These posts are intended to be helpful resources for understanding how some of our civic systems work.
The Gravity of Normal
This post is reprinted from The Lab Report, the City of Asheville’s internal data program newsletter. I manage the data and analytics program for the City of Asheville, but the truth is that I don’t care at all about data or analytics, or even about performance. What I care about is change. The chance to create positive change is what…
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Stories To Carry Us Through
In a conversation recently someone asked how to tell when you’re in a pivotal moment in history. I don’t recall how I responded at the time, but the question has continued to gnaw at me ever since. What’s bothering me is that there’s a narrative hidden beneath the question, a story about how things change and the part individuals play.…
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A Question of Boundaries
I work for the City of Asheville, a formal governmental institution that operates within strictly defined geographical boundaries. It operates within functional boundaries as well, with responsibility for things like streets and garbage, water and zoning, public safety and community spaces. The City obviously also has a role beyond the areas it strictly controls, such as housing and economic development.…
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Democracy
It’s hard to escape the incessant drama of the current moment these days, from the assaults on our institutions to the lives damaged or destroyed through incompetence or cruelty. It’s hard to think much beyond the immediate future, the next lawsuit, the next election, hard to think beyond resistance. But we need to. Our democracy is in grave danger, has…
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Fostering a Local Culture that Values Data
In my first essay I noted that data and data-driven decision-making are transforming government and politics and that we must involve the local community to ensure that it builds us up rather than damages us. I suggested three efforts in support of this. This essay starts to tackle the first: to foster a local culture that values data in driving policy decisions…
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Pitfalls & Potential: Building Community Capacity to Use Data
The idea of data-driven decision-making and its potential benefits is hardly new, nor is awareness of its dystopian potential. What is new today is the explosion of data being collected as a result of conversion to digital systems and the technological capacity available to process and learn from that data. New industries are being built on these capabilities and existing ones are…
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What’s the Code in Code for Asheville?
I was recently at meeting of NC brigades where we decided to change the name of Code for NC to the Open NC Collaborative. Both names were fine with me, but I share the concern for making the civic tech movement more inclusive and welcoming, and naming is an important part of that. For just that reason I sometimes wonder…
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What Guides Me Daily
I was on a panel yesterday at the Code for Durham Civic Spark Day with a couple awesome co-panelists, Noel Isama from Sunlight Foundation and Erin Parish from the City of Durham. We had a great conversation and a lot of fun with each other and with a delightfully engaged and energetic crowd. Moderator Sam McClenney prepared fall-back questions in case the audience turned out to be bashful.…
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Treating Data Like a Strategic Asset
My recent post on shared data systems in the City of Asheville, NC introduced the idea that adding a dataset to our management and reporting repository is also a chance to be more proactive about how we manage that dataset. It’s an opportunity to decide exactly how to represent and document the data, who should have access to it, and how we…
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Under Construction 