Our pursuit of innovation
Here in Syracuse, we spend a big chunk of our budget on purchasing goods and external services: everything from office supplies to hiring consultants to audit a specific department, to multi-million dollar construction projects. Given that we are a major spender in our community, it's about time we take a long hard look at our procurement practices and ensure that we are cultivating vendor diversity, equitably distributing our resources, and continuously achieving improved outcomes.
As our Performance Management Fellow Mojdeh will work with City Departments to establish metrics that will be used to measure their operational performance, interview Department employees to understand their processes and data capture methods, and communicate performance insights through data visualizations and dashboards and will manage a city-wide, cross-departmental performance management program.
When James Anderson took to the podium last week at the Bloomberg Philanthropies convening of communications directors from U.S. cities, he knew how to get my attention. James, who worked in a role just like mine under Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York City, is now the leader of Bloomberg’s Government Innovation team. He showed us the hard cold reality from the Edelman Trust Barometer: Americans don’t trust government.
Today, we are excited to launch DataCuse, an open data portal and website for the City of Syracuse. You can visit it now at data.syrgov.net.
We’ve posted here about how we use data to make decisions and why making data publicly available is important. With DataCuse, people in the community have access to a growing list of data that is collected and created by the City.
As you open the door to the Syracuse Innovation Office, your eyes catch the brightly painted walls, a sitting area with literature on cities and data science, the chalkboard wall covered in names and drawings. To your right is a conference room, decorated wall to wall in gigantic white post its; layered in smaller multicolored ones. Each note contains a problem, solution, or idea. In the final room sits the team of dedicated city innovators, busy working on improving economic opportunity in Syracuse.
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.
