Denver Mid-year Report Code for America

Showing what’s possible with open data and good service design.

Contents Background

pg5

Introduction

pg7

Our Team

pg8

Civic Tech Landscape

pg9

Projects

pg11

311 Data Visualization

pg12

Cuties in Denver

pg14

Marijuana Indicators

pg16

Street Sweeping

pg18

Community

pg21

What’s Next?

pg25

Projects // 311 Data Visualization

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3

Introduction The City and County of Denver wants to be the model of a 21st century city and they are already on their way. Denver has an open data portal with more than 180 data sets, a team of UX designers, and a unique program of process improvement called Peak Academy. Denver is driven by constant improvement. They are looking for more people to engage with their data sets. They also want to ensure the city is serving the public effectively by streamlining service delivery. By partnering with Code for America, the City hopes they can accomplish these goals. When we arrived in February, our city partners told us that it costs roughly $3 for every call that comes into 311 (their non-emergency information hotline). We learned that the city has been trying to get residents to find the same information using the web or mobile apps and reduce their call volume by 25%. We found that there is no single 311 area that a majority of residents call about and decided that the best way for us to have an impact would be to address a variety of call areas. Given these challenges, we set the goal of fostering a community of civic innovation with small tactical interventions. We chose these interventions by looking at data and understanding the experiences and frustrations of residents. With each project we hope to demonstrate how open data can be used, while also demonstrating the value of good service design.

Background // Introduction

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7

Our Team Becky Boone Fellow

David P. Edinger Chief Performance Officer

Drew Wilson Fellow

Chris Binnicker Deputy Chief Information Officer

Kavi Harshawat Fellow

Sarah Kurz Director of Strategic Marketing

Background // Our Team

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8

Civic Tech Landscape

Brigade There are two brigades in the Denver area, Code for Boulder and Code for Denver.

Civic Hackers There is a strong community of civic hacking in Denver with organizations like GoCode Colorado, hack4colorado, Warm Cookies for the Revolution leading the charge.

Open Data The portal is run by a third party, Open Colorado. The city has 180+ data sets but most are geo-spatial. The city doesn’t have an official Open Data Policy.

Background // Civic Tech Landscape

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311 Data Visualization The city shares monthly reports about their 311 cases internally. We saw an opportunity to improve the design and readability of these reports while also using publicly available 311 data from Denver’s open data portal. One of our first projects was to analyze and visualize the 311 data available online. By looking at it we assessed how people were using 311 and what they were calling in about. We used this data to drive the decisions that we made about next projects. Since we used open data, this visualization could be viewed by anyone.

Outcomes: Utilizes existing data set. Transparent and easy to read visualization of data. We hope to templatize this visualization so the city can use it for other data sets. Status: Styling the data prior to launch.

Projects // 311 Data Visualization

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Notes:

of 311 calls are for information. We can improve residents’ experiences by providing that information in other channels.

Top 311 Areas* 1. Registration Renewal 2. Graffiti Private 3. Vehicle Registration 4. Snow/Ice on Sidewalk 5. Graffiti Public

of 311 cases come via phone

of 311 cases come via the web

* 1/12014-3/16/2014

Projects // 311 Data Visualization

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Cuties in Denver The Denver animal shelter can house thousands of dogs, cats, and other small animals, and when summer comes around, the facility reaches that capacity. The city takes pictures of these animals and posts brief bios to their website. We saw an opportunity to engage even more citizens by putting this data where people are already communicating, on social media. Before our project the city hadn’t yet considered shelter data as a potential open data-set. With the help of the Denver Brigade, we created an API and @CutiesInDenver, a Twitter bot that automatically shares photos of adoptable pets. Since launching, a handful of other cities has expressed interest in the project.

Outcomes: Opens a new data-set for stray animals in Denver. Potential to open data for shelters across the country. Meets residents on social networks rather than a city website.

Status: Launched. Redeployed in 2 cities. Planning additional integrations. Working with vendor to create an open API.

Projects // Cuties

in Denver

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Notes:

“Having seen this Twitter bot, it has opened my eyes to the opportunities for how the public might want to use this data […] I think any exposure we can get to having animals adopted or bringing the public's eye to what the Denver Animal Shelter is doing is great.” - Alice Nightengale, Director of Denver Animal Shelter

We’ve inspired interest from Mesa, Boston, Austin, and Evanstan (IL)

The Denver Animal Shelter’s site is the 8th most visited site in Denver.

Projects // Cuties

in Denver

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Marijuana Indicators in Denver Colorado is one of the first states to legalize retail marijuana in the country and its impact on the capital city has been far-reaching. The city has received a growing number of calls from the press about licensing of marijuana retailers, safety impacts, and revenue from the new industry. With this project, we intend to help the city leverage its commitment to open data and transparency and illustrate the impacts of retail marijuana in a platform that would be easily accessible for city leaders and employees, reporters and the public. This project opens up facilities data, crime data, and revenue data from retail- and medical marijuana; could result in reduced staff time spent responding to press inquiries; and helps the city lend its data to the national conversation about Marijuana legislation in the United States.

Outcomes: New open data sets for crime, revenue, and licenses. Transparent and easy to read visualization of data. Reduced call volume. Status: Coding done. Waiting for data.

Projects // Marijuana

Indicators * 16

Street Sweeping Reminders Street sweeping is a major pain point for many Denver residents. It was one of the most frequent complaints we heard in our interviews with residents and the Denver Post even published a piece about residents’ frustrations with the issue. The city does not digitally publish a street sweeping schedule, the only source for this information is on street signs. We built a street sweeping notification system that allows residents to get reminders about upcoming occurrences of street sweeping. By choosing technologies that the city developers already use and by working closely with those developers, we are ensuring that this project can have a long-term impact. This small project can prevent some stress for residents, help them avoid fines, and hopefully reduce the number of information requests coming into 311.

Outcomes: New data set for street sweeping schedules. Potential for many more Denver schedules. Reduced 311 call volume. Status: Finishing development and planning a launch.

Projects // Street Sweeping

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Notes:

“Last year, the city issued 683,884 citations for meter violations, parking in tow-away zones (including on sweeping days), license-plate violations, exceeding two-hour limits and dozens of other infractions.” - Denver Post

> 1,900

calls into 311 about street sweeping last year.*

residents have signed up for Denver’s existing street sweeping notification system.**

unique page views on Denver’s street sweeping website per month on average.**

* for all of 2013 ** 4/23/2013 – 4/23/2014

Projects // Street Sweeping

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Press: What Open Data is Doing for Denver Dogs http://www.govtech.com/data/What-Open-Data-Can-is-Doing-for-Pets.html

Behind the Scenes: Code For America Does Denver http://www.govtech.com/data/Behind-the-Scenes-Code-For-America-Does-Denver.html

Raise Your Paws If You Like Open Data http://www.codeforamerica.org/blog/2014/04/28/raise-your-paws-if-you-like-open-data/

Research and Cookies http://www.codeforamerica.org/blog/2014/04/25/research-and-cookies/

Community

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Brownbags An Intro to Prototyping What is a “User?” Our Dev Stack: Branching, Code Reviews, and More Gov.UK Design Principles

Events Tax Day Carnival 1 Million Cups Happy Hours

http://vimeo.com/94452586 http://www.1millioncups.com/

User Research In-person Interviews - 11 participants Cabinet in the Community - 19 participants Research and Cookies - 5 particpants

Hackathons Code Across ~50 attendees National Day of Civic Hacking ~200 attendes

Community

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What’s Next?

We are about to launch our Street Sweeping Reminders application. Looking forward, we intend to test the assumptions we had when we first made this application: What is the best format to communicate these schedules? How do residents want to be reminded of street sweeping? When is the best time to deliver those notifications? Do residents want to know about other streets surrounding their address? Street sweeping is very similar to other schedules in the city like trash & recycling so we’re looking to explore how we could incorporate other schedules into this application. After this application, we’ll look for another small project that can demonstrate how open data and design can improve the city.

Conclusion & Recommendations

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