huwise: The All-In-One platform for data sharing at Frankston City Council
To provide the foundation for the Transparency Hub we chose Huwise to provide its data marketplace solution, deployed by its partner Peclet. In particular, we are benefiting from three Huwise features:
Engaging visualisations
The key aim of the portal is to share information in ways that are easy to understand by non-specialist users. Through Huwise we have been able to create a range of compelling data visualizations on key themes such as capital works, grants, financial performance and councilor information.
This is all available through interactive, drill-down dashboards that combine graphics and charts with explanatory text and the ability to filter information quickly and visually.
APIs to simplify access to information
More advanced users want to be able to go beyond the Hub’s own data visualizations to run their own analytics and create their own graphics
and dashboards. Every one of our 35 datasets automatically generates an API that means it can be easily exported, as well as being downloadable in multiple common formats. Additionally, the portal’s built-in data analytics tools makes it simple for users to create their own charts and maps, combining datasets as required.
Ability to better understand utilisation
Thanks to Huwise’s back oce management and reporting capabilities, we can easily understand how the portal is being used, and which are the most popular datasets, through metrics such as user visits, downloads and API calls. This ensures that we can focus on what matters to users, providing data that is relevant to their needs.
Results : Data as the pathway to building trust
The Transparency Hub is central to meeting our objective of building trust and engagement with our community, delivering particular results in three key areas:
- Engaging users
The Transparency Hub has been fully embraced and adopted by the local community, with 8,000 users accessing the portal since launch. There have been 329,000 API calls and the average session length has grown to 4 minutes 9 seconds. The most popular data is on councilor expenses, attendance and voting records, followed by pet registrations and capital works.
- Helping increase community satisfaction
While the portal is just part of Frankston’s push to increase trust, it is contributing to a major increase in engagement. In our latest Community Satisfaction Survey, we saw our scores increase for key aspects, including making decisions in the interest of the community, community consultation and engagement, and maintaining community trust and confidence.
- Acting as a role model for other councils
As well as accelerating usage, the Transparency Hub has also been praised by community organizations and monitoring body Community Watch Victoria, which highlighted it as a model for other councils to follow. Demonstrating its first of a kind status, the portal was selected as a finalist in the 2023 LGPro Awards for Excellence.
"The Transparency Hub provides the perfect way to share information in ways that are simple for our community to understand. We've already seen the benefits in terms of greater engagement and trust. Thanks to Huwise's technology and Peclet's support we're able to continually develop the portal to meet the changing needs of our community."
"At a time when trust between public bodies and communities is falling around the world, the success of Frankston's Transparency Hub demonstrates how data can be used to strengthen community engagement and drive greater understanding. We believe it can act as a blueprint for other councils, helping them to build deeper trust through data transparency."
About the Data leader
Satvir Sekhon
Smart Cities Business Analyst and Team Leader Data and Smart Cities, Frankston
Satvir Sekhon is Smart Cities Business Analyst and Team Leader Data and Smart Cities at Frankston
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