This one drew my eye when it was presented as a notice of motion at Brantford’s finance committee meeting in January. I waited on it because I was curious to see where it would go. It was approved at Wednesday’s finance committee meeting, subject to ratification by council.
Mayor Chris Friel has proposed a data analytics team / initiative within the city.
In a nutshell, this isn’t so much about collecting more data on you and your interactions with the city. It’s about actually using the data the city already has on its servers about you to serve you better. It’s also about using the data the city holds on infrastructure, programs and services to get a better understanding of how these things are used.
I’m a huge supporter of data-based decision making. More than I could ever express in words. Critics might bristle at some of the data implications, saying not everything the city does for people should be quantified in bits and bytes or be part of some formula.
But as a foundation for quantifying what the city does and how you interact with the city, data collection and the analysis of that collected data is fundamental.
When you know where you are, you can make much better decisions about where you can go.
As an aside, the data journalist in me can also get all kinds of opportunities to geek out with this information— provided the city also adopts an open data philosophy and opens relevant data (stripped of personal information, of course) up for public access.
Brantford