How smaller cities can partner to accelerate data sharing

Whatever the size of your community, data is increasingly vital to successful operations. Whether it is information from business systems, transport or traffic data, every city is generating growing volumes of data. Devices to capture information, such as Internet of Things (IoT) sensors are becoming cheaper and incorporated into more and more items, from traffic lights and rain gauges to trash cans, while wireless networks are now ubiquitous.

However, simply collecting this data only delivers limited benefits – sharing it internally, externally and across ecosystems releases its true value. Data sharing increases efficiency and innovation, enabling the creation of new services to meet the changing needs of citizens and businesses. This helps better manage budgets while attracting and retaining residents to your town or city. Data sharing delivers transparency about spending and activities and engages residents with your wider community.

Given that smaller cities have limited budgets and technical resources, they need to find ways to cost-effectively share their data with key stakeholders. Based on Opendatasoft’s panel discussion at Smart Cities Connect in Austin, this blog outlines three ways to achieve data sharing and deliver its benefits to smaller communities.

Sharing data externally with stakeholders such as citizens, businesses, other municipalities and internally with employees and elected officials delivers four key benefits for cities of every size:

Increased efficiency

Ensuring data is available to the right people at the right time automates processes, improves efficiency, and enables better decision-making. For example, providing elected officials with comprehensive, up-to-date information on key municipal objectives such as tackling homelessness or increasing sustainability allows them to make more informed decisions at both a strategic and operational level. 

The City of Long Beach is increasingly focused on combating homelessness and therefore collects and shares data on the issue, including breaking down numbers by electoral ward and other demographics via its data marketplace. This allows elected councilors to better understand homelessness at a local and city-wide level, feeding into decision-making, planning initiatives, and budgeting on the subject. 

Reduced risk

Cities are responsible for public safety, including ensuring that roads are safe and natural hazards such as flooding are contained. Deploying monitoring sensors helps capture data around potential risks, and then sharing it with the wider community ensures that it can be accessed to boost everyone’s safety. 

For example, the town of Cary in North Carolina shares data to highlight accident blackspots on the town’s roads and has installed a network of IoT water sensors and rain gauges across the town to give early warning of flooding. This data is shared through an interactive, granular dashboard on its data marketplace, keeping the community up to date on flood risks. Importantly this data is also used for internal decision-making, including the closure of roads or greenways, rerouting traffic to avoid floodwaters, and collaborating with communities upstream and downstream to assist in their preparedness efforts.

Enabling innovation

The needs of citizens are changing rapidly, and they expect towns and cities to meet their requirements through innovative, people-centric solutions. Implementing smart city programs that collect and use data are essential to delivering what citizens and businesses want. This increases engagement and attracts new residents to a town, building a stronger and more vibrant community. 

Morrisville in North Carolina is focused on using innovation to make its residents’ lives easier and more fulfilled. Amongst its smart city programs it uses sensors to measure whether sports facilities such as tennis courts and swimming pools are busy to help citizens plan their trips, and has deployed smart trash cans that automatically message town employees when they are nearly full. This information is made available via its public data marketplace and interactive app that shows the status and busyness of amenities while allowing residents to report incidents (such as potholes), and book rides on the municipality’s Smart Shuttle transport system.

Greater transparency

Towns and cities are responsible for spending taxpayer dollars wisely and effectively, meaning they need to demonstrate that they are operating transparently and ethically at all times. Sharing data on their overall performance, and that of elected officials helps deliver this transparency, building trust and increasing confidence and engagement. 

A perfect example of this is the pioneering Transparency Hub created by Frankston City Council in Australia. Part of a larger policy to increase engagement, trust and sustainable development of management of assets and infrastructure, the Hub is a user-friendly data marketplace that provides an overview of Frankston City Council’s decision-making and activities. This includes information on Frankston’s councilors, including the expenses they have claimed, attendance at meetings and briefings and a summary of decisions they have taken, as well as extensive information on the council’s financials, including expenditure, income, procurement and progress on capital works projects. 

As can be seen by the examples above, data sharing benefits every size of community. However, smaller towns and cities clearly have access to less resources and skills, meaning they have to be innovative in how they share data. Aside from creating their own public data marketplace, they can begin their data sharing journey in one of four ways:

Build interest by publishing data on your central website

A good way to gauge interest and start to build internal support for data sharing is to upload key documents and data to a section on the main municipal website. While this doesn’t deliver the same seamless experience as a data marketplace, it does focus employees on the importance of data sharing, and encourages the creation of an internal data culture. It also demonstrates transparency and builds a community around data which can then be used to justify increased focus and budget moving forward.

Work with your region

Rather than creating a single data marketplace for one municipality, the cost can be spread amongst multiple towns in the same region. In the United States, Councils of Government provide a strong focal point for combined sharing. They already bring together local government entities to coordinate programs and services, and this can be extended to a joint data marketplace that covers multiple municipalities.

Work with your state 

States collect and share large volumes of data, on everything from demographics to economic performance. They therefore have their own data marketplaces to share this information, and are committed to working with their local communities to widen data sharing and accountability. By collaborating with state data teams smaller towns and cities can get access to relevant data, which can then be showcased on their own site, or highlighted on state data marketplaces. 

Work with other public entities

A whole range of public entities, from school districts to police and fire departments, all want to share their data to ensure accountability and demonstrate performance to their communities. Working with them helps smaller cities to spread the resources required to share data, either through adding data to their sites or creating joint data marketplaces that provide more comprehensive information to the community.

Whichever approach you begin with, the data a town shares has to be easily understandable, consumable and relevant to its stakeholders. Information must be made available in ways that non-experts, such as citizens, can understand through intuitive visualizations including interactive maps, drill-down dashboards and in-depth data stories. Experts should be able to download information in key formats and via APIs.

This requires a centralized, self-service public data marketplace. Based on the same intuitive experience as an e-commerce marketplace, a data marketplace connects data producers to data consumers, accelerating data usage and sharing. It seamlessly delivers benefits around efficiency, productivity, innovation and transparency, maximizing ROI from investments in data. The best data marketplace solutions are also quick to deploy and easy to manage, reducing costs and overheads for cities and municipalities. Essentially they free your data and make it available to the right audiences in the right formats, accelerating usage, building trust and enabling you to deliver on your civic objectives.

Want to find out more about how a public data marketplace can transform how you share and use data? At Opendatasoft we work with public sector organizations from across the world – book an appointment with our experts to learn how we can help you turn your data into lasting value.