Paper by Laetitia Gauvin, Michele Tizzoni, Simone Piaggesi, Andrew Young, Natalia Adler, Stefaan Verhulst, Leo Ferres & Ciro Cattuto in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications: “Mobile phone data have been extensively used to study urban mobility. However, studies based on gender-disaggregated large-scale data are still lacking, limiting our understanding of gendered aspects of urban mobility and our ability to design policies for gender equality. Here we study urban mobility from a gendered perspective, combining commercial and open datasets for the city of Santiago, Chile.
We analyze call detail records for a large cohort of anonymized mobile phone users and reveal a gender gap in mobility: women visit fewer unique locations than men, and distribute their time less equally among such locations. Mapping this mobility gap over administrative divisions, we observe that a wider gap is associated with lower income and lack of public and private transportation options. Our results uncover a complex interplay between gendered mobility patterns, socio-economic factors and urban affordances, calling for further research and providing insights for policymakers and urban planners….(More)”.
Why local data is the key to successful place making
Jun 17, 2020 05:39 pm
Blog by Sally Kerr: “The COVID emergency has brought many challenges that were unimaginable a few months ago. The first priorities were safety and health, but when lockdown started one of the early issues was accessing and sharing local data to help everyone deal with and live through the emergency. Communities grappled with the scarcity of local data, finding it difficult to source for some services, food deliveries and goods. This was not a new issue, but the pandemic brought it into sharp relief.
Local data use covers a broad spectrum. People moving to a new area want information about the environment — schools, amenities, transport, crime rates and local health. For residents, continuing knowledge of business opening hours, events, local issues, council plans and roadworks remains important, not only for everyday living but to help understand issues and future plans that will change their environment. Really local data (hyperlocal data) is either fragmented or unavailable, making it difficult for local people to stay informed, whilst larger data sets about an area (e.g. population, school performance) are not always easy to understand or use. They sit in silos owned by different sectors, on disparate websites, usually collated for professional or research use.
Third sector organisations in a community will gather data relevant to their work such as contacts and event numbers but may not source wider data sets about the area, such as demographics, to improve their work. Using this data could strengthen future grant applications by validating their work. For Government or Health bodies carrying out place making community projects, there is a reliance on their own or national data sources supplemented with qualitative data snapshots. Their dependence on tried and tested sources is due to time and resource pressures but means there is no time to gather that rich seam of local data that profiles individual needs.
Imagine a future community where local data is collected and managed together for both official organisations and the community itself. Where there are shared aims and varied use. Current and relevant data would be accessible and easy to understand, provided in formats that suit the user — from data scientist to school child. A curated data hub would help citizens learn data skills and carry out collaborative projects on anything from air quality to local biodiversity, managing the data and offering increased insight and useful validation for wider decision making. Costs would be reduced with duplication and effort reduced….(More)”.
Article by Lawsuit.org: “In the 2002 dystopian sci-fi film “Minority Report,” law enforcement can manage crime by “predicting” illegal behavior before it happens. While fiction, the plot is intriguing and contributes to the conversation on advanced crime-fighting technology. However, today’s world may not be far off.
Data’s role in our lives and more accessibility to artificial intelligence is changing the way we approach topics such as research, real estate, and law enforcement. In fact, recent investigative reporting has shown that “dozens of [American] cities” are now experimenting with predictive policing technology.
Despite the current controversy surrounding predictive policing, it seems to be a growing trend that has been met with little real resistance. We may be closer to policing that mirrors the frightening depictions in “Minority Report” than we ever thought possible.
Fighting Fire With Fire
In its current state, predictive policing is defined as:
“The usage of mathematical, predictive analytics, and other analytical techniques in law enforcement to identify potential criminal activity. Predictive policing methods fall into four general categories: methods for predicting crimes, methods for predicting offenders, methods for predicting perpetrators’ identities, and methods for predicting victims of crime.”
While it might not be possible to prevent predictive policing from being employed by the criminal justice system, perhaps there are ways we can create a more level playing field: One where the powers of big data analysis aren’t just used to predict crime, but also are used to police law enforcement themselves.
Below, we’ve provided a detailed breakdown of what this potential reality could look like when applied to one South Florida county’s public databases, along with information on how citizens and communities can use public data to better understand the behaviors of local law enforcement and even individual police officers….(More)”.
Article by By Sara J. Singer, Stephen Downs, Grace Ann Joseph, Neha Chaudhary, Christopher Gardner, Nina Hersher, Kelsey P. Mellard, Norma Padrón & Yennie Solheim: “….Aligning the technology sector with a societal goal of greater health and well-being entails a number of shifts in thinking. The most fundamental is understanding health not as a vertical market segment, but as a horizontal value: In addition to developing a line of health products or services, health should be expressed across a company’s full portfolio of products and services. Rather than pushing behaviors on people through information and feedback, technology companies should also pull behaviors from people by changing the environment and products they are offered; in addition to developing technology to help people overcome the challenge of being healthy, we need to envision technology that helps to reduce the challenges to being healthy. And in addition to holding individuals responsible for choices that they make, we also need to recognize the collective responsibility that society bears for the choices it makes available.
How to catalyze these shifts?
To find out, we convened a “tech-enabled health,” in which 50 entrepreneurs, leaders from large technology companies, investors, policymakers, clinicians, and public health experts designed a hands-on, interactive, and substantively focused agenda. Participants brainstormed ways that consumer-facing technologies could help people move more, eat better, sleep well, stay socially connected, and reduce stress. In groups and collectively, participants also considered ways in which ideas related and might be synergistic, potential barriers and contextual conditions that might impede or support transformation, and strategies for catalyzing the desired shift. Participants were mixed in terms of sector, discipline, and gender (though the attendees were not as diverse in terms of race/ethnicity or economic strata as the users we potentially wanted to impact—a limitation noted by participants). We intentionally maintained a positive tone, emphasizing potential benefits of shifting toward a health-positive approach, rather than bemoaning the negative role that technology can play….(More)”.
Defining a ‘new normal’ for data privacy in the wake of COVID-19
Jun 17, 2020 07:29 am
Jack Dunn at IAPP: “…It is revealing that our relationship with privacy is amorphous and requires additional context in light of transformative technologies, new economic realities and public health emergencies. How can we reasonably evaluate the costs and benefits of Google or Facebook sharing location data with the federal government when it has been perfectly legal for Walgreen’s to share access to customer data with pharmaceutical advertisers? How does aggregating and anonymizing data safeguard privacy when a user’s personal data can be revealed through other data points?
The pandemic is only revealing that we’ve yet to reach a consensus on privacy norms that will come to define the digital age.
This isn’t the first time that technology confounded notions of privacy and consumer protection. In fact, the constitutional right to privacy was born out of another public health crisis. Before 1965, 32 women per 100,000 live births died while giving birth. Similarly, 25 infants died per 100,000 live births. As a result, medical professionals and women’s rights advocates began arguing for greater access to birth control. When state legislatures sought to minimize access, birth control advocates filed lawsuits that eventually lead to the Supreme Court’s seminal case regarding the right to privacy, Griswold v. Connecticut.…
Today, there is growing public concern over the way in which consumer data is used to consolidate economic gain among the few while steering public perception among the many — particularly at a time when privacy seems to be the price for ending public health emergencies.
But the COVID-19 outbreak is also highlighting how user data has the capacity to improve consumer well being and public health. While strict adherence to traditional notions of privacy may be ineffectual in a time of exponential technological growth, the history of our relationship to privacy and technology suggests regulatory policies can strike a balance between otherwise competing interests….(More)“.
Philipp Grüll at Euractiv: “When Germany takes over the European Council Presidency on 1 July, Berlin will have plenty to do. The draft programme seen by EURACTIV Germany focuses on the major challenges of our time: climate change, digitisation, and the coronavirus.
Berlin wants to establish ‘European Digital Diplomacy’ by creating a ‘Digital Diplomacy Network’ to exist alongside the ‘Technospheres USA and China’.
This should not only be about keeping European industries competitive. After all, the term “digital diplomacy” is not new.
Ilan Manor, a researcher at Oxford University and author of numerous papers on digital diplomacy, defines it as “the use of digital tools to achieve foreign policy goals.”
This definition is intentionally broad, Manor told EURACTIV Germany, because technology can be used in so many areas of international relations….
Manor divides the development of this digital public diplomacy into two phases.
In the first one, from 2008 to 2015, governments took the first cautious steps. They experimented and launched random and often directionless online activities. Foreign ministries and embassies set up social media accounts. Sweden opened a virtual embassy in the online video game “Second Life.”
It was only in the second phase, from 2015 to the present, that foreign ministries began to act more strategically. They used “Big Data” to record public opinion in other countries, and also to track down online propaganda against their own country.
As an example, Manor cites the Russian embassy in the United Kingdom, which is said to have deliberately disseminated anti-EU narratives prior to the Brexit referendum, packaged in funny and seemingly innocent Internet memes that spread rapidly….(More)”.
Frank Swain at the BBC: “For almost half a century, Benedictine monks in Herefordshire dutifully logged the readings of a rain gauge on the grounds of Belmont Abbey, recording the quantity of rain that had fallen each month without fail. That is, until 1948, when measurements were suspended while the abbot waited for someone to repair a bullet hole in the gauge funnel.
How the bullet hole came to be there is still a mystery, but it’s just one of the stories uncovered by a team of 16,000 volunteers who have been taking part in Rainfall Rescue, a project to digitise hand-written records of British weather. The documents, held by the Met Office, contain 3.5 million datapoints and stretch as far back as 1820.
Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, leads the project. “It launched at the end of March, we realised people would have a lot of spare time on their hands,” he explains. “It was completed in 16 days. I was expecting 16 weeks, not 16 days… the volunteers absolutely blitzed it.” He says the data will be used to improve future weather predictions and climate modelling.
With millions of people trapped at home during the pandemic, citizen science projects are seeing a boom in engagement. Rainfall Rescue uses a platform called Zooniverse, which hosts dozens of projects covering everything from artworks to zebra. While the projects generally have scientific aims, many allow people to also contribute some good to the world.
Others are trying to track the spread of invasive species in the ocean from underwater photographs, or identify earthquakes and tremors by speeding up the seismic signals so they become audible and can be classified by sharp-eared volunteers. “You could type in data on old documents, count penguins, go to the Serengeti and look at track camera images – it’s an incredible array,” says Hawkins. “Whatever you’re interested in there’s something for you.”…(More)”.
Laying the Foundation for Effective Partnerships: An Examination of Data Sharing Agreements
Jun 17, 2020 06:58 am
Paper by Hayden Dahmm: “In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, data has never been more salient. COVID has generated new data demands and increased cross-sector data collaboration. Yet, these data collaborations require careful planning and evaluation of risks and opportunities, especially when sharing sensitive data. Data sharing agreements (DSAs) are written agreements that establish the terms for how data are shared between parties and are important for establishing accountability and trust.
However, negotiating DSAs is often time consuming, and collaborators lacking legal or financial capacity are disadvantaged. Contracts for Data Collaboration (C4DC) is a joint initiative between SDSN TReNDS, NYU’s GovLab, the World Economic Forum, and the University of Washington, working to strengthen trust and transparency of data collaboratives. The partners have created an online library of DSAs which represents a selection of data applications and contexts.
This report introduces C4DC and its DSA library. We demonstrate how the library can support the data community to strengthen future data collaborations by showcasing various DSA applications and key considerations. First, we explain our method of analyzing the agreements and consider how six major issues are addressed by different agreements in the library. Key issues discussed include data use, access, breaches, proprietary issues, publicization of the analysis, and deletion of data upon termination of the agreement. For each of these issues, we describe approaches illustrated with examples from the library. While our analysis suggests some pertinent issues are regularly not addressed in DSAs, we have identified common areas of practice that may be helpful for entities negotiating partnership agreements to consider in the future….(More)”.
Tech Firms Are Spying on You. In a Pandemic, Governments Say That’s OK.
Jun 17, 2020 06:48 am
Sam Schechner, Kirsten Grind and Patience Haggin at the Wall Street Journal: “While an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, Joshua Anton created an app to prevent users from drunk dialing, which he called Drunk Mode. He later began harvesting huge amounts of user data from smartphones to resell to advertisers.
Now Mr. Anton’s company, called X-Mode Social Inc., is one of a number of little-known location-tracking companies that are being deployed in the effort to reopen the country. State and local authorities wielding the power to decide when and how to reopen are leaning on these vendors for the data to underpin those critical judgment calls.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office used data from Foursquare Labs Inc. to figure out if beaches were getting too crowded; when the state discovered they were, it tightened its rules. In Denver, the Tri-County Health Department is monitoring counties where the population on average tends to stray more than 330 feet from home, using data from Cuebiq Inc.
Researchers at the University of Texas in San Antonio are using movement data from a variety of companies, including the geolocation firm SafeGraph, to guide city officials there on the best strategies for getting residents back to work.
Many of the location-tracking firms, data brokers and other middlemen are part of the ad-tech industry, which has come under increasing fire in recent years for building what critics call a surveillance economy. Data for targeting ads at individuals, including location information, can also end up in the hands of law-enforcement agencies or political groups, often with limited disclosure to users. Privacy laws are cropping up in states including California, along with calls for federal privacy legislation like that in the European Union.
But some public-health authorities are setting aside those concerns to fight an unprecedented pandemic. Officials are desperate for all types of data to identify people potentially infected with the virus and to understand how they are behaving to predict potential hot spots—whether those people realize it or not…(More)”
A Practical Guide for Establishing an Evidence Centre
Jun 17, 2020 06:38 am
Report by Alliance for Useful Evidence: “Since 2013, Nesta and the Alliance for Useful Evidence have supported the development of more than eight evidence centres. This report draws on insight from our own experience, published material and interviews with senior leaders from a range of evidence intermediaries.
The report identifies five common ingredients that contribute to successful evidence centres:
Clear objectives: Good knowledge of the centre’s intended user group(s), clear outcomes to work towards and an evidence-informed theory of change.
Robust organisational development: Commitment to create an independent and sustainable organisation with effective governance and the right mix of skills and experience, over a timescale that will be sufficient to make a difference.
Engaged users: Understanding users’ evidence needs and working collaboratively with them to increase their capability, motivation and opportunity to use evidence in their decision-making.
Rigorous curation and creation of evidence: A robust and transparent approach to selecting and generating high-quality evidence for the centre’s users.
A focus on impact: Commitment to learn from the centre’s activities, including successes and failures, so that you can increase your effectiveness in achieving your objectives…(More)”.
A Guide for Decision Makers using Data to Understand the Extent and Spread of COVID-19 by the National Academies: “This rapid expert consultation provides insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the data on the COVID-19 pandemic by applying five criteria to seven types of data available to support decision making. It was produced through the Societal Experts Action Network (SEAN), an activity of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. SEAN links researchers in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences with decision makers to respond to policy questions arising from the COVID-19 pandemic….(More)”
Press Release: “Today, Global Partners Digital (GPD), ARTICLE 19, the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA), PROTEGE QV and the Centre for Human Rights of the University of Pretoria jointly launched an interactive map to track and analyse disinformation laws, policies and patterns of enforcement across Sub-Saharan Africa.
The map offers a birds-eye view of trends in state responses to disinformation across the region, as well as in-depth analysis of the state of play in individual countries, using a bespoke framework to assess whether laws, policies and other state responses are human rights-respecting.
Developed against a backdrop of rapidly accelerating state action on COVID-19 related disinformation, the map is an open, iterative product. At the time of launch, it covers 31 countries (see below for the full list), with an aim to expand this in the coming months. All data, analysis and insight on the map has been generated by groups and actors based in Africa….(More)”.
Rethinking the digital democratic affordance and its impact on political representation: Toward a new framework
Jun 17, 2020 06:19 am
Paper by Marco Deseriis: “This article advances a new theory of the digital democratic affordance, a concept first introduced by Lincoln Dahlberg to devise a taxonomy of the democratic capacities of digital media applications. Whereas Dahlberg classifies digital media affordances on the basis of preexisting democratic positions, the article argues that the primary affordance of digital media is to abate the costs of political participation.
This cost-reducing logic of digital media has diverging effects on political participation. On an institutional level, digital democracy applications allow elected representatives to monitor and consult their constituents, closing some gaps in the circuits of representation. On a societal level, digital media allow constituents to organize and represent their own interests directly. In the former case, digital affordances work instrumentally in the service of representative democracy; in the latter, digital democratic affordances provide a mobilized public with emerging tools that put pressure on the autonomy of representatives….(More)”.
Book by Rutger Bregman: “This is a book about a radical idea.
An idea that’s long been known to make rulers nervous. An idea denied by religions and ideologies, ignored by the news media and erased from the annals of world history.
At the same time, it’s an idea that’s legitimized by virtually every branch of science. One that’s corroborated by evolution and confirmed by everyday life. An idea so intrinsic to human nature that it goes unnoticed and gets overlooked.
If only we had the courage to take it more seriously, it’s an idea that might just start a revolution. Turn society on its head. Because once you grasp what it really means, it’s nothing less than a mind-bending drug that ensures you’ll never look at the world the same again. So what is this radical idea?
That most people, deep down, are pretty decent…(More)”.
How to Sustain Your Activism Against Police Brutality Beyond this Moment
Jun 15, 2020 07:16 pm
Article by Bethany Gordon: “…Despite the haunting nature of these details and the different features of this moment, I am worried that empathetic voices lifting up this cause will quiet too soon for lasting change to occur. But it doesn’t have to happen this way. Gaining a better understanding of the empathy we feel in these moments of awareness and advocacy can help us take a more behaviorally sustainable approach.
Empathy is a complex psychological phenomenon, describing eight distinct ways that we respond to one another’s experiences and emotions, but most commonly defined in the dictionary as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” Using this broader definition, scholars and activists have debated how effective empathy is as a tool for behavior change—particularly when it comes to fighting racism. Paul Bloom argues that empathy allows our bias to drive our decision-making, bell hooks states that empathy is not a promising avenue to systemic racial change, and Alisha Gaines analyzes how an overemphasis on racial empathy in a 1944 landmark study, “An American Dilemma,” led to a blindness about the impact of systemic and institutional racial barriers. This more general understanding and application of empathy has not been an effective aid to fighting systemic oppression and has led to a lot of (well-meaning?) blackface.
A more nuanced understanding of empathy—and its related concepts—may help us use it more effectively in the fight against racism. There are two strains of empathy that are relevant to the George Floyd protests and can help us better understand (and possibly change) our response: empathic distress and empathic concern, also known as compassion.
Empathic distress is a type of empathy we feel when we are disturbed by witnessing another’s suffering. Empathic distress is an egocentric response—a reaction that places our own well-being at its center. When we’re motivated to act through empathic distress, our ultimate goal is to alleviate our own suffering. This may mean we take action to help another person, but it could also mean we distract ourselves from their suffering.
Compassion is a type of empathy that is other-oriented. Compassion operates when you feel for another person rather than being distressed by their suffering, thereby making your ultimate goal about fixing the actual problem….(More)’
The Economist: “The twelfth edition of the Democracy Index finds that the average global score has fallen from 5.48 in 2018, to 5.44. This is the worst average global score since The Economist Intelligence Unit first produced the Democracy Index in 2006. Driven by sharp regressions in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, four out of the five categories that make up the global average score have deteriorated. Although there were some dramatic downturns in the scores of certain countries, others have bucked the overall trend and registered impressive improvements. Download the free report to find out where your country ranks…
The EIU Democracy Index provides a snapshot of the state of world democracy for 165 independent states and two territories. The Democracy Index is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture. Based on their scores on 60 indicators within these categories, each country is then itself classified as one of four types of regime: full democracy; flawed democracy; hybrid regime; and authoritarian regime….(More)”.
Open Data from Authoritarian Regimes: New Opportunities, New Challenges
Jun 14, 2020 08:54 am
Paper by Ruth D. Carlitz and Rachael McLellan: “Data availability has long been a challenge for scholars of authoritarian politics. However, the promotion of open government data—through voluntary initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership and soft conditionalities tied to foreign aid—has motivated many of the world’s more closed regimes to produce and publish fine-grained data on public goods provision, taxation, and more. While this has been a boon to scholars of autocracies, we argue that the politics of data production and dissemination in these countries create new challenges.
Systematically missing or biased data may jeopardize research integrity and lead to false inferences. We provide evidence of such risks from Tanzania. The example also shows how data manipulation fits into the broader set of strategies that authoritarian leaders use to legitimate and prolong their rule. Comparing data released to the public on local tax revenues with verified internal figures, we find that the public data appear to significantly underestimate opposition performance. This can bias studies on local government capacity and risk parroting the party line in data form. We conclude by providing a framework that researchers can use to anticipate and detect manipulation in newly available data….(More)”.
IoT Security Is a Mess. Privacy ‘Nutrition’ Labels Could Help
Jun 13, 2020 11:16 am
Lily Hay Newman at Wired: “…Given that IoT security seems unlikely to magically improve anytime soon, researchers and regulators are rallying behind a new approach to managing IoT risk. Think of it as nutrition labels for embedded devices.
At the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy last month, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University presented a prototype security and privacy label they created based on interviews and surveys of people who own IoT devices, as well as privacy and security experts. They also published a tool for generating their labels. The idea is to shed light on a device’s security posture but also explain how it manages user data and what privacy controls it has. For example, the labels highlight whether a device can get security updates and how long a company has pledged to support it, as well as the types of sensors present, the data they collect, and whether the company shares that data with third parties.
“In an IoT setting, the amount of sensors and information you have about users is potentially invasive and ubiquitous,” says Yuvraj Agarwal, a networking and embedded systems researcher who worked on the project. “It’s like trying to fix a leaky bucket. So transparency is the most important part. This work shows and enumerates all the choices and factors for consumers.”
Nutrition labels on packaged foods have a certain amount of standardization around the world, but they’re still more opaque than they could be. And security and privacy issues are even less intuitive to most people than soluble and insoluble fiber. So the CMU researchers focused a lot of their efforts on making their IoT label as transparent and accessible as possible. To that end, they included both a primary and secondary layer to the label. The primary label is what would be printed on device boxes. To access the secondary label, you could follow a URL or scan a QR code to see more granular information about a device….(More)”.
The “Social” Side of Big Data: Teaching BD Analytics to Political Science Students
Jun 13, 2020 08:28 am
Case report by Giampiero Giacomelloand Oltion Preka: “In an increasingly technology-dependent world, it is not surprising that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) graduates are in high demand. This state of affairs, however, has made the public overlook the case that not only computing and artificial intelligence are naturally interdisciplinary, but that a huge portion of generated data comes from human–computer interactions, thus they are social in character and nature. Hence, social science practitioners should be in demand too, but this does not seem the case. One of the reasons for such a situation is that political and social science departments worldwide tend to remain in their “comfort zone” and see their disciplines quite traditionally, but by doing so they cut themselves off from many positions today. The authors believed that these conditions should and could be changed and thus in a few years created a specifically tailored course for students in Political Science. This paper examines the experience of the last year of such a program, which, after several tweaks and adjustments, is now fully operational. The results and students’ appreciation are quite remarkable. Hence the authors considered the experience was worth sharing, so that colleagues in social and political science departments may feel encouraged to follow and replicate such an example….(More)”
How Data-Driven Cities Respond Swiftly and Effectively to COVID-19
Jun 13, 2020 06:51 am
Blog Post by Jennifer Park, Lauren Su, Lisa Fiedler, and Madeleine Weatherhead: “Since January of this year, the novel coronavirus has swept rapidly throughout the United States, leaving no city untouched. To contain the virus’ spread and protect residents’ health and livelihoods, local leaders have had to act swiftly and decisively. It is a challenge in scope and scale unlike any other in recent history — and it has underscored the power of data to guide life-and-death decisions and build trust.
Take, for example, Los Angeles. As cities across the country began issuing states of emergency and acting to promote public health, Mayor Eric Garcetti quickly identified the city’s response priorities: supporting families, small businesses, healthcare workers, and unhoused Angelenos, and increasing the healthcare equipment and testing kits available for the city. Mayor Garcetti tapped his Chief Information Officer and Innovation Team to collect and analyze data, to inform decisions, and share real-time information publicly.
A snapshot of Los Angeles’ publicly shared data from one of the city’s daily COVID-19 summary briefings. Image courtesy of the City of Los Angeles’ Innovation Team.
The Mayor was soon conducting daily briefings, updating the public on the latest virus-related data and informing city residents about various decisions made by the city — from pausing parking rules enforcement to opening thousands of temporary shelter beds. He used data to justify key decisions, linking stay-at-home orders to a decrease in COVID-19 cases from week to week.
Los Angeles’ swift response built on an existing culture of leveraging data to set goals, make decisions, and communicate with the public. Its leaders are now seeing the positive impact of having invested in foundational data capacity — regular tracking of cases, hospital capacity, and infection rates have proven to be vital to helping and accelerating the city’s responses to COVID-19.
Other cities, too, have leaned on established data practices and infrastructure in their response efforts, both to the benefit of their residents and to lay a stronger foundation to guide recovery….(More)“.
