Forum focuses on effective uses of municipal data

In an era when unprecedented amounts of municipal data are being made available to the public, it is especially important for local governments to organize the data in a meaningful fashion.

This was one of several themes that emerged during a 90-minute Emerging Issues Forum at the MMA Annual Meeting on Jan. 24 on the uses of information technology in cities and towns.

“Right now we have sensors on so many things,” said Cathleen Finn, the New England manager for IBM’s corporate citizenship program. “But it’s not really information until you collect and analyze it. In that sense, cities and towns have a lot of data, but they don’t necessarily have a lot of useful information.”

Once the information is in a useful format, the effect can be empowering for residents and municipal employees alike, said Jane Fountain, a professor at UMass Amherst who directs the university’s National Center for Digital Government.

“One of the most important cultural shifts is that the decisions start to be made in terms of data, rather than which department manager is best at arguing his case with the most skill,” Fountain said.

“The last piece of this is making this visual,” she added. “If you start putting up pie charts and mapping and potholes, anyone can look at it to see what neighborhoods are doing better and which ones are not doing so well. And they can also start to ask questions, such as, ‘Why do we have so much overtime in this department?’”

Even in a small city or town, Fountain said, it may be challenging to determine what kind of data should be posted. She also warned against having out-of-date data on a website.

A third panelist, Ezra Glenn, a former planner in Lawrence and Somerville who now teaches at MIT, cautioned local officials not to be in a rush to post information online.

“If you expect the public to make sense of the data, make sure you can make sense of it yourself,” Glenn said. “Don’t assume that the public has this free consultant to analyze the data and tell you the magic number.”

Glenn suggested that local officials may be divided over the best ways to apply the data. Some, he said, will insist that “open data will lead to smarter cities and better decisions.” But skeptics would say, “Hey, wait a minute, we have people who are experts in understanding data and now we’re going to let anybody with an Internet connection try to boss the city around?”

What is needed, Glenn said, “is a little bit of subtlety” between the two perspectives.

“What makes a city smart is not the data but using the data in a smart way,” he said.