Portland Plans to Become Open Source Mecca

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In its ongoing effort to become the coolest city in the U.S., the mayor of Portland, Oregon, is going to attempt to make it an "open source city," making its data as open as possible while respecting privacy, and buying open source applications when possible.

If passed by the City Council, Mayor Sam Adams' proposal will have the following steps:

"a. Enter into agreements with our regional partners to publish and maintain public datasets that are open and freely available while respecting privacy and security concerns as identified by the City Attorney;
b. Develop a strategy to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps, and other formats of media;
c. Organize a regional contest to encourage the development of software applications to collect, organize, and share public data;
d. Establish best practices for analysis of business requirements in software review and selection processes, identify existing commercial software systems with licenses that are scheduled to expire in the near future, and encourage the consideration of Open Source Software in the review, replacement and continual improvement of business solutions."

As for carrots, the city is also hoping to encourage the lucrative conference industry to come to Portland; the proposal also suggests promoting "Portland as a host city for leading Open Source Software conferences and related technology events, such as LinuxCon, Innotech, etc."

In addition, all formal technology related purchasing and contract opportunities will be offered to the open source community, according to the proposed resolution.

Adams first declared his intention of making Portland more open in June, during the Open Source Bridge conference. According to the Silicon Florist blog, this was a way of competing with Vancouver, B.C., Canada, which had announced in May its intention of doing the same thing.

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noted the original 2009 proposal to make Portland an "open source city." The City Council followed up: Portland adopted an open-data/open-source resolution in 2009 (Resolution No. 36735), kicked off the CivicApps idea-and-app contests, and over the next several years put public datasets online and built a formal Open Data Program (the city later codified an Open Data Ordinance on May 3, 2017). (portland.gov)

Immediate, practical results that followed are useful to keep in mind. The CivicApps contests produced multiple community apps (PDX Bus, PDX Trees, Loqi.me and more) and demonstrated the value of releasing machine-readable datasets for transit, permits, trees, crime, etc.; those early efforts fed into PortlandMaps and the citywide open-data portal and helped build a sustained local developer ecosystem. (e-pluribusunum.org)

For anyone looking to replicate Portland's path or to assess whether the city actually "became" an open-source mecca, focus on a few practical steps rather than slogans:

  • Pass a clear resolution that sets goals and directs bureaus to publish datasets and consider open-source options.
  • Start a short list of high-value, machine-readable datasets (CSV/GeoJSON) and publish them with an explicit license.
  • Run a one-off apps/ideas contest to seed community interest and prototypes.
  • Build governance: designate data stewards, release cadence, and privacy/redaction rules (legal review for PII).
  • Treat open standards and OSS as procurement options, not mandates; require evaluations that document business requirements and total cost of ownership.

Portland’s experience shows that policy + a small set of practical actions (portal, contests, governance, privacy safeguards) produces results — but long-term maintenance, licensing clarity, and data governance are what sustain value. (opendatapolicyhub.sunlightfoundation.com)

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