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>>> The City Governments That Have Mastered Data

The initiative What Works Cities has awarded certifications to 16 additional local governments for how they use data in decision-making.


Bloomberg

By Marie Patino

July 15, 2021


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-15/how-city-governments-are-using-data?srnd=premium


If one thing has thrived during Covid-19, it is the data dashboard.

Months into the pandemic, city halls, counties and every state across the U.S. had their own spin-off of the initial John Hopkins University dashboard, executed with various degrees of expertise — and usability. Covid dashboards and their more uplifting vaccination successors have also been subject to criticism, from lack of accessibility to underlying data not being easily retrievable. But together, they constitute an important step forward in making information of public health importance more visible.

This wasn’t made possible overnight. Data has become central to city hall, and a growing number of municipalities are now integrating it at every step of their decision-making processes. An initiative called What Works Cities, backed by Bloomberg Philanthropies and other partners, certifies cities based on how well they use data, from measuring goal achievement to making information public. This week the program awarded 2021 silver, gold or platinum certifications to 16 new U.S. cities, during a period in which the use of data for governance has proven crucial.

According to a report from Monitor Institute by Deloitte and What Works Cities, city governments that use data also are able to identify the needs of residents more efficiently, and deploy policies where they can have the greatest impact. In San Jose, California, the municipality sent outreach workers in the field to find out what neighborhoods in the city had the least access to broadband. After creating heatmaps of areas that needed more access to the internet, the city placed “small cell sites” in areas lacking them. A similar strategy was put in place in the early days of the pandemic: When schools closed and access to broadband became vital for children to continue learning from home, the city distributed 13,000 hotspots to families.

In Chattanooga, Tennessee, a city that achieved What Works Cities Gold certification this year, the municipality put together a task force
to house homeless veterans. It started by identifying every single member of the population, to be able to reach out and find solutions for every individual. This could not have been achieved without sending out people in the field in the first place to effectively gather information.

At the end of the policy cycle, using data means being able to evaluate results. Municipalities that are proficient at data often have extensive open data portals, making important datasets — like budget allocations or 311 and 911 calls — available to everyone for perusal and analysis. The municipality of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has released 50 of its most important datasets on its open platform, Open Data BR. Among them: budget information and real-time traffic flows. Residents have, according to the Deloitte report, effectively been using the platform to create their own visualization of the datasets they’re interested in exploring.

The latest certified cities bring the total number to 40 since What Works Cities started the certification program in 2018. Since forming in 2015, the group has spent more than $84 million on training, coaching and technical assistance for its 254 local government members.

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