Our pursuit of innovation
Syracuse held its first Open Data Day on Saturday November 4th at the Onondaga County Public Library in Downtown Syracuse. Over 100 participants came together to celebrate civic open data, attend educational sessions (on topics ranging from how to use Tableau to the synergy between urbanism, AR and open data portals) and engage in a hackathon focused on transportation data.
In early 2020, API participated in a 10-week learning opportunity through What Works Cities at Results for America focused on helping cities learn how to take immediate steps toward ending or reducing the impact of driver’s license suspension in their communities. In the US, driver’s license suspension due to nonpayment of fines and penalties, or failure to appear for traffic court, is legal in many states and municipalities but results in loss of economic opportunity, and autonomy, and reduces public safety. The opportunity, hosted by What Works Cities in partnership with the Fines and Fees Justice Center and the City of Durham Innovation Team, prompted us to evaluate the impact of debt-based license restrictions on our own community by looking at quantitative data on the concentration of driver’s license suspensions by census tract disaggregated by suspensions due to failure to pay or “appear.”
One of the skills that we have in our team at the Office of Accountability, Performance & Innovation (API) is quickly finding, pulling, and using data about city operations and services. We use this data to build dashboards that track performance and make maps that staff can use to address questions in real-time. The use of this data isn’t just valuable to our departments for internal purposes, it’s also meaningful to our community members as well. There are many reasons our community members appreciate access to this data that we collect. To ensure that we are sharing the data with them in a way that is easy to access and understand we have been busy collecting resident feedback on Open Data Syracuse, our city’s open data portal.
On February 19th, some members of our Office of Accountability, Performance, and Innovation (API), Nico Diaz (Chief Innovation and Data Officer), and Jason Scharf (Data Program Manager) had the pleasure to be part of CuseHacks' 2022 Hackathon. These events generally last somewhere between 24 and 72 hours, where teams break up and compete against each other to create innovative web applications, websites, maps, or design products to help solve different challenges. Some Hackathons have themes and some have different prizes for different categories.
CuseHacks is a Student-run Hackathon put on by Syracuse University students every year. Our API team was very excited at the chance to partner with CuseHacks and help sponsor this event.
Syracuse is no stranger to snow – historically we see an average of 124 inches a year and tend to be in the top 5 snowiest big cities in the country (from the Golden Snow Globe Competition). In an effort to share how we operate during a storm, we developed a snowplow map that shows when a street was last plowed.
Our Deputy Chief Innovation & Data Officer, Conor Muldoon, wrote a post outlining what led up to our current snowplow map and the potential impact of it right before we launched the tool in December here.
We have had several snow storms since the launch of the City’s Snow Plow map (ESRI’s Winter Weather Operations tool) the first week of December 2021. We successfully launched the tool to the public with the first large storm in January, tracking the plowed status of streets for three days, and saw around 12,000 hits over the course of the storm to the public viewer. We continue to maintain high engagement during the storms after, seeing consistent views of the tool throughout the storm’s length.
In 2018, the Office of Accountability, Performance, and Innovation developed an in-house web application to track the City’s fleet of snow plow trucks and map street segments that had been plowed during winter storms in order to communicate to residents when their street had been plowed. The tool was exceptionally well-received and played an important role in the City’s communication strategy around an important public service delivery. However, last year the system experienced significant challenges with the underlying sensor technology and ran into limitations in the frequency of the network provider’s communications - resulting in performance issues that made the much-anticipated snow plow map no longer functional.
Despite extensive attempts to work around the inherent technical limitations, it became apparent that it was time to develop a more robust solution.
Over the past year, the quality of life project has sought to understand what direction our residents want to see the city drive in by asking “What matters most to your quality of life?”. The idea here is that the city is currently in a car in the middle of a parking lot with 360 degrees of directions to go in. The car is made of numbers, and the parking lot is made of the stories we hear from residents every day. By learning more about quality of life from constituent perspectives, we hoped to narrow down from 360degrees to just a few roads to choose to drive down.
