Executive Order 2012-2, signed 10 December 2012, told every Chicago department to publish its data to data.cityofchicago.org, name an open data coordinator and file an annual compliance report. The portal still runs — 911 datasets, crime records refreshed daily. The reporting did not: the Inspector General found none had been filed since 2014.
The portal carries 911 datasets and is current: Crimes - 2001 to Present was refreshed on 26 July 2026. The governance around it lapsed. The Office of Inspector General found on 23 March 2020 that the City does not comply with its own order — no Open Data Compliance Report since 2014, an Open Data Advisory Group that had not met since 2014 and then covered only 18 of 29 city agencies, and a Chief Data Officer post vacant for 18 months.
🎓 Lesson
The order lapsed under the mayor who signed it — the reports stopped in 2014, two years in. A duty created by executive order can be dropped without repealing anything, and nobody has to vote. New York put the same duty in a local law.
Evidence📊 Independent
Scale🏙️ City-wide
Sources
↗ City of Chicago — Open Data Executive Order No. 2012-2The order itself, signed 10 December 2012 by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Blocks automated fetching (403); text verified through the Sunlight Foundation's transcription below and cited consistently by the OIG advisory.
↗ Sunlight Foundation Open Data Policy Hub — Chicago, IL executive order (10 December 2012)Independent transcription and analysis of the order. Sentence-level source for the duties: each agency shall make available online all appropriate data sets; the Mayor appoints a Chief Data Officer to coordinate implementation, compliance and expansion; each agency head designates an Open Data Coordinator; the CDO files compliance reports by July 15 each year. Also the source for the licence point — the order mandates Terms of Use developed by the technology department rather than granting an open licence.
↗ Chicago OIG — the advisory's findings on accuracy, consistency and usabilitySentence-level source for every figure in the impact field: 'The City also had not published an Open Data Compliance Report since 2014'; 'the Chief Data Officer position remained vacant for 18 months'; 'The City's Open Data Advisory Group had not met since 2014 and, at that time, only included representatives from 18 of 29 City agencies.'
↗ Chicago Data Portal — dataset metadata API, Crimes 2001 to PresentPrimary currency check, read 26 July 2026: dataUpdatedAt 2026-07-26T11:15:11+0000. Also the licence evidence, at field level: licenseId 'SEE_TERMS_OF_USE', licenseName 'See Terms of Use'. There is no open licence deed on the portal's assets.
↗ Socrata Discovery API — Chicago portal catalogueScale figure, read 26 July 2026: 911 datasets. The unfiltered catalogue returns 2,009 assets, but that count includes charts, maps, files and filtered views derived from the datasets; only the dataset count is used in the entry.
↗ City of Chicago — Data Terms of UseWhat the order's mandated Terms of Use actually impose. Warranties disclaimed on an 'as is' basis, and an affirmative notice condition on reusers: applications using the data must carry the disclaimer 'This site provides applications using data that has been modified for use from its original source, www.cityofchicago.org, the official website of the City of Chicago.' Blocks automated fetching (403); text verified through indexed search.
↗ Data-Smart City Solutions — Chicago launches OpenGrid (20 January 2016)Kept as context, deliberately not merged into this entry. OpenGrid, the public map built by DoIT from the internal WindyGrid, launched 19 January 2016 under Apache 2.0 and still loads at opengrid.chicago.gov/opengrid/. Its landing page copyright is frozen at 2015 and the repository's newest commit is a documentation edit of 15 April 2024. No municipality outside Chicago was found to have adopted it.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Chicago's Open Data Executive Order and Portal” — Chicago, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/chicago-open-data-portal/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
