This article is an excerpt from a report that originally appeared in Government Technology, a sister publication of Techwire.
New technology platforms are helping governments access the power of data aggregation and analysis, which can tell officials what the public is thinking and how to better address their concerns. More and more frequently, officials and agencies are able to enhance citizen engagement, communicating more effectively with their constituencies through social platforms.
A recent webinar showed how new analysis tools have played a role in helping governments navigate this year’s biggest crises — the COVID-19 pandemic and the nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd.
The webinar, “Local Gov 2.0: How L.A. and Chicago are Leveraging Tech to Manage Multiple Crises,” included comments from Amanda Daflos, chief innovation officer for the city of Los Angeles. That city is among those that have used tools from ZenCity, an Israeli startup specializing in open-source data aggregation and analysis, to better understand how to respond to these ongoing and complex events.
“In the world of COVID, my role has become acutely [about] data and research and helping the city to shape our knowledge around COVID and then also shaping the solutions that we’re bringing to the table,” said Daflos, explaining how data analytics tools have helped to supplement her department’s overall research related to the pandemic. “The point is data can help us,” she added.
Understanding how citizens think and feel about controversial, frequently interconnected issues — police violence, protest movements, social distancing and mask wearing — has helped administrators understand how to juggle these sometimes-conflicting priorities. Particularly in L.A., which saw some of the biggest protests and has recently had one of the highest rates of coronavirus infection in the country, officials have worked to finesse their communications with the public, said Daflos.
“We’ve used it for COVID; we also used it throughout the George Floyd protests,” she said. “It was a really important tool for understanding what people were feeling and thinking about.”
According to ZenCity, the platform can analyze sentiment by city-centric topics like traffic projects and specific department activities and policies, while also locating that sentiment geographically in a highly specific manner. An AI algorithm assists in this analysis and categorization.
