2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Institutional Context 53
efficiencies and return on investment in local government. Efforts that
use local government data should be viewed as an opportunity to create a
unique “brain trust” for resolving problems and improving service delivery,
not just as a means for ferreting out poor performers. When Minneapolis
311 mapped how service requests for exterior nuisance complaints
broke down by districts within the city, they discovered that one of the
four supervisor districts generated nearly 33 percent of all exterior
nuisance service requests, while another district generated only about
16 percent. Yet both district offices had the same number of support personnel.
Given that the demand was so much higher in one district than
the other, the city opted to reexamine the allocation of resources within
the city’s regulatory services department (Fleming 2008).
Future Developments
The proliferation of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices has
made it possible for citizens to become partners with their local government
in identifying problems and opportunities within the jurisdiction.
Mobile applications allow citizens to take a picture, capture GPS coordinates,
and submit a service request in a matter of minutes. During the
cleanup of the Gulf oil spill in 2010, environmental groups used mobile
applications extensively to track where wind and water currents were
transporting oil residue along the coastline and identify where cleanup
efforts needed to be organized. Known as crowdsourcing, this type of
large-group data collection effort can play a vital role in identifying
where resources need to be allocated.
However, the effectiveness of crowdsourcing efforts depends largely
on the ability to format different datasets so they can be easily integrated
and used in conjunction with other datasets. The emergence of
big data has led to a related movement toward open data and the push
for governments to make their data available in a format anyone can
use. The need for easy access to local government data for these applications
seems apparent. Manyika and colleagues (2011) note, however,
that there is reluctance by many in the public sector to facilitate such
access: “The mind-set of employees can be as great a barrier to realizing
value from big data as technological inadequacy.” Privacy and security
concerns have led to the establishment of policy or legal restrictions that
prevent data sharing.