Join us in welcoming 4 new team members to the Office of Accountability, Performance & Innovation. In recent months we searched the country for a Data Program Manager, an Innovation Designer, a Data Engineer, and an ARPA Data Analyst. Each of these roles is critical to our team and offers a different set of valuable skills that will add to the expertise and value that our office provides to the City and its residents. We are so pleased with the privilege to attract and welcome such talent to our team here in Syracuse.
Transforming the City’s Data Culture, One $123 Million Infusion of Federal Funding at a Time
Listen to Mayor Walsh articulate his vision for the City, and you will hear him describe his goal to transform Syracuse into a more data-driven city. But that process is not something that just happens on its own; it takes work and a data-driven culture needs to be nurtured. When the Federal Government passed the American Rescue Plan (ARPA) to provide funding to state and local governments around the United States in response to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the City of Syracuse received $123 million and the Mayor saw this as an opportunity to foster and promote better data practices throughout the City.
Open Data and Hacking for Good
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.
A Successful Deployment of the City of Syracuse's Snow Plow Map: What it Does, What We've Learned, and What We Plan to Do
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.
Syracuse Winter Weather Operations
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.
Performance Management at Syracuse: Why and How?
Meet our new Deputy Chief Innovation & Data Officer
Introducing Conor Muldoon who will help to lead the API team in data and innovation to find new and efficient ways to improve how the City of Syracuse delivers services. Conor will oversee the implementation of a city-wide performance strategy and the continuous expansion of the city’s data infrastructure. He will assist our Chief Innovation & Data Officer in championing the Mayor’s innovative and performance management vision for all city departments and constituents.