The Newton Police website has a public information page that can give you some top-level data, but if you really wanted to dig deeper, it’s surprisingly difficult. For example, you can see the locations of bike/pedestrian incidents, but you can’t do any data mining on the reports themselves. As was pointed out during a recent Public Saftey and Transportation committee meeting, we cannot find out, for example, how many of those incidents happened in or near a crosswalk. We cannot learn what caused those accidents or mine for repeated terms. It’s not that the information isn’t there, it is. It’s written into reports filed away and sometimes located elsewhere on the website. But they’re almost impossible to use. 

And that’s just the police. Want to understand how your elected officials voted? Good luck to you. All those votes are buried in PDFs scattered around the city website. You would need to dig in, pull out each vote in each committee, type it (manually) into some kind of spreadsheet, then do the same for every vote in city council. Of course, you would also need to tag the purpose of each vote. You may want to do this if, for example, you want to better understand how a particular official voted on zoning issues over time. I’m sure if you asked that official they’d tell you how they voted on individual events, but understanding their votes at a macro level could also provide data and information that would not only hold them accountable but would enable you, the voter, to make a more informed decision at election time. You could also use the data to identify trends, such as which councilors vote together more often than not? 

If you want an example of a city that does it well you only need to look east. Boston has a wonderful data-driven website that helps people understand what is happening around them. In fact, they have a whole office called New Urban Mechanics that looks for new ways to use data and information to help serve the public. This can be as simple as identifying potholes or a better understanding of crime statistics. A report of the team’s activity in 2019 can be found here. The office grew out of Mayor Menino’s idea that those in city government are effectively mechanics and their job is to fix what’s broken. This office regularly attracts great minds who would otherwise take jobs in major consulting firms, thereby bringing into city government new, fresh ideas. 

But it’s Boston’s open datasets that really fascinate me. People use them to create all sorts of maps and analyze information on their own. For comparison, take a look at Boston’s building permit data, which is available as a downloadable file, already put in a sortable format. Now compare that to Newton’s building permit data, which requires a click for each month and is then presented only as a PDF. If you wanted to use that data you need to grab each file, convert it, and then make sure it’s all in the right cells BEFORE you could do anything with it. That’s a lot of work. 

This is true for everything Newton produces. Any data we have is wrapped up in PDF or text documents and buried on websites. The city is developing a new site, but that doesn’t solve the data availability issue. 

I recently had a chance to talk (very briefly) with David Olsen about what makes tracking our votes so complicated. The short story is that off-the-shelf systems designed to record city council votes don’t work for our governmental structure. We’re just way too complex, meaning if we wanted a system for the city it would be expensive as it needs to be massively customized. There was hope for change a couple of years ago, however, as the new structure offered up in the proposed new city charter would have better matched what was out there. Which means, we gave up our chance at increased transparency by voting down the new charter. We can now either authorize a very expensive software package or change our city government. I’m not sure either will happen. 

When you can examine the data and then map that across departments, you can do amazing things. I’ve spoken with companies that do just that for municipalities. If, for example, you could combine road quality data with data about gas leaks, you could work with the gas company to create a construction schedule that focuses on the most at-risk areas. If you also included information about speeding and pedestrian safety, you could look at construction in a whole new way.

If you had a better understanding of where home sales are turning over and then could examine building permits at a granular level, you would have a map that shows you where houses are getting torn down and where they’re being renovated (and where they’re being purchased as-is). This could help as part of the zoning discussion when we talk about the long-term effects of a zoning change. We could also gain an understanding of the pace of construction at a city-wide level to get a handle on the pace of change. 

Today, if you wanted to know that a house in your neighborhood is applying for a special permit to be torn down, you need to watch the PDF agendas from the city committees. It’s all public, it’s all there, but it’s not easy to find or use. What if you just had a map of things that are happening? What if the data could be moved around and used in different forms? 

In order for our government to serve us it needs to communicate better. This isn’t just about a periodic email from the Mayor, but about the information that is part of our everyday lives.