Civic Tech
Metro21 is a city-university partnership between the city of Pittsburgh and Carnegie University.
"Civic tech is technology that enables greater participation in government or otherwise assists government in delivering citizen services and strengthening ties with the public." -Gov Tech
While studying at CMU (Carnegie Mellon University), I've learned the importance of community when it comes to open data, technology and city improvement. Through city/university partnerships fostered by MetroLab Network, open data portals, or community engagement programs, community is at the heart of every city. I hope to foster relationships at the local level to improve communities, cities, and well-being of individuals through data and data story-telling.
Capstone Project: TCVCOG Code Enforcement
Challenges Facing the Turtle Creek Valley Council of Governments
The TCVCOG (Turtle Creek Valley Council of Governments) governs 20 different municipalities, five of which participate in code enforcement program where municipalities share code enforcement officers and a database system to track code enforcement data.
Through different discovery processes, a team of five Heinz college students helped the TCVCOG realize their current challenges with the code enforcement program. First, the TCVCOG had a multitude of software and database issues that caused the system to crash in the field and prevent multiple users to access the database at the same time, and the inability to add notes and pictures to the case notes. Second, there was a lack of county data updates to the TCVCOG data, specifically property owner name updates. And third, the code enforcement summary reports that municipality members received every month were not conveying the information desired.
Approach
Our group spent the first half of the project gathering code enforcement information, understanding the TCVCOG through a variety of methods and talking to local subject experts.
Background literature review and research: Reading articles about code enforcement programs in other cities and defining code enforcement helped us have a sense of what code enforcement was and how to start the conversation the TCVCOG.
Client discussions: We met with the director and program manager at the TCVOCOG to understand the five w’s of their code enforcement program.
Interviews with third-party local subject experts: Mostly talking with Pittsburgh area groups and organizations, we learned more about the legal entities of code enforcement, the code enforcement scene in Pittsburgh as well as Cleveland and code enforcement concerns to keep in mind going forward.
Code enforcement ride alongs: Each of us went with one of the code enforcement officers on a four hour ride along to understand issues the officers face in their daily work. We also diagrammed each workspace that code enforcement officers worked in.
Work process investigations through narrative inquiry: Narrative inquiry is the process in which the organization or group interviewed “tells the story” of a process through drawing and guidance from the interviewee.
Project Deliverables:
Throughout this document, we will outline the process we took to interact with the client and discover their needs and their issues with their code enforcement program, instead of coming up with solutions we as students thought would help the TCVCOG. After discussions, ride alongs and municipal manager meetings, we found the following project deliverables:
Improve monthly reports : We designed a new series of reports using information in the existing TCVCOG database. These reports allow municipal partners to monitor code enforcement activity in their community. The reports, created in R Shiny update automatically and can be made available to TCVCOG staff and municipal managers to improve the functionality of the program.
Update owner names : We used open-data from Allegheny County to automatically update owner names in the TCVCOG database. This will insure that violations and communications with homeowners are sent to the correct address. It will also reduce the hassle of cross-checking against outside systems, which often was neglected for sake of time.
New database prototype : We designed and built an updated database prototype demonstrating new ways the database can be used. This new database will allow multiple code enforcement officer use, multi-municipality read-only access, storage space for photos and documents about a case, a way to track a case in one place for legal purposes as well as less call time to the IT department because of crashing. This database will also provide an opportunity for other code enforcement organizations around the United States to take the open source code and customize it for their code enforcement program making it a universal code enforcement tool.
Online complaint form : We created a user-friendly code enforcement web form (adjusted by user feedback) that allows citizens, municipalities, and code enforcement staff to enter complaints to one platform. This allows for a better workflow for the code enforcement officers as well as municipal managers in addition to the citizens who will get a tracking number to see the status of their complaint.
Data management plan : We wrote a data management plan that outlined data protocols for the new database prototype in addition to good practices for data, security and privacy. This document will guide the TCVCOG with a smooth transition to the new database prototype and provide a data dictionary and outline of best data practices for future work with IT departments, or students.