Customer-Driven Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jane Wiseman at DataSmart City Solutions: “Public trust in government is low — of the 43 industries tracked in the American Customer Satisfaction Index, only one ranks lower than the federal government in satisfaction levels.  Local government ranks a bit higher than the federal government, but for most of the public, that makes little difference. It’s time for government to change that perception by listening to its customers and improving service delivery.

What can the cup holder in your car teach government about customer engagement? A cup holder would be hard to live without — it keeps a latte from spilling and has room for keys and a phone. But the cup holder was not always such a multi-tasker. The first ones were shallow indentations in the plastic on the inside of the glove box. Accelerate and the drinks went flying. Did a brilliant automotive engineer decide that was a design flaw and fix it? No. It was only when Chrysler received more complaints about the cup holder than about anything else in their cars that they were forced to innovate. Don Clark, a DaimlerChrysler engineer known as the “Cup Holder King,” designed the first of the modern cup holders, debuting in the company’s 1984 minivans. The engineersthought they knew what their customers wanted (more powerful engines, better fuel economy, safety features) but it wasn’t until they listened to customers’ comments that they put in the cup holder. And sales took off.

Today, we’re awash in customer feedback, seemingly everywhere but government.  Over the past decade, customer feedback ratings for products and services have shown up everywhere — whether in a review on Yelp, a “like” on Facebook, or a Tweet about the virtues or shortcomings of a product or service.  Ratings help draw attention to poor quality and allow companies to address these gaps.  Many companies routinely follow up a customer interaction with a satisfaction survey.  This data drives improvement efforts aimed at keeping customers happy.  Some companies aggressively manage their online reviews, seeking to increase their NPS, or net promoter score.  Many people really like to provide feedback — there are 77 million reviews on Yelp to date, according to the company.  Imagine the power of that many reviews of government service.

If customer input can influence the automotive industry, and can help consumers make better decisions, what if we turned this energy toward government?  After all, the government is run “by the people” and “for the people” — what if citizens gave government real-time guidance on improving services?  And could leaders in government ask customers what they want, instead of presuming to know?  This paper explores these questions and suggests a way forward.

….

If I were a mayor, how would I begin harnessing customer feedback to improve service delivery?  I would build a foundation for improving core city operations (trash pickup, pothole fixing, etc.) by using the same three questions Kansas City uses for follow-up surveys to all who contact 311.  Upon that foundation I would layer additional outreach on a tactical, ad hoc basis.  I would experiment with the growing body of tools for engaging the public in shaping tactical decisions, such as how to allocate capital projects and where to locate bike share hubs.

To get an even deeper insight into the customer experience, I might copy what Somerville, MA has done with its Secret Resident program.  Trained volunteers assess the efficiency, courtesy, and ease of use of selected city departments.  The volunteers transact typical city services by phone or in person, and then document their customer experience.  They rate the agencies, and the 311 call center, and provide assessments that can help improve customer service.

By listening to and leveraging data on constituent calls for service, government can move from a culture of reaction to a proactive culture of listening and learning from the data provided by the public.  Engaging the public, and following through on the suggestions they give, can increase not only the quality of government service, but the faith of the public that government can listen and respond.

Every leader in government should commit to getting feedback from customers — it’s the only way to know how to increase their satisfaction with the services.  There is no more urgent time to improve the customer experience…(More)

Citizen Urban Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New report by Anthony Townsend and Alissa Chisholm at the Cities of Data Project: “Over the coming decades, the world will continue to urbanize rapidly amidst an historic migration of computing power off the desktop, unleashing new opportunities for data collection that reveal how cities function. In a recent report, Making Sense of the Science of Cities (bit.ly/sciencecities) we described an emerging global research movement that seeks establish a new urban science built atop this new infrastructure of instruments. But will this new intellectual venture be an inclusive endeavor? What role is 1 there for the growing ranks of increasingly well-equipped and well-informed citizen volunteers and amateur investigators to work alongside professional scientists? How are researchers, activists and city governments exploring that potential today? Finally, what can be done to encourage and accelerate experimentation?

This report examines three case studies that provide insight into emerging models of citizen science, highlighting the possibilities of citizen-university-government collaborative research, and the important role of open data platforms to enable these partnerships….(More)”

Index: Crime and Criminal Justice Data

Curated on Posted on by Ryan Sibley

The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on crime and criminal justice data and was originally published in 2015.

This index provides information about the type of crime and criminal justice data collected, shared and used in the United States. Because it is well known that data related to the criminal justice system is often times unreliable, or just plain missing, this index also highlights some of the issues that stand in the way of accessing useful and in-demand statistics.

Data Collections: National Crime Statistics

  • Number of incident-based crime datasets created by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): 2
    • Number of U.S. Statistical Agencies: 13
    • How many of those are focused on criminal justice: 1, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)
    • Number of data collections focused on criminal justice the BJS produces: 61
    • Number of federal-level APIs available for crime or criminal justice data: 1, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).
    • Frequency of the NCVS: annually
  • Number of Statistical Analysis Centers (SACs), organizations that are essentially clearinghouses for crime and criminal justice data for each state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands: 53

Open data, data use and the impact of those efforts

  • Number of datasets that are returned when “criminal justice” is searched for on Data.gov: 417, including federal-, state- and city-level datasets
  • Number of datasets that are returned when “crime” is searched for on Data.gov: 281
  • The percentage that public complaints dropped after officers started wearing body cameras, according to a study done in Rialto, Calif.: 88
  • The percentage that reported incidents of officer use of force fell after officers started wearing body cameras, according to a study done in Rialto, Calif.: 5
  • The percent that crime decreased during an experiment in predictive policing in Shreveport, LA: 35  
  • Number of crime data sets made available by the Seattle Police Department – generally seen as a leader in police data innovation – on the Seattle.gov website: 4
    • Major crime stats by category in aggregate
    • Crime trend reports
    • Precinct data by beat
    • State sex offender database
  • Number of datasets mapped by the Seattle Police Department: 2:
      • 911 incidents
    • Police reports
  • Number of states where risk assessment tools must be used in pretrial proceedings to help determine whether an offender is released from jail before a trial: at least 11.

Police Data

    • Number of federally mandated databases that collect information about officer use of force or officer involved shootings, nationwide: 0
    • The year a crime bill was passed that called for data on excessive force to be collected for research and statistical purposes, but has never been funded: 1994
    • Number of police departments that committed to being a part of the White House’s Police Data Initiative: 21
    • Percentage of police departments surveyed in 2013 by the Office of Community Oriented Policing within the Department of Justice that are not using body cameras, therefore not collecting body camera data: 75

The criminal justice system

  • Parts of the criminal justice system where data about an individual can be created or collected: at least 6
    • Entry into the system (arrest)
    • Prosecution and pretrial
    • Sentencing
    • Corrections
    • Probation/parole
    • Recidivism

Sources

  • Crime Mapper. Philadelphia Police Department. Accessed August 24, 2014.

The Silo Effect – The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Gillian Tett: “From award-winning columnist and journalist Gillian Tett comes a brilliant examination of how our tendency to create functional departments—silos—hinders our work…and how some people and organizations can break those silos down to unleash innovation.

One of the characteristics of industrial age enterprises is that they are organized around functional departments. This organizational structure results in both limited information and restricted thinking. The Silo Effect asks these basic questions: why do humans working in modern institutions collectively act in ways that sometimes seem stupid? Why do normally clever people fail to see risks and opportunities that later seem blindingly obvious? Why, as psychologist Daniel Kahneman put it, are we sometimes so “blind to our own blindness”?

Gillian Tett, journalist and senior editor for the Financial Times, answers these questions by plumbing her background as an anthropologist and her experience reporting on the financial crisis in 2008. In The Silo Effect, she shares eight different tales of the silo syndrome, spanning Bloomberg’s City Hall in New York, the Bank of England in London, Cleveland Clinic hospital in Ohio, UBS bank in Switzerland, Facebook in San Francisco, Sony in Tokyo, the BlueMountain hedge fund, and the Chicago police. Some of these narratives illustrate how foolishly people can behave when they are mastered by silos. Others, however, show how institutions and individuals can master their silos instead. These are stories of failure and success.

From ideas about how to organize office spaces and lead teams of people with disparate expertise, Tett lays bare the silo effect and explains how people organize themselves, interact with each other, and imagine the world can take hold of an organization and lead from institutional blindness to 20/20 vision. – (More)”

Using Technology, Building Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Jessica Baldwin-Philippi: “The days of “revolutionary” campaign strategies are gone. The extraordinary has become ordinary, and campaigns at all levels, from the federal to the municipal, have realized the necessity of incorporating digital media technologies into their communications strategies. Still, little is understood about how these practices have been taken up and routinized on a wide scale, or the ways in which the use of these technologies is tied to new norms and understandings of political participation and citizenship in the digital age. The vocabulary that we do possess for speaking about what counts as citizenship in a digital age is limited.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a federal-level election, interviews with communications and digital media consultants, and textual analysis of campaign materials, this book traces the emergence and solidification of campaign strategies that reflect what it means to be a citizen in the digital era. It identifies shifting norms and emerging trends to build new theories of citizenship in contemporary democracy. Baldwin-Philippi argues that these campaign practices foster engaged and skeptical citizens. But, rather than assess the quality or level of participation and citizenship due to the use of technologies, this book delves into the way that digital strategies depict what “good” citizenship ought to be and the goals and values behind the tactics….(More)”

What factors influence transparency in US local government?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Grichawat Lowatcharin and Charles Menifield at LSE Impact Blog: “The Internet has opened a new arena for interaction between governments and citizens, as it not only provides more efficient and cooperative ways of interacting, but also more efficient service delivery, and more efficient transaction activities. …But to what extent does increased Internet access lead to higher levels of government transparency? …While we found Internet access to be a significant predictor of Internet-enabled transparency in our simplest model, this finding did not hold true in our most extensive model. This does not negate that fact that the variable is an important factor in assessing transparency levels and Internet access. …. Our data shows that total land area, population density, percentage of minority, education attainment, and the council-manager form of government are statistically significant predictors of Internet-enabled transparency.  These findings both confirm and negate the findings of previous researchers. For example, while the effect of education on transparency appears to be the most consistent finding in previous research, we also noted that the rural/urban (population density) dichotomy and the education variable are important factors in assessing transparency levels. Hence, as governments create strategic plans that include growth models, they should not only consider the budgetary ramifications of growth, but also the fact that educated residents want more web based interaction with government. This finding was reinforced by a recent Census Bureau report indicating that some of the cities and counties in Florida and California had population increases greater than ten thousand persons per month during the period 2013-2014.

This article is based on the paper ‘Determinants of Internet-enabled Transparency at the Local Level: A Study of Midwestern County Web Sites’, in State and Local Government Review. (More)”

Mining Administrative Data to Spur Urban Revitalization

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Ben Green presented at the 21th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: “After decades of urban investment dominated by sprawl and outward growth, municipal governments in the United States are responsible for the upkeep of urban neighborhoods that have not received sufficient resources or maintenance in many years. One of city governments’ biggest challenges is to revitalize decaying neighborhoods given only limited resources. In this paper, we apply data science techniques to administrative data to help the City of Memphis, Tennessee improve distressed neighborhoods. We develop new methods to efficiently identify homes in need of rehabilitation and to predict the impacts of potential investments on neighborhoods. Our analyses allow Memphis to design neighborhood-improvement strategies that generate greater impacts on communities. Since our work uses data that most US cities already collect, our models and methods are highly portable and inexpensive to implement. We also discuss the challenges we encountered while analyzing government data and deploying our tools, and highlight important steps to improve future data-driven efforts in urban policy….(More)”

How to predict rising home prices, neighborhood change and gentrification

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Emily Badger in the Washington Post: “…In neighborhoods like this undergoing rapid change, there’s a deep gulf between what we can see — someone is trying to build something — and what we know about what’s really happening. How big will that apartment be? When is it supposed to be finished? And, because I know you’re wondering: What are they planning to do about parking?This information, which can be gleaned from the magnificent treasure that is government building permits, often publicly exists. But it’s never really been democratized. A group of tech companies and pilot cities is trying to do that now in ways that could have some fascinating implications. Imagine if you had a location-aware app that could call up the details of a construction site as easily as Redfin can show you the nearest for-sale home….

So Zillow, Accela and several other partners and local governments including Tampa, San Diego and Chattanooga have developed a common standard all cities can use to publish data about building and construction permits. The concept has important precedent: Google helped coax cities to standardize their transit data so you can track bus and train routes on Google Maps. Yelp has tried to do the same with municipal restaurant inspection data so you can see health scores when you’re scouting dinner.

Building permit data similarly has the potential to change how consumers, researchers and cities themselves understand the built world around us. Imagine, to give another example, if an app revealed that the loud construction site in your neighbor’s back yard had no permits attached to it. What if you could click one link and tell the city that, speeding up the bureaucracy around illegal construction? …(More)”

Push, Pull, and Spill: A Transdisciplinary Case Study in Municipal Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Jan Whittington et al: “Cities hold considerable information, including details about the daily lives of residents and employees, maps of critical infrastructure, and records of the officials’ internal deliberations. Cities are beginning to realize that this data has economic and other value: If done wisely, the responsible release of city information can also release greater efficiency and innovation in the public and private sector. New services are cropping up that leverage open city data to great effect.

Meanwhile, activist groups and individual residents are placing increasing pressure on state and local government to be more transparent and accountable, even as others sound an alarm over the privacy issues that inevitably attend greater data promiscuity. This takes the form of political pressure to release more information, as well as increased requests for information under the many public records acts across the country.

The result of these forces is that cities are beginning to open their data as never before. It turns out there is surprisingly little research to date into the important and growing area of municipal open data. This article is among the first sustained, cross-disciplinary assessments of an open municipal government system. We are a team of researchers in law, computer science, information science, and urban studies. We have worked hand-in-hand with the City of Seattle, Washington for the better part of a year to understand its current procedures from each disciplinary perspective. Based on this empirical work, we generate a set of recommendations to help the city manage risk latent in opening its data….(More)”

IBM using Watson to build a “SIRI for Cities”

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at FastCompany: “A new app that incorporates IBM’s Watson cognitive computing platform is like Siri for ordering city services.

IBM said today that the city of Surrey, in British Columbia, Canada, has rolled out the new app, which leverages Watson’s sophisticated language and data analysis system to allow residents to make requests for things like finding out why their trash wasn’t picked up or how to find a lost cat using natural language.

Watson is best known as the computer system that autonomously vanquished the world’s best Jeopardy players during a highly publicized competition in 2011. In the years since, IBM has applied the system to a wide range of computing problems in industries like health care, banking, retail, and education. The system is based on Watson’s ability to understand natural language queries and to analyze huge data sets.

Recently, Watson rolled out a tool designed to help people detect the tone in their writing.

Surrey worked with the developer Purple Forge to build the new city services app, which will be combined with the city’s existing “My Surrey” mobile and web tools. IBM said that residents can ask a wide range of questions on devices like smartphones, laptops, or even Apple Watches. Big Blue said Surrey’s app is the first time Watson has been utilized in a “citizen services” app.

The tool offers a series of frequently asked questions, but also allows residents in the city of nearly half a million to come up with their own. IBM said Surrey officials are hopeful that the app will help them be more responsive to residents’ concerns.

Among the services users can ask about are those provided by Surrey’s police and fire departments, animal control, parking enforcement, trash pickup, and others….(More)”