Boston's Basic City Services Dashboard | Hacker News Reader

Boston's Basic City Services Dashboard

bostonglobe.com

66 pointsdanso55 comments

Boston's neighbor, Somerville, has taken this a step further and made it all public: http://www.somervillema.gov/dashboard/index.html

The source is even on github: https://github.com/DanielHadley/SomervilleSystems

As someone who grew up in Somerville, I'm impressed.

Although that doesn't seem to be the same thing as a "realtime" dashboard, that is an amazingly well-done site.

20 years ago it had the not-entirely-undeserved nickname Slummerville. It's remarkable how much it's changed.

The city site isn't bad either - http://www.somervillema.gov/

Yeah, 20 years ago I wouldn't have considered a move here. Been here since August last year and we really love it. The city "works" with effective city services (call 311 for anything) an open planning process, social media communication channels, and a coherent vision for future development. If the city has a major challenge right now it's gentrification. The city has become almost too popular - and the influx has been driving up housing costs dramatically. The typical home purchase is a brutal bidding war. But for those of us already here, it's great.

And it's all on github: https://github.com/DanielHadley/SomervilleSystems

Holy shit, a relatively small municipality whose website doesn't look like complete ass! Elected officials know what they're doing in Somerville.

Bootstrap. It helps any site go from looking like crap to passable.

Or look like it came out of the same cookie-cutter

For typically slow-moving small town/city officials, anything that doesn't look like a 90s relic that probably has no Javascript at all, Bootstrap is a massive improvement.

Do you mean to say a look-and-feel consistent with other sites I may have visited rather than some special snowflake whiz bang mystery meat UI that some "designer" cooked up? Yeah, the people of Somerville are really missing out.

we see the cookie cutter - the vast majority of people will have zero idea what bootstrap is or notice the similarities. we also are exposed to many more sites using bootstrap than the average user as it is so heavily used in tech circles.

Would you rather sites look like crap and have bad functionality, or look the same and have good functionality and UX?

that's much better than 'hand crafted in MS Word' or 'broken Wordpress'

Or Frontpage.

Which is better than looking shitty.

I live in Somerville (for school) and didn't even know about this. Cheers.

The really cool thing, IMO, is the City of Boston app. You can report anything- grafitti, potholes, "can we plant a tree here please," and of course "the neighbor is leaving the trash out/marking a parking spot with a barrel/smells."

The cool thing is that the reports are all public and you can follow up on yours until they respond.

From a city manager's perspective, this must be terrifying- if more reports come in than you can handle. If you CAN handle the volume, though, it's pretty awesome.

It's my understanding that it's a blessing to city managers - they can't fix potholes they don't know about! :)

If they have a consistent backlog then they can make the case for more resources.

Sounds very similar to NYC's 311 app, which still sometimes surprises me with how interactive and transparent feeling it can make the huge unwieldy city bureaucracy.

  { 
  "Potholes filled": 
   {
    "total": 383,
    "one same street": 287,
    "near the mayors house": 287,
    "near campaign donors houses": 32
   }
   }

I know you're probably joking, but you're wrong about that. The Mayor's office of New Urban Mechanics (the most startup-like government office I've ever talked to), under the previous mayor, developed an app called Citizens' Connect, which allows citizens to quickly report and get the city to fix urban problems. In the case of potholes, it doesn't even necessarily require direct reporting, as at least one version of the pothole reporting app can use your phone's accelerometer to automatically report potholes as you drive.

Reference: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-23/potholes-the...

I know these particular dashboards aren't real-time, but I'm still reminded of Dan Mckinley's, "Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Real-time Analytics"

http://mcfunley.com/whom-the-gods-would-destroy-they-first-g...

> Real-time web analytics is a seductive concept. It appeals to our desire for instant gratification. But the truth is that there are very few product decisions that can be made in real time, if there are any at all. Analysis is difficult enough already, without attempting to do it at speed.

In this case, the lack of context isn't just from not having a ready-comparison across timeframes...but what does it mean when "Graffiti Removed" peaks two weeks ago, and then flattens to a low as of today? Is it because sanitation crews aren't working as hard? Or is it because they've been working so hard -- and so have the cops -- that there's now much less graffiti to clean up?

Even with the sparse data here, I feel that there's a risk of a kind of "data overload"...in that nearly all of the data here is irrelevant without context...is it really more efficient for the mayor to glance at the dashboard every once in awhile and reflexively shout to his aides, "WTF is up with our potholes, check it out!"

> .but what does it mean when "Graffiti Removed" peaks two weeks ago, and then flattens to a low as of today?

Without data, you wouldn't have asked that question, and you wouldn't have got an answer.

Analytics doesn't give answers, it gives questions.

The way this article is written makes way more sense if you imagine the author were a time traveler not of our era.

Remember that newspapers have to write at a ~2nd grade level because the general public is stupid.

Any evidence newspapers write at a second grade level? I seriously doubt this.

That being said, there is an effort in politics to "dumb down" speeches in the last few years to reach a bigger audience. They still speak at high school level though.

http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/01/state-of-the-unio...

>Obama's use of simple language is in part a reflection of his audience: the American voter in an election year. And it's part of a larger trend in simpler State of the Union language as the speech as transitioned from a simple address to Congress into a prime-time televised event.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/21/study-congre...

>A new study by the Sunlight Foundation found that Congress speaks at an average grade level of 10.6, equivalent to a sophomore in high school. That number is down from 2005, when Congress' 11.5 speaking level was in line with a high school junior.

>"We do it on purpose," Mulvaney said of himself and his other freshman Republicans. "People have been teaching this for decades. If you want someone to understand your message, you speak clearly and concisely."

EDIT: I went to the New York Times homepage and picked the first article I saw. It was this: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/world/europe/ukraine.html?... I than ran it though a readability score analysis: https://readability-score.com/ It was written about at an 11th grade level.

I'm spouting a factoid heard long ago, maybe it's a 5th or 6th grade, I don't know. Regardless, it's not at a college level.

Besides, you're quoting stuff about Congress/State of the Union, not newspapers. Similar audiences, but different things with different goals.

I've heard this so many times. With this logic, Ernest Hemingway writes at a 2nd grade level.

Yeah, sure, that's true. Doesn't mean it's wrong when talking about newspapers. They're different bodies of work. Journalists generally aren't writing narratives laden with literary themes.

There's a big difference between using simple, succinct language and dumbing down your writing. Good newspapers do the former.

Newspapers like the Globe and the New York Times recognize that they play an important role in keeping an archive of daily life. As such, many articles are specifically written to contain context that future readers can use to understand an issue as it relates to the overall culture at the time.

I feel like I've seen dashboards become more and more popular lately. I've been meaning to set one up for my company for a while now but never got around to it because of the difficulty of getting it setup right and finding the right metrics (even when using the popular services such as geckoboard, leftronic, etc..)

Who here uses a real time business dashboard? Why or why not? Any problems you've experienced with it?

I've tried a number of them, the biggest issues are always service integration and keeping a history.

Having one dashboard that integrates all of our different analytics, business, and project management systems and keeps a decent history is really tough.

http://www.geckoboard.com/widget-directory is really cool if you don't need to go back in time.

I always end up building manual solutions and storing the data in a middle-man database like mysql. I have high hopes for ElasticSearch + Kibana as a better middleman and dashboarding system.

Have you given cyfe.com a try? Looks like they mention "historical data" where they archive your data history.

Nope, thanks for the tip, this looks promising!

When I worked at Best Buy, one of the senior developers put together some pretty cool dashboards with Zing Charts: http://www.zingchart.com/

We had several charts that kept track of all the agile stats like burn rate, tasks, outstanding defects, and sprint progress. He whipped it together in about a day since it was done with Javascript and JSON. All he did was have people update their individual JSON files on the network before they left for the day and he'd run a batch job at night that pulled in the new data and then updated the charts.

It was pretty easy to manage and we had a 72" monitor hooked into the network so every morning you got an update on how things were going. The "business types" liked it because they could just glance as they were strolling past our area and see how horrible errrrrrrrrrrrr great our progress was on the project.

We're in the processing of building https://www.thedash.com to make it easy and painless to set up dashboards. We use dashboards for tracking all kinds of information within our applications.

>"Any problems you've experienced with it?"

Politics.

Technical hurdles (getting / massaging data) might be challenging or time-consuming but they're straightforward problems.

Dealing with people who feel possessive of their data or fear having their laundry aired are the real challenge - I want to say 90% of the problem even.

This might be a non-issue in a small company, but it has been consistent death in the places I've dealt with it (10,000+ employees).

For example...

Company 1:

The public is clamoring for access to data that the company has been holding tight to its chest and disseminating sporadically on paper and later through a painful website that only returns one "result" at a time.

We track down the data sources, create some shims to get it in an easier format and even write some code that will make the output more useful to the public.

First, the director in charge of 70 or so people who deal with the traditional entirely manual system of handling this data freaks out.

The director claims that what we're presenting must be wrong because it doesn't match the stats that someone has been delivering to him manually. We demonstrate that our stats are actually more accurate - he doesn't care - we try to move forward with the raw stats as he likes them.

Next, It comes out that certain external agreements are based on juked stats. If we present the data as is the company is afraid that they will end up having to deal with very difficult questions or a lawsuit.

The project gets killed.

Later, we're asked to come up something in the same area, but purely for internal use. As requested, data is combined and averaged down to a short list of half a dozen percentage based metrics and a single "traffic light" for overall health.

Again, someone in the chain has been lying about their 100% stats and flips out when their numbers only add up to 97% and they get a "yellow". We refuse to fake the stats so they ended up tasking some administrative person with cleaning up our data to the liking of the management before every meeting in which it would be reviewed.

Company 1 - Situation 2:

Generally similar to Situation 1, except this time to jilted director goes for the trump card - says revealing his data would be a threat to national security.

Discussion over.

Company 2:

Major public-facing failure. Executives think a dashboard will help them spot trends and keep the rest of the company honest.

Departments directly responsible for the failure simply refuse to allow access to their data (actually just make the process so slow and bureaucratic as to be pointless). The project dies on the the vine when the pain of the failure has sufficiently faded from the executive memories.

-----

In the end, dashboards are just information, they can reveal problems directly or indirectly, but they won't solve them.

Interesting, thanks for sharing. I think large enterprise companies can definitely be much more difficult to work with in that way compared to a small business.

I want to, with all my soul, leave a snarky comment about Boston bravely entering the early 2000s, but more than anything I'm saddened that decision makers whose choices impact the lives of millions don't have easy access to the sort of data visualizations that a soon-to-fail social media startup has up on monitors on Day 3.

Boston's previous mayor, for 20 years, didn't even allow voicemail on phones at City Hall. But he did fund an office that build the Citizens Connect app and made great strides in freeing up public data. It's a refreshing change to have a mayor who will now look at the data.

Its a good idea, but man could they have made the dashboard look a little nicer, maybe bigger graphs?

These are some lousy metrics to run a city by. It indicates how much they are doing, but not how effective they are. These metrics are glorifying the work the city does, rather than striving for a better city.

The best metrics are the ones where zero is the goal. Imagine, instead, if the dashboard showed:

* open potholes

* streetlights out of service

* buildings with graffiti

Then, instead of patting themselves on the back for doing so much, they might have an actual goal.

You can't report on data that doesn't exist.

Do they have a take on the three points you listed above? I know they have an app for reporting pot holes, but how complete is the data?

At least they can monitor performance over time, and start asking questions like:

> If more pot holes are being filled now, is it because of an increase in performance or because we have more deteriorating roads?

DC has had something like this for a few years. See e.g. http://track.dc.gov/Agency/KA0 for dashboard and http://data.dc.gov/ for a massive list of available datasets.

It looks like they based the design on a napkin the mayor drew on to explain what he wanted.

funny enough though, its probably equally effective.

Can someone at least style the dashboard?

Does the Mayor really only care about street lights, pot holes, and graffiti?

I wonder if my city has something like that. Oh wait the past Mayors of Atlanta have been corrupt like Bill Campbell who took all the money.

Judging by the article's image, I thought they were going to bash this "dashboard". I mean... it looks absolutely terrible.

I'd be curious to know how many tax-payer dollars went towards this state-of-the-art dashboard.

The city of edmonton has had this for awhile now, and it's publicly available - https://dashboard.edmonton.ca/

It seems to me that the big flaw in this is that if something isn't reported (deaths, DUIs, truancy, etc), then the Mayor doesn't see it.

    And while some might find the concentration of information overwhelming,
    Walsh finds it helpful.

    “You learn to focus on certain things,” he said.

So he's focusing on things that are reported. What about the things that aren't reported? You can't just focus on things that are reported, you also have to see the missing pieces and work with those.

Not that this isn't cool... I just wonder what the repercussions of his "focus" can be...

No matter how much data we give him, we're still going to have this problem.

The only solution is to not give him any data at all, which is ridiculous.

I don't think that's the "only" solution. I think another solution would be getting more data less frequently... A weekly report of everything instead of an instantaneous report of 10% of things...

I'm really just thinking out loud here. Not criticizing this at all. I think it's better to have some data than no data, as you pointed out.

He's looking at the dashboard wondering why the graphs take up so little space, and are surrounded by so much whitespace.

Vanity metrics for a mayor?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com