Making Open Data Accessible to Communities: City Forward and other Data Visualization Tools

John C. Reinhardt, AICP - Program Manager, City ForwardIBM Corporate Citizenship

November 18, 2011

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Data and Cities: an IBM perspective

City Forward: a Corporate Citizenship Initiative

The Future: Data Literacy and Real-World Examples

Presentation Overview

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Today, almost anything—any object, process or system—can be instrumented, inter-connected and infused with intelligence.

Data is lying in archives, published on government websites, being sensed from in-strumentation in the environment, deduced from aerial imagery, and built from the ground-up by citizens electronically communicating about city life.

This reality holds enormous promise for people everywhere. Nowhere is the potential for progress more evident than in the world’s cities.

Our Cities Generate Vital Signs

Instrumented | Interconnected | Intelligent

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The Future is Urban

1900 2007 2050

13% 50% 70%

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Cities are a Complex System of SystemsHere, all man-made systems intersect, interact and interconnect with one another.

On average 45% of a city’s budget goes to providing public safety services

Up to 40% of world energy use takes place in buildings

In Mexico City, 600 new vehicles enter the congested streets every day

A 1% increase in the college-educated population of a metropolitan area raises ev-erybody else’s average wages by 0.8%-1.2%

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Data in CitiesNational Data

City Data

Neighborhood Data

- Relatively easy to secure.-Good for comparing cities to national averages.- Can be by academics, NGOs, think tanks.

- Relatively easy to secure.- Good for comparing peer cities (as cities like to do!)- Can be used by journalists, city governments, academic researchers.

- Di!cult to secure.- Good for making policy & resourcing decisions.- Can be used by citizens, CDCs , urban planners, etc.

Individual Data

- Explosion with new instrumentation- Allows for interesting predictive analytics- Privacy concerns

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Importance of Data

Smarter Cities bring together information in ways that lead to new insights and support decision-making.

What is City Forward?

City Forward is a free, web-based platform that lets users visualize and interact with city data while engaging with a community of people who are passionate about the future of cities.

cityforward.org

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What does City Forward do?

Interactive exploration tools turn raw data into actionable information—revealing important patterns and insights

Easy-to-use collaboration tools enable robust discussion, annotation and social sharing functionality

Thought leadership and data curation guide the discussion of open data and cities

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Explorations

Data sources, visualizations and user commentary are com-bined to create explorations that bring important aspects of the data into focus for further analysis Explorations can be created by anyone from the community of City Forward users

An Exploration can be about one or more topics in one or more cities data + visualization + commentary = an “Exploration”

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An Exploration - Syracuse and Housing Building Permits in Syracuse (Syracuse’s boom occurred in the late 90s)

Homeowner Vacancy in Peer cities Baltimore, Syracuse, Detroit(Baltimore’s vacancy was more stable. What policies were in place?)

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How Does it Work?

Database

City

GovernmentAgency

Community

Community

Data Acquisition &

Transformation Services

Services

ContentUser

Community & Data Explorations

Exploration

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IBM Technology in Action

IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligencefor data analysis

IBM DB2 Database for data storage

IBM ILOG Elixir for Data visualization

IBM Rational products for requirements and project mgmt

IBM Tivoli software for user info mgmt

IBM Lotus products for content mgmt and social networking

Click here for a full technology overview.

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Focus Audiences

Audience 2PractitionersCitiesCorporationsGovernmentSMEsAcademics

Have tools, data, and expertise to share

Audience 1Citizens

StudentsMediaNGOs

In need of tools, data, and training

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City Forward Model

Data

Knowledge

Action

Data identification,vetting, and storage

Discussions of open data standards*

Explorations

Expert Blog Posts*

White Papers*

Conferences & Events

Best Practice Community*

Community Networking

* coming in 2012

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City Forward Model in Action

DataData sets on bridge & tunnel crossings, toll collection, commuting patterns, etc. loaded into City Forward.

Academics export data sets for use with SPSS, GIS, etc.

KnowledgeCity Forward exploration visualizes trends in bridge & tunnel use, traffic jams, and toll collection revenues.

Expert Blogger weighs in on the economics of congestion pricing on City Forward Blog.

City Forward publishes white paper on data and transportation, which includes a section on congestion pricing.

IBM CC&CA staff advises local university capstone project, results distributed through City Forward.

Smarter Cities Challenge includes City Forward Explorations

ActionCitizens weigh in on congestion pricing exploration using Facebook and Twitter.

City leadership reviews case studies of New York City and London posted in the City Forward best practices community.

Local IBM CC&CA Rep hosts a City Forward working session with NGO and government experts in the city.

City reviews all information and recommends a congestion pricing strategy.

Would congestion pricing

work in my city?

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City FocusSCC Cities

Academic Partnership Cities

Business Opportunities

CC&CA Field Representatives

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Topic Focus

Education & Workforce Development | Social Safety Net

Disaster Management | Food Systems

Chosen based on several criteria:

Emerging sectors for IBM, hot topics in the media, data availability, and ability to engage in thought leadership.

Focus topics are not at the exclusion of other explorations, but help focus the outreach to speci"c user groups.

Citizen Engagement (across all vertical topics)

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Successes to date

Number of Explorations

Number of SubjectsNumber of Cities

National Average CitiesData Sources

SCC Integration

Academic Partnerships

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31783242

- City Forward is part of the 2012 City Selection Process.

- Integration with Syracuse, Philadel-phia, and Helsinki

NYU Urban Systems Competition, NC State Youth Services Project, Notre

Dame Foresight CourseYale, MIT, Harvard Capstones

Total

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Other Tools

Social Networking and Community Building Tools

Included

Independent Discovery

m Many  Eyes

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“The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand. You don’t have to be a data expert to navigate between di#erent views, make your own comparisons, and share your "ndings.

Students, journalists, policy makers and everyone else can play with the tool to create visualizations of public data, link to them, or embed them in their own webpages. Embedded charts and links can update automatically so you’re always sharing the latest available data.”

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Simple, Minimal Interface

Animations of data over time

Ability to embed and share

User-uploaded datasets

Datasets from: World Bank; Eurostat; OECD; US Bureau of Labor Stats; US Census; CDC; World Resources Institute; NYC Department of Public Health, etc.

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“Tableau Public is a free service that lets anyone publish interactive data to the web. Once on the web, anyone can interact with the data, download it, or create their own visualizations of it. No programming skills are required.

The free version of Tableau Public is for people. This includes writers, bloggers, students, professors, hobbyists, journeymen, critics, citizens and more. It’s also meant for organizations, but only as an introductory service. If your organization wants to put data online for the public, you are welcome to use this as an introductory service.”

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Users must download software

Robust “Community” section

O#ers best practices on visualization

Does not store datasets, but links topublicly available data.

Allows users to share and comment

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m Many  Eyes

“Data visualisation tools from IBM. Site allows users to upload data and then produce graphic representations for others to view and comment upon.”

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m Many  Eyes

Robust “Community” section

Users can upload their own data

Users can share data sets

Allows users to share their viz

Many good looking viz options

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“Data visualization works so well because the human brain is extremely well-equipped to process visual information. We can capture patterns and essential themes in huge data sets very, very quickly through visual means.

Unfortunately, the tools to create these visual representations are usually too expensive and di!cult for smaller news organizations and everyday citizens to use, creating a gap for the future of community journalism. With the generous support of the Knight Foundation, we created VIDI, a suite of powerful intuitive Drupal data-visualization modules for anyone to use on any standard set of data ranging from government databases to demographics and statistics.

Jack Knight called for media to inform and enlighten, so the people might determine their own true interests. As we come to understand his exhortation’s new, evolving meaning, we must continually challenge ourselves to break down professional barriers in order to empower the in"nite diversity of equally true interests. “Raw Data Now” should be our battle cry, and open-source data visualization modules our weaponry. Visualize the power of data!”

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Developed speci"cally for Journalists

Users must identify data sets

To share, users must have a Drupal-based website

The best looking visualizations are created through Google API

Tool is set up to visualize by selecting “Time”, “Geo” or “Comparative” data

Requires some technical skill and data literacy

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“The Global City Indicators Program provides an established set of city indicators with a globally standardized methodology that allows for global comparability of city performance and knowledge sharing. This website serves all cities that become members to measure and report on a core set of indicators through this web-based relational database.”

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Allows for city to city comparison

Allows comparisons of “peer cities”

Could have useful data for City Forwardvisualizations

Many cities do not have data

Reports are only in “chart” form

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The future of urban data: More Data

Better Data Better Use of Data

More Collaboration Amongst Professions

What’s Next?

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City Forward is currently the only tool with the following features:

Extensive City-level data

Storage of datasets on the City Forward website

City comparison features using city-reported data

Global scope at the city level

Thinking about: How to Scale the number of cities and data sets included

User experience redesign, built around cities as hubs

City Forward as a data literacy tool

What’s Next?

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Accessing, understanding and processing data will be key to accessing the best opportunities in cities in the 21st century

Where to send the kids to school

Where jobs are located and where they pay the most

How to minimize energy consumption

“We didn’t build libraries for a literate citizenry. We built libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data portals not because we have public policy literate citizens, we build them so that citizens may become literate in public policy.” - David Eaves

Data Literacy

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What are we doing as a group to foster citizen interaction with data, increase data literacy, and improve the understanding of

urban systems among the general public?

Challenge to the Urban Systems Collaborative

Questions | Open Discussion