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.
API had the opportunity to attend the conclusion of New York City’s Open Data Week this year. This event was organized by the City of New York’s Office of Technology and Innovation as well as BetaNYC, which is a community group that helps to educate and organize community events community members on New York City’s open data. …
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.
What does it take to be a data-driven city government? Over the past year, for the City of Syracuse, it has meant a multi-pronged approach. Among our more visible projects is a partnership with Esri we expanded our snowplow map into a winter weather operations tool, tracking the updated sensors in our snow-plowing operations, which received over 10 thousand visits in the first storm of the last season alone and was recognized with an award for Special Achievement in GIS. We have also taken a performance-based approach to implementing the American Rescue Plan injection of $123 million dollars, with a public-facing dashboard that provides updated insights into how well we are spending federal spending dollars, and has been recognized as a national case study. And working side-by-side with our department of public works, we’ve piloted the inclusion of equity metrics in our road reconstruction investments.
Over the summer our office was fortunate to have hosted a cohort of very bright and driven interns, you’ve met them in a few of our previous blog posts you can read HERE. During our time together we had the pleasure and privilege to get to know these wonderful young women and work alongside them on a number of different projects and programs where their fresh perspectives and ideas proved to be invaluable to us. Before they left us to get back to their studies at Harvard and Syracuse University we asked them to summarize the work they completed with us over the 8-week internship and to highlight some of their favorite projects. Please read on to see how their summer went and all the great work that they helped us to accomplish!
We use spatial data every day – navigating from point A to point B, delivery of mail and packages to an address, identifying boundaries of our homes. Spatial data is some of the most useful data to communicate information; we can communicate where something is, how far away it is, how we can navigate there, and aggregate to spatial shapes (i.e., your street block or zip code) to identify characteristics of an area. Spatial data is information captured in a shape - think points, lines, or polygons. Information stored in these shapes then allows us to map the information in relation to other information. This can include how close or far away something is, how big or small something is, and how two areas of information compare to something near it (how does your neighbor impact you?).
The City produces spatial data often to help us communicate the narrative of key information to residents. This can vary across a wide variety of topics, from where water main breaks are happening, to what streets are closed for road reconstruction, to what neighborhood an address belongs to, to how close a school is to a resident’s house, or to the last time a snow plow cleared the road a citizen is traveling on. All of this information is communicated clearly and concisely through maps comprised of spatial data. In this post, we will explore several examples of how the City uses spatial data to measure and improve services.
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.
