Innovations in Health Policy

• Overemphasis of the analysis and reflection phases
• Underemphasis of the preparation and dissemination phases
• Problem spaces may have no data to begin with
• Insights have few outlets to actualize into action

• How can we use Open Data to inform change at the local level?

• What are some avenues for turning insight into action?

The story of how a visiting faculty member at the Pratt School of Architecture with a penchant for civic improvement saved New Yorkers over $55,000 a year in parking tickets.

• Parking Tickets via NYC Open Data

• Ben Wellington, IQuantNY

• Reddit, Tumblr, and Local Media Outlets

One person can instigate change at the community level and resolve unintended policy side-effects:

• Open Government Initiatives

  • Encourages public oversight
  • Enables creative solutions from civically minded individuals

• Basic Exploratory Data Analysis

  • Outliers can reveal an interesting story
  • Descriptive statistics can inform future research

• Social Media

  • Disseminate findings to larger audiences
  • Generate public discussion

Dynamic Version

Using QGIS, an open-source GIS software, we can run a points-in-polygon analysis and identify clusters of complaints inside our district of interest.

Here we identified a building on 151st between Amsterdam and Broadway with several open rat complaint cases from different callers:

• Pull, wrangle, and visualize open data using open-source software

• Time-series analysis to observe monthly trends

• Qualitatively-driven

  • Ex: Supporting rat anecdotes with 311 complaint data

• Quantitatively-driven

  • Ex: Supporting pothole data with pictures from on-site visits

• Submitting evidence to respective government agencies for quick-fixes

• Holding NYC Council Accountable | Blog | Rpubs

• NYPD Motor Vehicle Collisions | Data

• New York State Medical Misconduct Cases | Data | GitHub

• BanTheBins | Usahidi Crowdmap (Prototype)

• Reproducibility of Analysis

• Motivates "neighborhood-specific" research

• Encourages collaboration and new developments

• Removes barriers to civic engagement

Downsides to Open Data

• Potential for abuse

• Quality of data sources

• Difficult to go beyond correlational studies

• Software

  • Statistical Analysis | R
  • Data Visualization | ggplot2
  • GIS - QGIS | CartoDB
  • Data Munging | Python/pandas

• Blogs

  • NYC Open Data Analysis | IQuantNY
  • Story-telling with Data | FryanData

• Datasets

  • Data.gov
  • NYC OpenData
  • Open New York

• 311 Data Report for District 7 | Rpubs
• R Code | GitHub
• HTML5 Slides | GitHub