Mayor de Blasio needs greater than public support to advance his plans for jobs, education, and public safety. He must harness big data.
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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s inaugural State of the town remarks set an ambitious, liberal agenda. Covering topics including income inequality, education, and environmental sustainability, de Blasio could have his work cut out for him as he challenges a number of the city’s most deeply rooted problems.
One way his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, worked to handle city challenges was with municipal data analytics programs and an overarching, data-driven mindset. Building on Bloomberg’s successes with data policies and applying lessons from other cities, de Blasio could make great strides toward improving the standard of life for brand new York City’s 8.3 million residents.
Jobs and economic development
Mayor de Blasio has proposed a whole lot of measures around job training, including making a system to glue jobseekers with various programs. Centralizing data from the city’s various unconnected job-placement systems is a step within the right direction, but Manhattan must also apply analytics to compare jobseekers with jobs and coaching opportunities. Such systems, deployed within the private sector, could broaden opportunities for the city’s nearly 700,000 unemployed workers.
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De Blasio also plans to advertise economic growth through expanded small-business development. This initiative includes simplifying the city’s complex municipal contracting process to be more accessible to local businesses, a process that open data can improve. Philadelphia and Chicago have experimented with treating procurement requests, even small ones, as open data, letting government officials and respondents find, mark up, and touch upon proposals for potential city contracts.
Education
The mayor can be concentrating on the city’s education system, with the goals of improving graduation rates, prioritizing limited teaching resources, and maximizing the standard of elementary and secondary schools.
To accomplish those goals, the town must embrace large-scale analysis of student records and teaching assessments to supply more accurate data on what’s working and what isn’t. But de Blasio has opposed efforts — specifically in the course of the not-for-profit inBloom — to consolidate student data in support of study and personalized learning. Insights to be gleaned from student data won’t be available so long as that information remains siloed in individual schools and systems that do not interoperate. The mayor must rethink his position.
Resilience
Securing town against natural disasters is another key portion of de Blasio’s agenda. For starters, the mayor must maintain his predecessor’s commitment to disseminating information, including mapping and knowledge visualization, in times of crisis. During 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, government technologists enlisted the information science community to update evacuation maps with minute-to-minute flood predictions, they usually drew on open data sources to map shelters and recovery centers. Information isn’t more precious than during a disaster, and smart, responsive data dissemination can save lives.
But even before disaster strikes, data analysis can identify vulnerable buildings and neighborhoods to aid the town direct its infrastructure upgrades and retrofitting. Ny city already has combined data from building inspections and fire incidents to spot the buildings most liable to deadly fires, and the hot mayor has a chance to expand this technique to predict other disasters.
Sustainability
Promoting green standards for building construction and renovation covers just a fraction of a standard building’s lifespan. De Blasio could take those plans further by promoting in-building power monitoring for existing structures. There, he should take a cue from a project funded by america Department of Energy that uses low-cost sensors to gather data on power usage, temperature, airflow, and occupant schedules to create a dashboard that alerts building occupants to after they should turn off a tool, open a window, or take other energy-saving steps.
Crime and safety
The mayor’s plans for policing, including increasing use of the audio-based gunshot-detection system ShotSpotter and expanding the information-driven gang-targeting initiative Operation Crew Cut, are on target. One area for improvement is inside the use of open data. While the recent York City Police Department have been reluctant to release granular data, de Blasio desires to change that approach, having given the NYPD a failing grade in transparency last year when he was still the city’s Public Advocate.
The mayor also supports Vision Zero, a program that uses red light cameras and speed detectors to enforce safe driving. More data can alleviate the “he said, she said” problem of crash investigations, and de Blasio’s leadership on this area will undoubtedly inspire similar efforts in other cities.
New York City’s vibrant community of knowledge science startups and civic hackers are wanting to help with a few of the programs cited above. But first, the mayor must fully embrace a philosophy of information-driven innovation.
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Travis Korte is a research analyst with the guts for Data Innovation, where he conducts research frequently data policy, open government, and health analytics. He has worked on data science projects with the Huffington Post and other organizations. View Full Bio
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