Transparenzportal: Publish-by-Default Information Register
Hamburg's Transparency Act, in force October 2012, obliges agencies to publish contracts over €100,000, commissioned studies, subsidies, building permits and municipal-company executive pay without anyone asking. The register went online in October 2014 and now holds 176,259 records. Publishable contracts take effect a month after publication, leaving the city a withdrawal right.
📊 Impact
176,259 records published as of August 2026. June 2026 traffic: 858,718 page views plus 6.71 million API calls; the portal states it cannot count unique visitors because it does not collect IP addresses. The 2017 statutory evaluation counted 22.7 million accesses and ~66,000 publications in the portal's first years.
🎓 Lesson
Proactive publication is cheaper than feared and harder to sustain than expected: the statutory evaluation found no excessive administrative burden, but also that few residents knew the portal existed, and Hamburg's own information-freedom commissioner reported in January 2026 that the courts had narrowed the parallel request-based route.
📖 Terms in this entry: Open data · Urban data platform (UDP) · Civic participation platform
Sources
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Transparenzportal: Publish-by-Default Information Register” — Hamburg, Germany. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/hamburg-transparency-portal/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.