The city has worked for years to create a data-driven culture, solidifying this commitment with the 2021 release of its Open Data Dashboard. The dashboard presents information regarding candidate contributions and expenditures as well as donations that candidates received. The data and dashboard include filings from 2019 to the present; the dashboard was officially released in January.
The Board of Ethics (BOE) and the Office of Innovation and Technology’s (OIT) CityGeo team used data that was already available to create the dashboard and make it more accessible to a wider audience, as explained by Jordana Greenwald, acting general counsel for the BOE.
Notably, the release includes the raw data with duplicates removed, which simplifies the process for others to do their own analysis. The interactive dashboard is powered by the same data sets, but in a format intended to be simpler for those without extensive literacy to use. Finally, an in-depth video tutorial for the dashboard simplifies the navigation process for the tool.
Each of these pieces of the release help to make the tool easy to use for those in the community without extensive data expertise.
“Visualization is also an effort toward equity, because it lowers the bar in terms of technical skill [needed] in order to be able to interact with the data and glean insights from it,” said Kistine Carolan, who is the senior program manager at OIT with the CityGeo team.
Without context, the story can get lost. Carolan explained that the contexts are provided to create a wider public understanding of this tool, such as the tutorial, the metadata and the technical documentation to guide usage. This can create a greater understanding of both the complexities of the dashboard’s data, and the complexities of campaign finance at large.
The many complexities of managing databases and campaign finance law required a collaborative process that involved joining subject matter experts, Carolan explained.
“I think it was a really beautiful pairing of different types of expertise in order to try and produce something meaningful and hopefully impactful,” said Carolan.
The dashboard is currently in its beta phase, and it will be over the coming months as its impact is evaluated during the upcoming 2023 primary election. Through this period, feedback is encouraged and will be collected to help the city get information from stakeholders to understand how the tool is being used, any areas of confusion and improvements that could be made, Carolan said.
“The point of this application is to make this data valuable to the public, you know, especially during the course of an election season like this one, and part of that is really trying to peg down what is it that they find valuable,” Bryan McHale, the public integrity compliance supervisor for the BOE, added.
The city expects the tool to be used by members of the public, members of the media, researchers, data analysts and even politicians themselves.
“I think one of the things that comes out of sharing data is that everybody understands it better,” said Phaedra Tinder, senior GIS analyst on the CityGeo team.
As Tinder detailed, the city is releasing open data throughout the year as part of its Open Data Program, and in doing so, it is increasingly becoming common practice for the city to release an interactive dashboard with that data to make it more accessible for people in the public to interact with.
