Our pursuit of innovation
We are incredibly excited to announce a pilot program that has just been launched by the Division of Code Enforcement. We are calling this the TOP Code Enforcement Pilot Program because it helps Code Inspectors to better respond to tenants’ needs, interact with property owners, and be more proactive in identifying code violations.
I was running late to the Behavioral Insights conference in NYC. Despite planning efforts, I was having trouble checking into the hotel and now only had fifteen minutes to get from East 92nd Street and 1st Avenue to 78th and Madison (Bloomberg Philanthropies!). Seeing the time tick by, I made a decision. I abandoned the concierge, grabbed my luggage and began my stressed out walk/run toward the nearest 6 train. While I clamored across the upper east side, I drilled through what I would do if I got there five minutes late (walk in quietly and sit down) versus fifteen minutes late (wait out the first meeting of the day and join the group after) versus more than thirty minutes late (resign in shame).
We’ve posted before about how a human-centered design approach is integral to our research process, but it’s also a big part of our ideation and initiative development. Similar to how we need to work with residents who interact with systems and challenges every day to fully understand them, we need input from residents to know exactly what ideas will work most effectively to help them.
Today, we are excited to launch DataCuse, an open data portal and website for the City of Syracuse. You can visit it now at data.syrgov.net.
We’ve posted here about how we use data to make decisions and why making data publicly available is important. With DataCuse, people in the community have access to a growing list of data that is collected and created by the City.
In April 2017, the Environmental Protection Agency removed information from its website relating to climate change. This included scientifically-based information and data about climate change, its causes, and its impacts... Thanks to work led by the City of Chicago, the information that used to reside on the EPA’s website was copied and is now published on a variety of municipal websites, including the City of Syracuse’s.
As you open the door to the Syracuse Innovation Office, your eyes catch the brightly painted walls, a sitting area with literature on cities and data science, the chalkboard wall covered in names and drawings. To your right is a conference room, decorated wall to wall in gigantic white post its; layered in smaller multicolored ones. Each note contains a problem, solution, or idea. In the final room sits the team of dedicated city innovators, busy working on improving economic opportunity in Syracuse.
Driving through many of Syracuse’s neighborhoods today, one can’t help but notice the boarded up vacant houses, trash-strewn vacant lots, crumbling porches, and chipping paint. One might ask, how did this happen? How did we get here? And, what impact does neighborhood blight have on the city and its residents? What are the consequences to living in unstable and unsafe housing? And how does it affect our residents’ access to opportunity?
