OpenGov’s Growth Partly Thanks To President Trump

OpenGov, the Redwood City, Calif. company that makes software used by local governments to keep financial records that are transparent, has been gaining traction and credits some of that to the election of President Donald Trump.

According to a report in TechCrunch, OpenGov Co-Founder and Chief Executive Zac Bookman said that the company had the best first quarter in its history and has seen a 20 percent increase in job applicants since Trump won the U.S. Presidential election.

According to a Bookman, at a time when the Federal government is getting seemingly more secretive — the White House will no longer disclose the logs of who visits and removed the Open Government section from its website — local governments are getting more transparent.

The Trump administration’s moves are prompting local governments to go the other direction, but local governments are also becoming more transparent because it’s easier than ever to make public data accessible and searchable. Bookman told TechCrunch there are now 1,400 public agencies across 47 states using OpenGov’s software.

The city of Boston is one of the largest municipalities to use OpenGov’s software, which created Analyze Boston thanks to OpenGov. Analyze Boston is an open data portal that lets the city publish open data sets and make them available to citizens.

Other local governments using OpenGov include Omaha, Neb.; Kenton County, Ken. and the state of Ohio. In Ohio, OpenGov is available to every local government. Bookman told TechCrunch the company is signing up a new customer every two days, with most of them wanting the budgeting software that cuts the time it takes to build a budget — an operational performance management suite of software that helps local governments benchmark their performance against the performance of other cities — or an open data service that enables the governments to provide data access to residents.