The City Governments That Have Mastered Data
Source: Bloomberg CityLab | By Marie Patino | July 15, 2021, 12:27 PM CDT
The initiative What Works Cities has awarded certifications to 16 additional local governments for how they use data in decision-making.
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. (Disclaimer: Bloomberg Philanthropies is the charitable foundation of Michael R. Bloomberg, majority owner of CityLab parent Bloomberg LP.)
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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…