GREENSBORO -- Twitter is used for news, commentary and just sharing pictures. But it also provided a forum for a town hall discussion on the use of open data.
"We have a lot of data and all of our data is public data, and we get requests for data all the time," said Jane Nickles, City of Greensboro IT director.
To help alleviate the amount of requests, the City of Greensboro's IT department got a feel for how an open data portal is used in other cities.
"With open data we can provide that data over an online portal that you can have access to over the Internet and actually be able to access that and query that data without having to go through the city or a formal request to get it," said Nickles.
The city is in the process of putting together their own open data policy. City officials say permits, inspection, police and fire records are the most common records requested.
"It's important that we're conforming to state statutes on public records, what's considered public data and what's not considered public data, and that's really written into the policy," said Jason Marshall, City of Greensboro GIS application developer.
The other communities they talked to on Twitter say there have been positive outcomes from open data portals.
"Other cities have implemented open data and you start to see things like apps being developed based on that data, additional services being provided because that data is there and things happening sort of organically," said Nickles.
The City of Greensboro is expected to have the new open data portal up and running this fall.