Watch: Route Fifty Panelists Dive Into State and Local Government Data Use Practices
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Connecting state and local government leaders
Representatives from the city of Pittsburgh, the commonwealth of Virginia and The Pew Charitable Trusts spoke with Executive Editor Michael Grass on managing ‘the fuel that turns the gears of government.’
We’re living through the early stage of the era of public-sector data-driven decision-making, one that promises greater interactivity and efficiency on the part of government. But the power of public data in the digital age is often touted generally, even abstractly, when it’s the details that can truly inform interested members of the government and the public today. We want to know how governments are making data available, to whom, to what end, and with what degree of success.
“Data is the fuel that turns the gears of government,” said Route Fifty Executive Editor Michael Grass last week Tuesday to open a viewcast panel discussion on the topic last Tuesday hosted by the Government Executive Media Group's Route Fifty. Panelists were Tom Conroy, vice president of the government performance research unit at The Pew Charitable Trusts,; Anthony Fung, Virginia’s deputy secretary of technology; and Laura Meixell, Pittsburgh’s analytics and strategy manager.
“In western Pennsylvania, we’re dealing with the problem of municipal fragmentation,” Meixell said. “There are 132 municipalities in Allegheny County, where the Pittsburgh is located, and that’s just bananas. It’s a really crazy way to think about organizing operations because major policy issues don’t stop at the municipal border edge. A major issue we deal with is sewer overflow and water quality issues. We’re currently under nearly a $4 billion consent decree from the [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] to fix those issues.”
Meixell was touting the work of the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center, a project supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Heinz Endowment in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh. The center gathers together regional government, academic and nonprofit data in one place and provides services to data publishers to help make the data as accessible and digestible as possible.
“One way to think about how to address fragmentation,” Meixell said, is to “create a platform for sharing information and creating data standards that will truly address larger community issues.“
Conroy shared insights from a daunting 18-month project he is undertaking at Pew to review data practices in all 50 state governments.
He mentioned four rough categories of activity being undertaken. Governments are working to make more data available for use within government and among the public. They are using more data and data collection to enhance public-sector performance. They are also integrating data systems, and they are using data collected over relatively long stretches of time for predictive purposes.
"Collecting data longitudinally allows policy makers to predict what’s happening, say, with foster children in the child welfare space, to see who’s most at risk, who needs certain services given their history in the system,” he said.
And integrating data systems is also critical.
“You match child welfare with Medicaid with housing data and suddenly you get a picture that is more holistic about a family, about a child with certain trends and characteristic, so that you can make at the government level better operational, budget and performance decisions," he said.
Grass noted that some municipalities are doing better than others with their data practices.
“Our system of federalism in the United States doesn’t necessarily mandate best practices being implemented across the board,” he said.
“Yes, you’re right, there’s a wide spectrum out there,” Conroy said, which is why it’s important to highlight the best work being done.
Conroy, a former four-term state representative in Massachusetts, highlighted cases where matching up datasets led authorities in Ohio to root out income tax fraud, health officials in Minnesota to zero in on unnecessary hospital readmissions that cost the state $2 billion, and the government in Indiana to make budget and resource-allocation tweaks to reduce infant mortality.
Other topics addressed by the panel included use of public-space sensors—on garbage cans to make collection more efficient, in crime areas to detect gunshots and the sound of ball bearings moving in a shaken can of spray paint—and the kind of administrative culture that works best at promoting the best data-practice development.
Watch the full hour-long viewcast above.
John Tomasic is a journalist who lives in Boulder, Colorado.
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