Engagement

Open Data and Hacking for Good

Open Data and Hacking for Good

On February 19th, some members of our Office of Accountability, Performance, and Innovation (API), Nico Diaz (Chief Innovation and Data Officer), and Jason Scharf (Data Program Manager) had the pleasure to be part of CuseHacks' 2022 Hackathon. These events generally last somewhere between 24 and 72 hours, where teams break up and compete against each other to create innovative web applications, websites, maps, or design products to help solve different challenges. Some Hackathons have themes and some have different prizes for different categories.

CuseHacks is a Student-run Hackathon put on by Syracuse University students every year. Our API team was very excited at the chance to partner with CuseHacks and help sponsor this event.

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A Successful Deployment of the City of Syracuse's Snow Plow Map: What it Does, What We've Learned, and What We Plan to Do

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A Successful Deployment of the City of Syracuse's Snow Plow Map: What it Does, What We've Learned, and What We Plan to Do

Syracuse is no stranger to snow – historically we see an average of 124 inches a year and tend to be in the top 5 snowiest big cities in the country (from the Golden Snow Globe Competition). In an effort to share how we operate during a storm, we developed a snowplow map that shows when a street was last plowed.

Our Deputy Chief Innovation & Data Officer, Conor Muldoon, wrote a post outlining what led up to our current snowplow map and the potential impact of it right before we launched the tool in December here.

We have had several snow storms since the launch of the City’s Snow Plow map (ESRI’s Winter Weather Operations tool) the first week of December 2021. We successfully launched the tool to the public with the first large storm in January, tracking the plowed status of streets for three days, and saw around 12,000 hits over the course of the storm to the public viewer. We continue to maintain high engagement during the storms after, seeing consistent views of the tool throughout the storm’s length.

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Syracuse Winter Weather Operations

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In 2018, the Office of Accountability, Performance, and Innovation developed an in-house web application to track the City’s fleet of snow plow trucks and map street segments that had been plowed during winter storms in order to communicate to residents when their street had been plowed. The tool was exceptionally well-received and played an important role in the City’s communication strategy around an important public service delivery. However, last year the system experienced significant challenges with the underlying sensor technology and ran into limitations in the frequency of the network provider’s communications - resulting in performance issues that made the much-anticipated snow plow map no longer functional.

Despite extensive attempts to work around the inherent technical limitations, it became apparent that it was time to develop a more robust solution.

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Introducing SYRCityline- transforming resident engagement and quality of service.

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Cityline has always been a portal to communicate with the residents, understand their concerns and find ways to address them, but a strong program is only successful if it continues to meet the needs for which it was intended, and for that, it has to be relevant, easy to use, and efficient.

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Living a Quality Life in Syracuse

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Over the past year, the quality of life project has sought to understand what direction our residents want to see the city drive in by asking “What matters most to your quality of life?”. The idea here is that the city is currently in a car in the middle of a parking lot with 360 degrees of directions to go in. The car is made of numbers, and the parking lot is made of the stories we hear from residents every day. By learning more about quality of life from constituent perspectives, we hoped to narrow down from 360degrees to just a few roads to choose to drive down. 

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Sentiment analysis of social media shows how to address vaccine hesitancy in Syracuse

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As more doses of the COVID-19 vaccine become available in the US, communities across the country have begun encountering vaccine hesitancy – sectors of the population that have access to doses but that express doubts, skepticism, or concerns. The ability to understand where that hesitancy comes from, and how to address it, could mean the difference between achieving herd immunity early or enduring many more months of the pandemic.

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Travel Request Submissions go Digital

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Travel Request Submissions go Digital

In 2018 our former Director of Innovation started a program over the summer aimed at changing the innovative culture in City Hall with the aspirations of identifying and executing a process improvement project that was meaningful and would impact a number of departments. The API office's ideation luncheon sparked the interest of many and we got a variety of ideas and suggestions.

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Measuring Customer Experience

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Since May 2019, we’ve been working to improve the City’s permitting function. This is the fourth of six posts that talk about early initiatives to improve organizational structure and processes.

As we continue to focus on permitting, we want to regularly incorporate customer feedback into our initiatives. To do this, the Central Permit Office has launched an in-person Customer Satisfaction Survey. This survey informs staff and management about the customer experience and create a baseline for improvement. We also hope that it will highlight positive customer encounters and interactions.