Grains of Salt (v49): Syracuse Partners with SU on Data Analytics

Continuing the collaboration that is the hallmark of Mayor Ben Walsh's administration, the city of Syracuse and Syracuse University have a new agreement on data-sharing.

The agreement, reported in the Daily Orange, will allow SU students access to municipal data on which they can perform analytics and hopefully identify opportunities.

The article recaps emails with Sam Edelstein,the city's chief data officer, who advised that select data will be shared with the students. The city both collects and creates data, he said, and added

We know that students get great experience working with real data like the types that we collect - and we get the benefit of experts helping us to make sense of the information.

The Common Council approved the agreement at the end of July, after discussion privacy concerns. Councilor Khalid Bey was one who expressed concern, as noted in this report from WRVO.

I'm certainly a person that's for creativity and innovation, but we have to be careful about being creative at the expense of the taxpayer. Hackers are very good. We learned that. I want us to be a little more clear about what we're doing. I can see the value of the exchange. But I thought the downplay on our concerns with security, relative to the data, was a little negligent. 

Even though Edelstein said much of the information is already made public, or could be -  most of it comes from infrastructure projects - Bey is right to be concerned, and the city should take privacy concerns seriously. It's particularly timely, given the recent ransomware attacks on both the Syracuse City School District and the Onondaga County Public Library systems.

No one benefits when these concerns are downplayed, certainly not the administration.

SU will receive only copies of the data, via the cloud, not access to the systems where the data is stored. Edelstein said the city will choose the data carefully, and "is sensitive about what data is presented, especially if it contains personally identifiable information." The Common Council should request regular updates from Edelstein on this.

How might city taxpayers benefit from the new collaboration? Edelstein mentioned dashboards for individual city departments are a possibility' these could complement the city's Performance Dashboard, which gives a whole-city look at things like financial and neighborhood stability and service delivery. l'll talk more about the Dashboard in another post.

I agree with Edelstein on the bottom line here. Again, from the WRVO article,

We just have a lot of information and we're going to collect a lot more of it in the coming years. We will never have the staff to be able to analyze all of it and make the decisions  that we need to make. Tapping into expertise and resources at the university is kind of a no-brainer to me. 

The goal is to have the project up and running this fall.