The city of San Jose has launched its Equity Through Data and Privacy Program, which aims to improve both equity and accountability in the way the city serves its residents.
Governments are increasingly implementing a data-driven approach to this sort of work, from state government using data to transform processes to using data to understand gaps and opportunities in broadband expansion or equitable transit.
Announced at the end of June 2022, the program will involve new data collection processes that the city can scale, paired with community outreach to be transparent about the effort and its intended impact, as explained by the city’s Chief Innovation Officer Clay Garner.
The program will also include the hiring of the city’s first equity through data lead, as well as two community impact fellows. The new team will be co-led by the city’s digital privacy officer.
This particular program is a joint effort between the Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation (MOTI), the Office of Racial Equity and the Information Technology Department. The creation of this program was supported by a three-year, $750,000 investment from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Garner said the interdepartmental collaboration process is necessary to target equity, as it is very intersectional from a policy standpoint. The agencies will be better positioned to share service data and resources for a more comprehensive approach.
“I would say there’s a growing interest in how cities identify and rectify equity gaps when it comes to service delivery and access,” Garner explained. “In San Jose, we realized that we needed the data analytics infrastructure in place to understand how specific policy decisions can create better outcomes for struggling ZIP codes.”
When it comes to collecting and using data, privacy and transparency go hand in hand to ensure public trust, Garner explained, noting that the team has already designed some campaigns for community outreach about why data equity matters.
The program will work to enhance digital privacy using three core tenets: transparency, community engagement and impact.
Regarding transparency, the city aims to ensure the public is aware of digital privacy efforts by employing various strategies, including keeping the latest surveillance technology information up to date on the city website. This ties closely with community engagement, which involves public outreach and information campaigns. And finally, the program will help the city to create consistent analysis processes regarding privacy and socioeconomic conditions to measure the impact of city services.
Garner intends the outcome of this grant and program to be for staff to gain better skills and data awareness to convey data insight information to policymakers at both the department and elected level.
One of the ways the city can improve equity is through the designing of the city’s budget. The team is already exploring how budgeting decisions benefit and burden different residents in the city.
“I think the ideal end state is [that] our decision-makers can really base conversations around equity and data, which the city is able to accurately collect and interpret to improve service delivery and operations for our most marginalized communities in San Jose,” he said.
The city will start working to ensure the community understands how and why data is being collected with its deployment of automated license plate readers.
As the city expands data collection efforts, Garner said that the city would like to make any non-sensitive data public on its Open Data Portal, which was launched years ago to implement the city’s Open Data Policy and Open Data Community Architecture. The Open Data Policy was passed in 2016, followed by the the city’s Digital Privacy Policy in 2020.
Garner said that this team has since been working on making that portal cleaner and the data sets hosted there more accessible so people can better understand what their government is working on.
This story first appeared in Government Technology magazine, Industry Insider — California’s sister publication.
