Global city data projects selected for inaugural NYU incubator

The Open Data Policy Lab within New York University’s GovLab has selected ten participants for its first City Incubator programme. They come from cities in the US, Canada, Romania, Nepal, Ecuador and Argentina.

The free six-month scheme will apply the start-up incubator model for helping entrepreneurs to grow companies to ‘intrapreneurs’ working on data projects in cities.

Following applications from five continents, selected projects include using citizen science to map road accidents in Mendoza, developing a diversity dashboard for the City of Winnipeg and expanding public-private data-sharing in New York City.

City data trends

Stefaan Verhulst, Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer at The GovLab, told Cities Today that the projects and submissions exemplify the principles of the “third wave of open data”.

“Cities have become the frontier of innovation as relates to open data,” he commented.

One key trend is a shift from opening data and waiting for innovation to happen, to a more purpose-driven approach.

“All the applications had a clear purpose in mind,” said Verhulst. “They wanted to solve a problem with a data innovation, whether it was a product or a new process. That’s an indication of a certain level of maturity in thinking about data.”

A collaborative approach was another common theme.

“In most of the applications there was a clear sense of collaboration with other stakeholders, whether these were internal or external, and that’s also a new trend that I feel is emerging and is probably one that has been solidified during COVID-19,” said Verhulst.

He added that the submissions also showed that thinking around data responsibility is evolving from being simply about harm prevention towards a greater focus on equity. This means not only using data to map equitable outcomes but also ensuring the data itself is representative of the population.

Product development 

Adrienne Schmoeker, Senior Fellow at The GovLab and former Deputy Chief Analytics Officer for the City of New York, said there was also a theme around creating data “products” such as dashboards, platforms and tools to engage residents and businesses.

“This product work and thinking about product development as its own function that might need its own skillset is still new for government,” she said.

“A lot of folks who are going to ingest the insights that come from data might not necessarily be data-literate, but they can benefit from these tools. A way of really multiplying the transformative power of data within an institution is through a data product.”

Ten city data innovators

The ten participants for the Open Data Policy Lab’s inaugural City Incubator are:

• Jennifer Bodnarchuk, Senior Data Scientist, Innovation & Technology Department, City of Winnipeg, Canada: Developing the City of Winnipeg’s first Diversity Dashboard to provide transparency into the municipal government’s workforce demographics and activities, aiming to create a more welcoming and inclusive workplace culture and city.
• Emri Brickner, Smart City Department Manager, Municipal Division of IT & Innovation, Beer Sheva, Israel: Scaling and broadening the scope of a data product that combines city population data across various channels with both internal and external insight tools and datasets to support economic development, decision-making and public transparency efforts.
• Andrea Calderon, Race & Equity Data Analyst, Office of Equity & Inclusion, City of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States: The Albuquerque Equity Index is a public geospatial tool to show geographies of inequity in Albuquerque and to help evaluate the reach of city service distribution with the goal of increasing municipal investment.
• Nicolas Diaz, Chief Innovation & Data Officer, Office of Accountability, Performance & Innovation, City of Syracuse, New York, United States: Supporting a new model for equitably assessing the property tax value of properties in Syracuse, using machine learning capabilities.
• Valentin Muresan, Personal Advisor to the Mayor of Timisoara for Smart City and Digital Transformation, Timișoara, Romania: Helping the Timișoara Open Data Lab establish data and AI ethics, standardisation and policies, and use technology and open data to support citizen engagement.
• Siddhanta Neupane, IT Officer & Project Team Leader, Changunarayan Municipality, Nepal: Taking the Changunarayan Open Data Platform to the next level by developing open data standards, policies and governance structures along with advancements in the geospatial functions of the platform.
• Cindy Nicklin, Data Operations Manager, and Oliver Bjornsson, Policy Analyst, Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics, New York City, United States: Scaling the Recovery Data Partnership, a data collaborative launched by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics during COVID-19 which gives 80 city analysts access to 15 external datasets. Through the City Incubator, the team aims to institutionalise this process to support future use cases and collaborations with third-party datasets.
• Danny Perches, Development Project Facilitator, City Manager’s Office, City of Springfield, Missouri, United States: Developing a public key performance indicator dashboard to demonstrate action and progress across the city’s various functions and improve trust with the public.
• Henry Xavier Hernandez Rendon, Chief Information Officer, City of Guayaquil, Ecuador: Launching a public market analysis geospatial open data tool, Citizen 360, to support businesses and other organisations and individuals in understanding potential investment opportunities in the city.
• Luciano Pedro Santoni, Geographer, Spatial Data Team, City of Mendoza, Argentina: Supporting digitisation and the creation of data about road accidents in Mendoza City through a citizen science project.

The Open Data Policy Lab team will share outcomes, lessons learned and best practices throughout the duration of the programme.

Partners supporting the programme include Microsoft, Mastercard City Possible, Luminate and Public Sector Network. Participants will have access to mentors such as Joy Bonaguro, Chief Data Officer for the State of California and Chris Whong, Outreach Engineer at Qri and former Director of NYC Planning Labs.

Image: Caleb Minear on Unsplash