Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation

* Book: Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation. edited by Brett Goldstein with Lauren Dyson. Code for America Press,

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Discussion

The data-driven city

Evgeny Morozov:

"an essay on the “data-driven city,” by Michael Flowers, the former chief analytics officer of New York City, which appears in “Beyond Transparency: Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation,” a recent collection of essays (published, tellingly, by the Code for America Press), edited by Brett Goldstein with Lauren Dyson. Flowers suggests that real-time data analysis is allowing city agencies to operate in a cybernetic manner. Consider the allocation of building inspectors in a city like New York. If the city authorities know which buildings have caught fire in the past and if they have a deep profile for each such building—if, for example, they know that such buildings usually feature illegal conversions, and their owners are behind on paying property taxes or have a history of mortgage foreclosures—they can predict which buildings are likely to catch fire in the future and decide where inspectors should go first. The appeal of this approach to bureaucrats is fairly obvious: like Beer’s central planners, they can be effective while remaining ignorant of the causal mechanisms at play." (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine?)