Washington D.C.'s open data policy, ArcGIS Hub portal and licence
A 2014 mayor's order told District agencies to publish their datasets to a central catalogue; Mayor's Order 2017-115 added a Data Policy in 2017 that makes every agency inventory its data and grade each set from level 0 (open) to level 4 (restricted confidential). The portal, opendata.dc.gov, runs on Esri's ArcGIS Hub and serves a DCAT-US feed. The District's terms of use dedicate its data to the public domain under CC0 1.0 — but the catalogue's own metadata mostly ships CC BY 4.0, and some datasets carry 'custom', 'null' or no licence at all.
The first enterprise dataset inventory (March 2018) covered 1,640 datasets at 79 agencies, 708 of them (43.2%) classified level 0 open. By the 2024 annual report, 78 agencies listed 2,330 datasets and 1,061 were classified open — of which 298 (28%) were still not published.
🎓 Lesson
Read the metadata, not the policy page. D.C. dedicates its data to the public domain in writing, while most of the files ship under an attribution licence — and a quarter of the sets its own agencies call open are not online.
Evidence🏛️ Official
Scale🏙️ City-wide
Sources
↗ OCTO — District of Columbia Data PolicyNames the instrument: 'Mayor's Order 2017-115', effective 'April 27, 2017' and amended 'June 19, 2018'. Links onward to the full policy at opendata.dc.gov/pages/data-policy.
↗ Mayor's Order 2014-170 — Transparency, Open Government and Open Data DirectiveThe earlier instrument (July 2014): each agency to make available through the online District of Columbia Data Catalog all appropriate datasets and metadata, machine-readable, by 1 November 2014. Confirmed via search index; the document page itself was not retrieved, and no source found says the 2017 order rescinds it.
↗ Government of the District of Columbia — Terms and Conditions of Use for District DataThe written licence: 'Unless otherwise noted, the data on the Sites is public domain and made available with a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal dedication', under which 'the District waives all rights to the data worldwide under copyright law'. District logos are excluded; credit ('Data retrieved from Open Data DC catalog') is requested, not required.
↗ Open Data DC — ArcGIS Hub datasets API (org 'City of Washington, DC')The shipped licence, read from metadata rather than policy. A ten-dataset sample returned CC-BY-4.0 for six (incl. 'Roadway SubBlock Intersection', 'Floodplain 100 Year', 'DC Estimated Trees'), 'custom' for three, and CC0-1.0 for one ('Racial Equity Dashboard'). The API answering for this org id is also what confirms the portal runs on Esri's ArcGIS Hub.
↗ Open Data DC — DCAT-US 1.1 catalogue feedMachine-readable catalogue. Most entries carry ''license': 'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0''; 'Washington, DC: A University District' carries an empty string and 'Automated Safety Camera Program' the literal string 'null'. accessLevel is 'public' throughout; there is no 'rights' field.
↗ D.C. Open Government Coalition — Open DataIndependent compliance reading of the CDO's own annual reporting: 'Agencies reported in 2023 that they hold 1,061 datasets assessed as Level 0 in sensitivity' and '298 datasets or 28 per cent of the 1,061 total classified as open are not yet published for public access'; '78 D.C. Government agencies recorded 2,330 enterprise datasets'. Also records Mayor's Order 2018-050 directing the Chief Data Officer to report annually each March.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Washington D.C.'s open data policy, ArcGIS Hub portal and licence” — Washington D.C., United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/washington-dc-open-data/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
