2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

48 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
community offer one solution. More informal methods for exploring
public opinion are provided by a host of new applications for web and
mobile devices.
In Mesa, Arizona, the mayor and city council were interested in reaching
out to the public using a variety of methods, and they wanted to
go beyond the feedback received via a traditional community satisfaction
survey. In the search for a solution to obtain more dynamic data
and information on citizens’ ideas, the city chose UserVoice Feedback,
which allows the collection of feedback on proposed ideas that have been
prioritized after online voting by citizens. The city launched iMesa, a
grassroots citizen investment and improvement effort, to develop community
projects to “build a better Mesa.” All the ideas posted on iMesa
are open for public viewing and debate. Since the introduction of iMesa
in 2011, hundreds of ideas have filtered into the city through the website.
The city collects all the ideas and schedules a series of volunteer
community meetings to discuss and refine the ideas before presenting
them to the city council. The mayor and the council work with the city
manager to determine how the ideas will be implemented. A significant
number of the ideas submitted are expected to transform how the city
and the community work together. “If I have 1,000 ideas going into a
bucket and one percent of those are great ideas, then I am successful,”
said Alex Deshuk, Mesa’s manager of technology and innovation, who
oversees the effort. 3
Using Local Government Data
New technologies such as these have helped to generate a wealth of new
data and led to what is known as the “big data” movement. In the past
two decades, society has moved from discussing data in terms of kilobytes
and megabytes to gigabytes and petabytes, and ultimately yottabytes
(Manyika et al. 2011). Shark and Cable (2011) note that although
the private sector has begun mining business intelligence from big data,
using them to identify trends and tackle new business problems, local
government leaders have only just begun to explore the possibilities
offered.
A central challenge for local governments in using big data stems
from the need for personnel who understand how to make the best use
of the data. In its predictions for the information technology field for