Cities

This is Datadoodle

April 22, 2021 by Ted Cuzzillo

Where’s Datadoodle? It’s been on everyone’s mind, absolutely everyone’s. Well, not really. Most longtime readers probably assumed that the latest sabbatical was just Datadoodle doing business as usual. Still, the latest pause, from late 2019 until today, was just one of several in the blog’s 14 year history,

This time was slightly different. I took a full time job as an industry analyst to see if the benefits of a paycheck and camaraderie compensated for lockstep. It didn’t. But I did get to spend 12 months with a remarkably intelligent and humane team. I also learned a few important things about industry analysis, some of which I will apply here. The others I will repudiate.

Datadoodle returns with a few changes

Cadence. I plan to publish every Tuesday and, as soon as I can sustain it, one other day, too.

Focus. At least to start, Datadoodle will observe and comment on two of my old favorites, data storytelling and smart cities — from the intersection of the two. As always, Datadoodle will evolve with the industry, always with an eye on the horizon.

Smart cities and data narrative may seem at first glance like an odd couple. But it’s actually a natural and even unavoidable one.

Smart cities, the crucible. Smart cities rely in part on the willingness and ability to use data by the public, city staff, and others. What portion of these groups are data literate? What portion is willing to use data? The answers to both questions are ominous for smart-city dreamers and planners: Not many of them.

Data narratives, the connector. So then, how will the data-illiterate, data-averse, data-lazy, or just too-busy-for-data communicate and theorize? With stories, of course.

By the way, I will use “story” and “narrative” interchangeably. “Narrative” has connotations I prefer, and “story” is a sacred and ancient word that needs a rescue. More on that in later posts.

The narrative on stories, or the story on narratives

As data spills out from the relatively disciplined business space to public spaces, people will talk about it with the same medium they’ve always used. Imagine a simple example: A man asks his neighbor if it’s going to rain in the afternoon. The neighbor may pull out a smartphone to read the forecast and give the percent chance. He may only translate the percentage chance of rain into a range. Either way, whether he reads out the percentage or the range, it will be heard as a range like good chance, or fair chance, or no chance. Most data will be related in a similarly casual way.

Notice that such a story works even without an explicit beginning, middle, and end. His neighbor’s innate knowledge fills in on the fly.

A data story is much more than a parade of charts

My definition of data stories makes a sharp break from the one imposed on it by a presumptuous handful of writers. A data story is not parade of data charts! Such a pathetic spectacle benefits only those who already know how to interpret data.

Actual data narratives/stories are bigger, broader, and far more potent. They can even, for example, help analyze data. That includes theorizing about events that underlie metrics and suggesting new paths for analysis.

Stay tuned for more on the city-story “intersection.” I look forward to your comments!

One thing led to another toward a part in organized civic tech

November 4, 2019 by Ted Cuzzillo

Water from heavy rain around a blocked drain formed a puddle, and nearby resident Michael Norelli could have called the city. But he just cleared it himself. He kept on clearing it in storm after storm — simple do-it-yourself action that eventually led him to a civic tech team and even some notoriety.

It led him to meet a neighbor, a developer who volunteered at the San Francisco “brigade” of the nationwide civic tech group Code for America. That volunteer told him about a project called Adopt A Drain. Eventually, after a move across the bay, Norelli joined OpenOakland, the Oakland brigade.

By day, Norelli is a GIS analyst and expert cartographer, a much valued skill in OpenOakland’s water quality project. When he joined the team, they put him right to work adding state legislative district boundaries to the water quality map. Project founder Aaron Hans calls Norelli’s skills “incredibly useful.”

Norelli says he found the volunteer culture a little disconcerting at first. There’s not even a soft fist that comes down if you miss a deadline. Compared with most commercial cultures, this team’s culture hangs looser, the pace is slower, the expectations are milder, and the politics are there but tamer.

When he expressed concern that he wasn’t meeting his objectives, one of the group leaders seemed to dismiss it. “Oh, it’s a volunteer project,” she said.

Other groups seem to push on expectations a little more insistently, Norelli has observed. There, project managers who do the same work in for-profit organizations “definitely have a focus on corralling all the cats.”

He fears that low expectations will result in low impact, which can dishearten volunteers. If they show up consistently and in the end not their team has nothing actionable to show, many will drop off. “The worst thing would be for interested volunteers showing up on Tuesdays (Open Oakland’s meeting night),” he says, “applying themselves, and then having nothing actionable come from it.” But, I think, he might just be getting used to it all. He joined only a few months ago, in July.

Norelli mentions one soft incentive: no less than every other month, teams on every official project must present the project’s accomplishments since the last report. To Norelli, that’s better but still soft — while project leader Aaron Hans seems to regard it as a strong incentive to perform.

Hans says that expectations have to be lower than in the for-profit world. Every volunteer either has a full time job or is seeking one. You really need to respect their limited time, he says.

Whatever Norelli’s fears are, an October event turned up some proof in the project’s pudding: the water-quality project won the California Water Data Challenge’s Enduring Civic Collaborator/Engagement Award. It was among 50 projects submitted from around California.

Even more significant, Norelli says he finds one big, important difference from commercial work: the personal rewards are much higher. He says, “The big thing that keeps me excited and energized and motivated is that [with my new skills in] data visualization and the specialty of mapping, [creating] real change in the world is very exciting.”

Civic tech projects need storytellers

October 22, 2019 by Ted Cuzzillo

I asked a leader of one civic tech group the other day what his team lacked. Among the group’s half-dozen or so core contributors and about 20 occasional ones, they have a coder. They also have a guy who’s tied into local politics. And the guy I talked to, Nick Brooks, is the user-interface designer.

The group is Open Budget: Oakland, one of nearly a dozen active projects in OpenOakland, a local “brigade” associated with Code for America. Open Budget Oakland aims to provide everyday citizens with an understanding, mostly with data visualization, of the city budget and budget-making.

Brooks said, “People need to know how to use this.”