Our pursuit of innovation
Infrastructure Week - a national week of attention dedicated to elevating infrastructure as a critical issue impacting everyone - is this week.
In Syracuse, improving infrastructure is one of Mayor Miner’s top priorities, and if you have followed this blog, you will know that the innovation team has focused its efforts on infrastructure for more than a year. Our infrastructure report, detailing the work done so far, is available here.
Our Department of Neighborhood and Business Development launched, in partnership with Code for America, business.syrgov.net. We wrote about the site previously, and in this post will walk through some of the site’s backend, technical details.
Today, we are excited to release the City of Syracuse’s Open Data Policy. This policy is different because we are asking you to comment on it before it is made official. Visit this site https://documents.mymadison.io/docs/city-of-syracuse-open-data-policy and state your support or opposition. Additionally, you can comment or leave notes so the policy can be changed where appropriate.
Today, the City of Syracuse is excited to announce the launch of its Business Portal, now live at business.syrgov.net.
Professor Sam Musa defines a smart city as one that:
“engages its citizens and connects its infrastructure electronically. A smart city has the ability to integrate multiple technological solutions, in a secure fashion, to manage the city’s assets - the city’s assets include, but not limited to, local departments’ information systems, schools, libraries, transportation systems, hospitals, powerplants, law enforcement, and other community services. The goal of building a smart city is to improve the quality of life by using technology to improve the efficiency of services and meet residents’ needs.”
Flint's infrastructure crisis has been well documented, and many of you are probably already familiar with their challenges. In April 2014, the City of Flint changed its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River. The new water source proved to be corrosive and, without proper treatment, caused lead from water service lines (the pipes that bring water from the larger water mains into homes) to leach into and contaminate the water.
This past summer, we partnered with the Water Department and the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good Fellowship to work on developing a model that predicts how at risk water mains are of breaking. In the months following the partnership, we've seen that the model they built is giving us intelligence about the water system that supplements the knowledge of the crews that attend to it every day. Using data to predict how risky water mains are helps us plan for their maintenance and replacement, and allows us to better coordinate construction work across the different infrastructure systems. The project also showed us what it takes to have a positive partnership on a data project like this.
To date, we have launched thirteen initiatives and programs. We would like to share a report which details our work and discusses each initiative in detail. The link to our infrastructure report is below. Please check it out, and let us know your comments, questions, or suggestions in the comments below!
