Working with the City of Greenville

[wmfox3]

As I've mentioned to some of you, I have opened discussions with the city regarding gaining access to more of their databases as part of what I see as a broader initiative to make Greenville a Data-Smart City. I had an initial meeting June 28 with Government Relations Manager Julie Horton. Later that day, Julie texted me to say that City Manager John Castile "is really interested in talking to you." I followed up with an email that she forwarded to Castile and as a result we've set up a meeting at City Hall at 2 pm on July 10. If anyone is interested in attending the meeting with me, let me know. I see this initial meeting as fact-finding discussion to learn more about how we can help the city and they can help us. Here's the June 28 email:

Julie,

Thanks for taking the time to meet with me today.

Greenville was built by visionary leaders who sketched a blueprint for its future leading to innovative solutions that addressed anticipated change. Public-private partnerships, respect for the environment and a dedication to finding solutions for housing, jobs, healthcare and education have made Greenville what it is today. In many ways, Greenville was a Smart City before anyone began using that term.

I’m proposing a collaboration with Code for Greenville, a volunteer group organized under the Code for America banner, to use data and technology to make Greenville a Data-Smart City.

I imagine a way residents can get a transparent view of how their city is working for them, and a way for city leadership and department heads to measure their progress toward goals, ensure that resources are aligned with priorities, and taxpayer funds are being spent efficiently.

This data-infused tool could assist in making decisions regarding the deployment of resources and identify areas of underserved needs. It could ultimately be predictive by anticipating potential issues or challenges before they arise or prior to becoming intractable problems.

Importantly, this will require building relationships in and across departments, understanding their needs, and identifying opportunities where data can empower and transform. With the right data and agreement on how to measure effectiveness, a variety of internal and external dashboards could be developed.

Public-facing views of the data could promote a sense of accountability and create channels of engagement and dialogue.

And the open-sourcing of much, if not most, of this data presents opportunities for the local developer community to use the data as a foundation upon which to build their own civic applications, i.e. the Trolley Tracker. http://trackthetrolley.com/

Cities like Chicago and Boston, and as close as Charlotte and Atlanta, are using data and dashboard displays to track performance in priority areas like housing, neighborhood development, community safety, transportation, economic development and the environment, according to news coverage.

In my vision, the development work would be done by Code for Greenville volunteers under the auspices of the city at no cost to taxpayers. In exchange, the city would make available datasets and real-time data under agreed-upon terms of use. In other words, while one of the overarching objectives of the project is the make data freely available to the public, I understand that some data might be considered proprietary or not freely distributable.

I’d love to find a mutually agreeable time to meet with interested city officials to discuss these ideas. I’m including some helpful links to online articles that explore the idea of Data-Smart Cities.

Bill

https://data.boston.gov/ https://data.cityofchicago.org/ http://datasmart.ash.harvard.edu/

[allella]

I'm also out of town on Friday.

@randomjohn The original permitting story was to do something like build an estimated # of days in the queue for the various permits so applicants could be notified (website, email, other subscription methods?) so they don't have to call the office wondering how much backlog there is and the average delay. I know more information would be useful to the business owners but it would be interesting to know how much that solves problems for the city. For instance, if they get a lot of calls it may actually allow them to refer people to a system and save time that could be better spent on other parts of their process.

The other thing it might allow is a data point so the city can budget for inspectors based on the load. The City Manager mentioned part of the slowness with some permits is having only 1 inspector in the budget.

[allella]

Also, I would agree that once a project is selected it would be very wise to speak with the folks on the ground and avoid a "consultant" perception with the folks who are likely to provide the data and use the systems we'd build.

I had a lot of success working IT by not just talking to management but really spending the most time with people doing the day-to-day work.

I feel like that will come naturally to the CFG folks, but in bigger organizations the culture might try to insulate the ground-level employees for the decision making when they tend to be critical in getting things right.

[allella]

Data questions to ask regardless of what data we ask for:

• Frequency
• Format
• Delivery method/protocol
• Privacy concerns
• Limit to # or records or history