In Civic Tech Circles, There Are Few Better Places to Be Than Philadelphia City Hall

PHILADELPHIA — With about nine months remaining in Mayor Michael Nutter’s second and final term in office, 2015 is a time to reflect on some of the noteworthy civic tech projects and tech-forward initiatives that City Hall has undertaken in recent years.

The unveiling of Philadelphia’s new open data portal and the improvements made to the now redeployed Philly 311 system are two big elements of the Nutter administration’s ongoing efforts to transform city government so it better delivers public services to residents, businesses and other stakeholders.

The civic innovation efforts in Pennsylvania’s largest city have been recognized with major awards and grants from organizations like the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Bloomberg Philanthropies.

With all that continued momentum and a more empowered local tech community, it’s also a time to think about which current mayoral candidates might continue Nutter’s efforts to reform City Hall processes like procurement and help support Philadelphia’s civic tech and startup infrastructure.

During a Civic Day gathering for Philly Tech Week on Monday evening, mayoral candidates participated in a debate focused on tech-specific topics. But as Technical.ly Philly reported, for the would-be mayors, this was “ a niche outside of most of the candidates’ comfort zones .”

Those candidates might have benefitted from a Civic Day gathering just before the mayoral forum that featured members of Nutter’s administration discussing their civic tech efforts at City Hall.

Story Bellows, the director of Nutter’s Office of New Urban Mechanics , said that she has hopes that the next mayor will maintain her operation, which was modeled after the one created at Boston City Hall under then-Mayor Thomas M. Menino and continued under current Mayor Martin J. Walsh.

“We are all urban mechanics,” Bellows said, borrowing a line that Menino, who died last fall, would often use when describing the work local public servants do on a daily basis.

While everyone in Philadelphia City Hall might be an urban mechanic according to Menino’s definition, Bellows said that there are great benefits to having a specific New Urban Mechanics office within a mayoral administration.

Bellows’ office serves as an in-house civic innovation R&D lab and a portal for innovators to interact with City Hall and a place where municipal innovation and ideas can be tinkered with.

“We’ve really been at the forefront of this national movement, this international movement, on civic innovation,” Bellows said during the Philly Tech Week Civic Day Open Access PHL event at the Pipeline Philly co-working space, which enjoys great views of City Hall across the street from its 15th floor perch.

Bellows and her colleagues are busy planning for the rest of Nutter’s City Hall tenure—and the next mayoral administration.

That includes preparing transition plans on the Nutter administration’s procurement reform efforts, which were honored with a $1 million Mayors Challenge award from the Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2013.

Overall, Bellows said, the success of the reform efforts on procurement come down to this question facing City Hall: “How can we be a place that’s attractive to more vendors?”

Part of that depends on the success of translating the sometimes confusing “legal English” of the procurement process into “conversational English,” she said.

For Todd Baylson, tech procurement advocate at the Office of Innovation & Technology, part of the challenge that comes with the reform efforts is tied to balancing transparency with process efficiencies.

In Philadelphia, those who bid on city contracts must detail their political contributions as part of their contract bid. Baylson told the crowd at Pipeline Philly that while such disclosures are important for transparency, some city contractors have said the rules are overly burdensome.

Additional rules, like having bidders certify that they have no ties to Northern Ireland or Sudan, might indeed be outdated, but are nevertheless on the books for bidders and procurement officers to navigate.

The procurement reform efforts, Baylson said, are trying to create a better system that works for everyone.

Baylson touted two new websites for city contractors, eContract Philly and BigIdeasPHL.com , which allows users to sign up for notifications when new software and Web development projects are posted.

Among the list of other Web and tech improvements at City Hall, Baylson also mentioned Philadelphia’s new analytics website that allows average citizens to see how much traffic individual city websites are getting.

The newly launched website has a “dashboard” that displays minute by minute, the total number of people visiting nearly 30 of the city’s online domains. It also provides daily updates ranking the most heavily trafficked sites, as well as information about the types of devices, browsers and operating systems the city’s online visitors are using.

“We’ve realigned our thinking as a city around being customer centric and customer focused,” Richard Negrin, Philadelphia’s deputy mayor of administration and coordination and managing director, said as he discussed the analytics site during an interview on Tuesday.

The dashboard application currently relies on data from a Google Analytics account for Philadelphia offices and agencies and is based on technology initially developed within the U.S. General Services Administration , according to information on the analytics site.

Many city web domains are not yet included in the dashboard figures and more data will be made available over time, the website also notes.

The analytics site comes as the city continues work on alpha.phila.gov , a new city website that Philadelphia is building “out in the open,” while attempting to incorporate user feedback. It currently features links to Philadelphia’s online 311 reporting portal and property search tool , as well as incomplete sections related to issues like public safety and city contracts .

“This is sort of an extension of what we’ve done around our alpha site,” Negrin said, referring to the analytics dashboard.

As of Tuesday, the dashboard data showed that by far the city’s most-trafficked web address was it’s main site, www.phila.gov , which had 796,845 visitors in the last 30 days. In second place was the city’s property website, which had 74,571 visitors during the same time period.

This chart, built off of data from the City of Philadelphia, excludes Web traffic information for the city's top-performing website, phila.gov.

In Negrin’s view, the people who will be most interested in the analytics data are likely to be journalists, entrepreneurs and mobile app developers.

He also acknowledged there are limits to what the analytics site will provide.

“It helps inform us with regard to one segment of the population, those folks that are online and how they’re interacting with us, but I don’t think it answers the entire riddle of what does everyone care about,” he said. “The digital divide is a very real issue here in Philadelphia, and there’s a significant percentage of our folks that are just not a part of that conversation yet.”

Still, he emphasized that the analytics site and the alpha site were important components in the city’s drive to develop new technology. “We’re not walking in with preconceived notions around a solution that is a top-down approach,” Negrin said. “The most successful programs adapt, integrate and are community driven.”