How Government's Data Can Be Truly Useable | Data-Smart City Solutions
lterrat's bookmarks 2017-04-27
Summary:
"What the movement should be pushing for instead is useable data, and we're seeing considerable progress on that front. A group of chief data officers from large cities recently released a letter to the open data community that makes the point in a compelling way. The CDOs argue that the real issue is accessibility of data to a wider audience so that the number and types of users continue to expand. Simply counting the number of released data sets as a performance accomplishment misses the point. It's the production of useable data, along with the essential metadata to tie it together.
As important as streetlights and potholes may be, the power of visualization to enhance understanding of broader urban issues cannot be overstated. Thanks to a dynamic, interactive "story map," for example, citizens around the country now can see just how much the issue of wealth divides us. This platform, produced by Esri, expresses how visible the rich-poor divide is in America's largest cities, illuminating the reality that poor neighborhoods are often just blocks from rich ones. Those divides are not so clear in a spreadsheet view.
Beyond enhancing understanding of issues, data visualization drives action and spurs citizen-government collaboration. When I was deputy mayor for operations in New York City, the city's 311 call center reported that we were receiving 20 million calls a year but that nobody really knew the results of those calls. So we began to implement mapping software that placed dots on the location of citizen reports, with larger dots representing reports of higher frequency."