city & municipal

Philadelphia’s Newly Upgraded Open Data Portal

Curated on March 7, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Grass at Government Executive: “If you’re looking for streets where vending is prohibited in the city of Philadelphia, the city’s newly upgraded open data portal has that information. If you’re looking for information on reported bicycle thefts, the city’s open data portal has that information, too. Same goes for the city’s budget.

Philadelphia’s recently relaunched open data portal, Open Data Philly, has 264 data sets, applications and APIs available for the public to access and use. Much of that information comes from municipal sources.

“The redesign of OpenDataPhilly will increase access to available data, thereby enabling our citizens to become more engaged and knowledgeable and our government more accountable,” Mayor Michael Nutter said in a statement last month.

But Philadelphia’s open data portal isn’t just designed to unlock datasets at City Hall.

The city’s universities, cultural and non-profit organizations and commercial entities are part of the portal as well. Portal users interested in historic maps of the city can access the Philadelphia GeoHistory Network, a project of Philadelphia’s Athenaeum Museum, which maintains a tool where layers of historic maps can overlaid on an interactive Google map.

You can even find a list of current happy hour specials, courtesy of DrinkPhilly….(More)”

Citizens Connect

Curated on March 6, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Harvard Business School Case Study by Mitchell Weiss: “Funding to scale Citizens Connect, Boston’s 311 app, is both a blessing and a burden and tests two public entrepreneurs. In 2012, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts provides Boston’s Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics with a grant to scale Citizens Connect across the state. The money gives two co-creators of Citizens Connect, Chris Osgood and Nigel Jacob, a chance to grow their vision for citizen-engaged governance and civic innovation, but it also requires that the two City of Boston leaders sit on a formal selection committee that pits their original partner, Connected Bits, against another player that might meet the specific requirements for delivering a statewide version. The selection and scaling process raise questions beyond just which partner to choose. What would happen to the Citizens Connect brand as Osgood and Jacob’s product spreads across the state? Who could help scale their work best then nationally? Which business models were best positioned to drive that growth? What intellectual property arrangements would best enable it? And what role should the two city employees have, anyway, in scaling Citizens Connect outside of Boston in the first place? These questions hung in the air as they pondered the one big one about passing over Connected Bits for another partner: should they?…(More)”

Action-Packed Signs Could Mean Fewer Pedestrian Accidents

Curated on March 2, 2015July 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Marielle Mondon at Next City: “Action-packed road signs could mean less unfortunate action for pedestrians. More than a year after New York and San Francisco implemented Vision Zero campaigns to increase pedestrian safety, new research shows that warning signs depicting greater movement — think running stick figures, not walking ones — cause fewer pedestrian accidents.
“A sign that evokes more perceived movement increases the observer’s perception of risk, which in turn brings about earlier attention and earlier stopping,” said Ryan Elder, co-author of the new Journal of Consumer Research report. “If you want to grab attention, you need signs that are more dynamic.”

The real U.S. pedestrian sign on the left represents what almost seems to be a casual stroll, while the example on the far right amps up the speed of the walkers.

The study argues that drivers react faster to signs showing greater movement because the threat of a last-minute accident seems more real — and often, a quicker reaction, even by a few seconds, can make a major difference….
Another important point in a world where pedestrians can play games with walk signals: Elder’s suggestions seem more noteworthy than whimsical — and not necessarily a contribution to urban cutesification that annoys some city-dwellers….(More)”

Mobile customer service gives city residents a voice with government

Curated on March 1, 2015October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Lauren Horwitz at TechTarget: “When social scientists James Wilson and George Kelling devised their broken windows theory during the 1980s, they couldn’t have imagined smartphones as tools to keep neighborhoods safe and clean. But for the city of Philadelphia, a new online initiative known as Philly 311 turns mobile devices into frontline tools for citizens to report problems and engage with local government.
Until just a few months ago, when Philadelphia residents wanted to report a graffiti-riddled building, they would have to call the city’s customer contact center. Some residents toted around hefty physical binders to track issues. But today, they can use mobile phones to report incidents and track them online without having to make a call or stop by the contact center.
With Philly 311, which launched in December 2014, residents can take photos of wayward trash littering a street, “geolocate” the incident with a mobile phone,…
With initiatives like Philly 311, the city has experienced changes in resident interaction with government. Between 2013 and 2014, for example, mobile phone use to report incidents to the city’s contact center exploded, with communication increasing more than 300%. Walk-in communication with the contact center decreased by 9%, by contrast, and email communications by 1%. Mobile reporting of incidents can thus promote some contact center efficiencies, in which incidents are automatically reported by phone and routed to the appropriate department. Lue said that the city has made the shift to accommodate residents’ need for more effective and scalable multichannel options….(More)”

Where is Our Polis In the 21st Century?

Curated on February 25, 2015November 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Hollie Russon Gilman: “If you could improve the relationship between citizens and the state, how would you do it? It’s likely that your answer would be different from mine and still different from the next five people I ask. Because rules and structures of government are constantly changing and the tools people use to communicate shift with newly available technologies, this relationship must continue to evolve…

Multiple factors shape the quality of democracy, such as the safety of free speech and reliability of public transit or secure long-term planning. Democracy, at least the glorified ancient ideal some like to lay claim to as our founding heritage, also involves the creation of a polis — specifically, a place where man is freed from the burdens of household goods, most famously articulated by Plato in The Republic.

We can’t mistake an ideal for the reality — Plato’s polis was highly constrained and available only to the most privileged of Greek men within a social system that also sanctioned slavery. However, the ideal of the polis — a place to experience democratic virtues — also holds at least theoretical promise and compelling possibilities for real change to the current state of American democracy.

We need what this ideal has to offer, because the social contract as we know it today can feel more like a series of alienating, disconnected obligations than what it could and should be: an enabler of civic creativity or power. Our current social contract does not come with a polis — or, to put it another way, room to imagine new ways of thinking.

Why is this a problem? Because in order to truly harness civic innovation, we need to embrace deeper ways of thinking about democracy.

What would a deeper democracy look like? Harvard political theorist Robert Unger describes “deepened democracy” in his recent book Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative as a system in which citizens “must be able to see themselves and one another as individuals capable of escaping their confined roles.” One promising way citizens can perform new roles in a “deeper democracy” is by working with public institutions, and amongst themselves, to influence policymaking.

We need tools to empower these citizens use their work to fashion a polis for the 21st century. One particularly promising innovation is Participatory Budgeting (often shortened to “PB”), which is a process whereby citizens make spending decisions on a defined public budget and operate as active participants in public decision-making like allocating local funds in their neighborhood. The Brazilian Workers’ Party first attempted PB in 1989, where its success led to the World Bank calling PB a “best practice” in democratic innovation….

Why is PB so effective as a civic engagement tool? PB is especially powerful because it engages citizens with complex political issues on the local level, where they live. PB’s strength as an intervention in our social contract lies in municipal budgets as the scale at which citizens can be experts. In other words, people who live day to day in communities know best what resources those communities need to solve problems, be successful, and thrive.

Many of our governance decisions face the dual challenges of integrating individual-level participation efforts with the scale of contemporary national U.S. politics. Part of PB’s power may be breaking down complex decisions into their manageable parts. This strategy could be applied beyond budgets to a range of decision-making such as climate adaption or addressing food deserts.

PB represents one of the best tools in a broader toolkit designed to re-engage citizens in governance, but it’s far from the only one. Look around your very block, community, and city. Examples of places that could operate as a 21st-century polis range from traditional community anchor institutions engaging in new ways to the application of digital tools for civic ends. Citizenvestor is a civic crowd-funding site that works online and with traditional brick-and-mortar organizations. In Mount Rainer, MD, Community Forklift — a “nonprofit reuse center for home improvement supplies” (or, you might say, a library for tools) — and a local bike share engage a large group of residents.

Civic and social innovation is built from the exchange of resources between government institutions and community networks. Ideally, through coming together to talk, debate, and engage in the public sphere, people can flex their civic muscle and transform their lives. The fabric of communities is woven with the threads of deeply engaged and dedicated residents. A challenge of our current moment in history is to reconcile these passions with the mechanisms, and sometimes the technologies, necessary to improve public life.

Can this all add up to a wholesale civic revolution? Time will tell. At a minimum, it suggests the potential of community networks (analog and digital) to be leveraged for a stronger, more resilience and responsive 21st century polis….(More)”

The Future of Public Space Analytics

Curated on February 25, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

The AGILE Landscape Project: “Public space is an essential component of any great city. It brings people together to socialize, recreate, and work. More pointedly, it attracts people to the city, builds relationships, and spurs innovation and new ideas that fuel a city’s economic growth. How we optimize the investments made in our streetscapes, plazas, parks, and greenways is important to each individual project’s success and the city as a whole. Are the places being built fulfilling their promise? If so, could they be doing more and if not, how do they need to change?…
“Places in the Making”, a publication published in 2013 by MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, underscored this problem. They cited the lack of active metrics as a common challenge to placemaking efforts. They reported that “It is astonishing how few placemaking projects actively and honestly assess their own successes and failures.” They went on to explain the existing placemaking culture focuses on fuzzy, unmeasurable goals and that this has created “an inertia in assessment efforts”. The report stressed that this lack of assessment is detrimental to the field as a whole because valuable insights are left undiscovered and the same mistakes are made repeatedly….
“Places in the Making”, a publication published in 2013 by MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, underscored this problem. They cited the lack of active metrics as a common challenge to placemaking efforts. They reported that “It is astonishing how few placemaking projects actively and honestly assess their own successes and failures.” They went on to explain the existing placemaking culture focuses on fuzzy, unmeasurable goals and that this has created “an inertia in assessment efforts”. The report stressed that this lack of assessment is detrimental to the field as a whole because valuable insights are left undiscovered and the same mistakes are made repeatedly.

“It is astonishing how few placemaking projects actively and honestly assess their own successes and failures.” – “Places in the Making”, DUSP (2013)

Both William H. Whyte’s seminal Street Life Project and resulting book and documentary, Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980), along with Jan Gehl’s extensive public life studies and influential book Life Between Buildings (1987) serve as the foundation of the urban design profession’s knowledge base. Their observations and insights were amassed through considerable time and manpower. We are lucky to have their contribution from which to draw upon when making future decisions. Though we shouldn’t stop observing and building upon their significant contributions. We must continually add clarity and resolution particularly in the unique and specific context of each place.

Unfortunately, the POE and previous research are only snapshots in time. With the rise of embedded sensor infrastructure, “smart cities”, social networks, and ubiquity of smartphones that are becoming increasingly more powerful and sophisticated every year, the ability to gain real-time continuous 24/7 quantitative monitoring of public life data is now a reality. The ability to capture so much data is unprecedented and will only continue to get easier. The amount of and type of information that can and often is being collected about the world around us and ourselves is vast. When it comes to cities, transportation, parking, energy, waste collection, and water systems has attracted the most attention. In the private sector, retail analytics have been the focus.
Collecting data for data sake should not be a goal. Rather we need be knowledgeable of what is available and possible while being discerning about the data that is useful for improving the management and design of public space. By selectively incorporating sensors into the design of physical space, the data collection system can provide real-time information about the use of the space. Like website analytic systems, the network can provide useful information about the number of people using the space, how long they are using it, as well well as other meaningful measures of public life. The data gathered can be combined with a wide array of environmental data such as temperature, humidity, sun/shade patterns, rain fall, water quality, and air quality. In addition, other available data sets such as sales tax collections, building permits, real estate transactions, and programming/event schedules can be overlaid with data to make relationships between the use of the public space and its context more visible.

While the real-time nature of the data can be used to quickly understand the immediate impact that programming and design decisions have on the space and vice versa, it can also capture data and trends over extended durations that would not otherwise be possible without considerable resources. All of this enables us to make more informed decisions rather than anecdotal observations and assumptions. With the interest of tactical urbanism and other short-term public space investments, this need for data is greater than ever. The data can be used to justify investment in long-term improvements and/or make slight adjustments in temporary spaces to increase their effectiveness….(More)”

Urban technology analysis matrix

Curated on February 24, 2015July 19, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

New Paper by Pablo Emilio Branchi , Carlos Fernández-Valdivielso , and Ignacio Raúl Matías: “Our objective is to develop a method for better analyzing the utility and impact of new technologies on Smart Cities. We have designed a tool that will evaluate new technologies according to a three-pronged scoring system that considers the impact on physical space, environmental issues, and city residents. The purpose of this tool is to be used by city planners as part of a strategic approach to the implementation of a Smart City initiative in order to reduce unnecessary public spending and ensure the optimal allocation of city resources….

The paper provides a list of the different elements to be analyzed in Smart Cities in the form of a matrix and develops the methodology to evaluate them in order to obtain a final score for technologies prior to its application in cities….Traditional technological scenarios have been challenged, and Smart Cities have become the center of urban competitiveness. A lack of clarity has been detected in the way of describing what Smart Cities are, and we try to establish a methodology for urban policy makers to do so. As a dynamic process that affects several aspects, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed solution further. (More)”

City Governments Are Using Yelp to Tell You Where Not to Eat

Curated on February 24, 2015November 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Luca and Luther Lowe at HBR Blog: “…in recent years consumer-feedback platforms like TripAdvisor, Foursquare, and Chowhound have transformed the restaurant industry (as well as the hospitality industry), becoming important guides for consumers. Yelp has amassed about 67 million reviews in the last decade. So it’s logical to think that these platforms could transform hygiene awareness too — after all, people who contribute to review sites focus on some of the same things inspectors look for.

It turns out that one way user reviews can transform hygiene awareness is by helping health departments better utilize their resources. The deployment of inspectors is usually fairly random, which means time is often wasted on spot checks at clean, rule-abiding restaurants. Social media can help narrow the search for violators.
Within a given city or area, it’s possible to merge the entire history of Yelp reviews and ratings — some of which contain telltale words or phrases such as “dirty” and “made me sick” — with the history of hygiene violations and feed them into an algorithm that can predict the likelihood of finding problems at reviewed restaurants. Thus inspectors can be allocated more efficiently.
In San Francisco, for example, we broke restaurants into the top half and bottom half of hygiene scores. In a recent paper, one of us (Michael Luca, with coauthor Yejin Choi and her graduate students) showed that we could correctly classify more than 80% of restaurants into these two buckets using only Yelp text and ratings. In the next month, we plan to hold a contest on DrivenData to get even better algorithms to help cities out (we are jointly running the contest). Similar algorithms could be applied in any city and in other sorts of prediction tasks.
Another means for transforming hygiene awareness is through the sharing of health-department data with online review sites. The logic is simple: Diners should be informed about violations before they decide on a destination, rather than after.
Over the past two years, we have been working with cities to help them share inspection data with Yelp through an open-data standard that Yelp created in 2012 to encourage officials to put their information in places that are more useful to consumers. In San Francisco, Los Angeles, Raleigh, and Louisville, Kentucky, customers now see hygiene data alongside Yelp reviews. There’s evidence that users are starting to pay attention to this data — click-through rates are similar to those for other features on Yelp ….

And there’s no reason this type of data sharing should be limited to restaurant-inspection reports. Why not disclose data about dentists’ quality and regulatory compliance via Yelp? Why not use data from TripAdvisor to help spot bedbugs? Why not use Twitter to understand what citizens are concerned about, and what cities can do about it? Uses of social media data for policy, and widespread dissemination of official data through social media, have the potential to become important means of public accountability. (More)

Making City Hall Leaner

Curated on February 24, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Nigel Jacob at Governing: “…How do we create services that people actually want to use?
The first change is to start thinking about these services as products. What’s the difference? Well, this is where we can learn something from startups. Products are the tools that we build to deliver value to our users.
Products are typically managed by one or more product managers that watch very carefully how users interact with the product so the startup can determine which features to keep and which to toss. We can contrast this with traditional government services which are developed at some point to solve a problem of some sort, but because they are typically not monitored in a way to understand whether these services are actually adding value, they quickly fall out of sync with the needs of people.
Consider government websites that allow people to access their benefits. These sites are typically clunky to use and hard to navigate. This isn’t a small issue. It can be the difference between people getting and not getting the resources they need to survive.
Case in point: CalFresh.
These are services.

Compare this to a site such as Balance which was designed by watching how people use the CalFresh site, talking to these users about how they would like to access their benefits and then building a tool that actually responds to their needs.This is a product.
So, we need to be thinking about not only what government is building (in terms of tools), but also how it builds them.
The approach to building high-value products used by startups (and other orgs looking to build better products) is called Agile.
There are many flavors of Agile, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. One of the more recent agile methodologies that has garnered support in the startup community is Lean developed by Eric Reiss in his book, “The Lean Startup.”
Now, a word of caution. Any methodology that is used outside of the context in which it was intended runs the risk of simply not working. However, at its core, Lean is about learning what works and what doesn’t, so I’ll focus on the central elements of Lean since they have much to teach those of us who are working to overhaul local government about how to create value….(More)”