Using City Data to Develop Innovative Solutions

EVERY TIME YOU DRIVE PAST a traffic light, pay a bill, call a city department, search the city website, or even throw out trash in your neighborhood dumpster, you create data that is collected by your municipality or its private sector partner. Applying data analytics to this and other data points collected from fellow residents enable city administrators and their partners to provide better service — faster responses and more cost-effective solutions that can anticipate your needs.

Data gathering and analysis are underway in many municipalities. Chief data officers are building open data portals that they share with their counterparts elsewhere to create centralized “data ingestion engines” that take information from multiple sources. Los Angeles, Chicago, San Diego and Atlanta are creating such open data portals.

Moreover, they are building datasets and application programming interfaces (APIs) — a set of definitions, protocols and tools that help programmers create software — and sharing those within their own departments and third parties like tech startups, who would then create apps based on the data.

Such an approach helps dramatically unleash latent potential in the data for use by data scientists, a city’s in-house operations, professional software developers, college students, entrepreneurs and incubators, said Austin Ashe, general manager, intelligent cities at GE’s subsidiary Current, which calls itself the digital engine for intelligent environments. “It lets them have a chance at building an interesting use case or an interesting outcome using the data.”

Here, the U.S. government leads by example. Its data resources are available at data.gov/open-gov. For regional and local governments, data are available at cities.data. gov, counties.data.gov and states.data.gov. San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York and Seattle lead the list of cities that have put out the most number of APIs and datasets, according to an AT&T blog for software developers.

They have spawned apps for all manner of citizens’ needs. New York’s portal, for instance, has an app designed by its health department for “cooks from all walks of life,” while other apps help locate drinking water fountains or parking spots.

Waze, a traffic and navigation app owned by Google, is a prominent example of an innovation that uses public traffic data. Drivers use the Waze app on their smartphone to navigate their trips better by avoiding accident spots and congested roads. They also interact with other drivers by giving them a heads-up about police sightings, road hazards and other trouble spots on their trip. Waze has partnered with 72 U.S. cities including Los Angeles, Boston and Jersey City, N.J.

The availability of open data in vast amounts and in accessible formats, and the analytics it allows, enables city departments to leverage each other’s data and also collaborate, breaking down silos that have traditionally existed between them. For example, half a dozen different city departments or agencies could find parking data useful to do such things as oversee traffic, gather revenue from parking ticket fees, street cleaning, and so forth. At the same time, a food truck owner could use data on open parking spaces and dynamic pedestrian movements to decide on the perfect location. “That’s the magic of smarter cities and IoT platforms right there, with the simultaneous use of historical data and real time data,” Ashe said.

But former Atlanta CIO Samir Saini thinks cities in Europe are ahead of those in the U.S. in aggregating and sharing data across various departments and with outside groups, such as universities and companies. “That means being very de- liberate about the use of data and the contracts we sign with vendors that have smart city solutions,” he said, adding that Atlanta is going about that approach consciously.

THE FIVE Cs OF DATA SHARING

Saini identified five groups — the Five Cs — that benefit from such an integrated and collaborative approach. The first ‘C’ is where the city departments themselves are the users and the customers of the platform. Different city departments use each other’s data so that there are truly no silos when it comes to data filed across departments within the city. For example, the water utility may buy a smart water meter that has a “smart water cloud” with consumption and other data that might be valuable to other departments — something previously not being shared.

That approach in itself could create real value with improved service delivery to citizens.

The second ‘C’ is for citizens, where the city takes a citizencentric, and not a department-centric approach. That means citizens receive a unified platform for say, paying a water bill or securing a business license — an activity that typically requires multiple departments to be involved.

The government interacts as one entity with its citizens, bundling all services on one dashboard. In order to accomplish that, the city needs an open data platform “that brings it all together,” such as OpenGov — a cloud solution for public sector budgeting, operational performance and citizen engagement. The third ‘C’ is the college/university system. The city extends its data platform through formal relationships with its “best and brightest” colleges for R&D projects that might produce solutions to city issues. In Atlanta, for example, the city shares its data platform with Georgia Tech and is collaboratively working on multiple projects, including one in advanced data analytics.

Community impact is the focus of the fourth ‘C’ where the city extends the data platform to the neighborhood level for services and apps. For example, it might want to provide “situational awareness” of the state of health or public safety in their neighborhood to both communities and city administrators. They would slice and dice the data to try and find solutions to improve the outcomes on these fronts.

The fifth ‘C’ has firms in the “civic tech” space that work on technology solutions for city services, and the larger business community. They would use the APIs that the city publishes to develop apps or other products. The city would also gather APIs from other entities such as transportation agencies, and act as a “clearing house” for APIs, providing tech firms and others access to a wider group of APIs. “The fruits of those efforts would be felt beyond the city, across the region and also across the state,” said Saini. He noted the potential for Atlanta: It has 4.9% of the state’s population but contributes 59% of the state’s economic output.

One example of how IoT sensors could do forecasting analytics, although not predictive analytics as yet, is their deployment in Atlanta’s sewer system. The city has a combined sewer system where storm water and wastewater run through the same pipes. It also has an aging pipeline system, and so it frequently faces “combined sewer overflow events.” The city’s water department recently implemented an IoT project where it deployed sensors on manholes to measure flow levels. During a storm, if the flow levels hit a certain threshold, alerts are sent through a visualization tool to allow a dispatcher to send teams out to address the overflow before it worsens. “This enables us to respond to the event, so that we can manage it in a proactive versus a reactive manner,” said Saini.

Other cities too have launched projects to systematically share their data across departments and entities such as colleges/universities, civic tech firms and other businesses. However, before a city determines how its various agencies can cross-reference data and share datasets,

it needs to understand the data it already possesses. In an ambitious move, Washington, D.C. is cataloging the existing data in each of its departments and agencies and complete the project over the next year. That would give it an understanding of the types of data it has, the formats in which they are collected and stored, and the frequency of their collection.

CHALLENGES AROUND DATA SHARING

Data sharing efforts have their share of challenges, too. One persistent question for cities and citizens is how the data is managed, who owns the data, what standards should apply, and what they should they do with it, said Britt Harter, director of sustainability services at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “There certainly is an emerging interest in monetizing that data, and in no small part because cities are very cashstrapped.” As cities view their data as a potential revenuegenerator, they must tread with caution. The primary issue is that of privacy. “If and when the city is seen to be selling information about its residents that is sensitive — who are its stewards and what would be a breach of trust?” asked Harter. “I caution the drive to monetize the data, to counterbalance that with managing the trust of residents.”

Helpfully, the Smart Cities Council’s Open Data Guide lists 17 universal principles that apply across all partners, and one of that covers citywide data security and privacy.

In many cases, cities are able to anonymize data that could be of value, without compromising citizens’ rights, Saini noted. For example, counting the number of pedestrians is important to economic development groups, retailers and building owners because it helps determine whether to establish a retail store or an apartment complex in the area. Similarly, data on the number of cyclists on the streets could be useful for bike-sharing and ride-sharing firms. He said data that is so counted tends to create “a sufficient level of anonymity.”

THREE PILLARS

As mayors delve into smart city development in earnest, it’s good to look at the effort through three pillars. The first “is to recognize that you can unlock innovation locally,” Ashe said. “We at GE like to think of smart cities through the lens of IoT.” He added that the concept of smart cities has changed over the past 10 to 15 years from its traditional sense of helping City Hall deliver services better on its own to “it’s no longer the mayor and the staff trying to figure out how to solve problems.”

Rather, engagement with the broader community of citizens and other stakeholders is an integral part of the new order. In that changing civic engagement model with the broader community, opportunities abound for innovation to occur with “extremely fast and scalable methodology” through IoT. Participants in those endeavors could be universities, entrepreneurs or ordinary citizens. As such, the second pillar is to have a city leadership team dedicated to thinking about and executing on those possibilities.

The third pillar is about bringing a sense of urgency to these opportunities. Today’s cities are changing at an extraordinary pace in terms of citizens’ needs and demands. Yet, the traditional way city administrations go about their business is too slow, chiefly because that was how they were set up. They have to be more flexible on what changes they need to make, what their citizens need, and how they will go about delivering on those needs.