Project: Open Data Standard and Analysis Framework - Building Response Equity in Local Governments
By: Joy Hsu, Ramya Ravichandran, & Edwin Zhang
How can we better understand equity in local governments and the resources they provide to our communities?
In collaboration with DataKind, a global nonprofit organization bringing expert data scientists to find solutions with social change organizations, MOTI launched an open data standard and analysis framework toward equity — a publicly accessible system to understand the quality of government services in San José by location and the people who live there.
The City of San José is the tenth most populous city in the United States, and one of the most diverse. At MOTI, we aim to hold our City government accountable to providing equitable services to its residents. What equitable services means may not translate between cities — here, we define equity as using the City’s data ethically and in ways that drive equitable outcomes for our constituents.
We chose to focus on emergency response times as a measure of equity to demonstrate this open data standard and analysis framework. Emergency response times are an important measure of the quality of government service, and this measure both affects decisions about future resourcing (e.g., in where fire stations are placed) and can be used by community members to highlight both strengths and areas of potential improvement for their city government. For example, a New York City resident wrote to their city government that they were concerned about the lack of accessibility to emergency services in their neighborhood, but they couldn’t find a way to download the full dataset. We’re working to help citizens like them.
Read the full case study, including a demo of the team’s prototype, on DataKind’s blog.
Joy Hsu was a tech policy fellow with MOTI and is currently pursuing her PhD in Computer Science at Stanford. Edwin Zhang and Ramya Ravichandran are DataKind San Francisco volunteers.
