Can the city’s snow plow tracker boost confidence in services among residents?

 

 

Angelo Trivisonno is a Clevelander who builds maps and apps for fun. To date, he’s created a public service bill bot that tracks Cleveland City Council activity, a daily bot tweeting bike/pedestrian/scooter-involved crashes reported to dispatch, and a bot tracking new bike parking added to OpenStreetMap. 

His latest creation is a custom-built snow plow tracker that builds on Mayor Bibb’s recently-released snowplow tracker by allowing residents to see how recently their streets have been plowed. (Full disclosure: Trivisonno’s wife, Jessica Trivisonno, was recently hired as Bibb’s senior strategist for the West Side Market.) 

As the uber-storm-of-the-century AKA snowmageddon-in-CLE slams the city’s streets, The Land caught up with Trivisonno (who is known as “Cleveland’s civic data laureate” on Twitter) to find out why this data matters for Cleveland, what we can learn from it, and how to get involved. 

How did you build your snow plow tracker? Where did you get the idea? 

I first started building this specific map the day after the mayoral election. I recycle and remix many of my map projects – the snow plow map, for example, is a remix of my election day map. If you compare the two maps, you’ll see many common features. I started to look at how other cities were mapping and sharing their snow plow data and came up with a short list of must-have features: fast loading, color-coded routes, and near real-time data.

But without any real data, the map itself wasn’t really useful. That changed on January 28 when the city posted its new snow plow map and essentially created a brand new source of civic data. 

Pleasantly surprised, I now had a source of real data to feed into the map and that’s what you see today. 

I think some people might prefer my map over the city’s because the snow plow routes are color-coded, so you can learn how recently the vehicles passed through your street and neighborhood. I must also recognize and commend the city for developing their own official map very rapidly – I’m sure there were many logistical and technical challenges to get everything running smoothly on the vehicles and computer systems.

On the technical side, my map is written in Javascript using Leaflet.js, and there’s a bit of processing of city data behind-the-scenes using code written in Python and stored in a geospatial database running on the Amazon cloud. The Amazon cloud makes these types of projects really easy and cheap – even with hundreds of people using my map it’s not costing me more than a couple pennies to run.

 

 

You have a day job, right … soooo, how’d ya find time to do this? And more crucially, why is it important to you?

Making maps and civic tools seems to be a hobby I’ve developed, somewhat unintentionally (coding and map-making is totally unrelated to my day job). Locally, OpenCleveland is a great and growing community of Clevelanders who also make and share digital tools and knowledge to increase engagement and awareness of local issues. I’m often collaborating with people in this group, brainstorming and dreaming of new ideas and projects. 

I also must mention Cleveland Documenters, who have been building digital tools and capacity to also increase local knowledge of community issues – they’re also doing great work! The tech community here in Cleveland is growing, and I think that bodes well for our city economically, especially if we can share the technical learning opportunities with all residents.

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“I think this work of developing tools to engage and share civic information is important because it’s strongly associated with confidence in government.”

I think this work of developing tools to engage and share civic information is important because it’s strongly associated with confidence in government, and a number of research papers have been published on this. In one recent study, the city of Boston experimented with responding to service complaints to their 311 system with an image of the resolved issue. Researchers there studied and discovered that providing this visual confirmation of the resolved issues led residents to feel 14% more trusting and 12% more supportive of local government, compared to a control group of residents that received no visual confirmation. 

The theory is that government responsiveness increases feelings of personal impact, which boosts willingness to engage both directly and indirectly with city services and programs. If a tool of mine can empower Clevelanders somehow to better understand or advocate for some important issue and make an impact, then that always feels like a major win for all of us. And if one of my tools competes with or pushes the city to develop its own tools that are better, then that’s another victory for us all.

What are you learning from this map? Any key takeaways about how the city is doing and how it could improve? 

I’m going to pass and let elected officials, policy makers and others more knowledgeable and experienced in providing city services study and answer these questions. I think the issue of what and where gets plowed first and last (commercial vs. residential areas, driving lanes vs. sidewalks vs. mobility lanes, higher-density residential areas vs. lower-density, etc.) is a major policy issue that is worthy of more discussion and reporting. My hope is the city is collecting all of this data together and can use it to build stronger and more effective services.

Mayor Bibb promised more transparency. He also made this plowing data available. Why do you think this is important, and do you think Bibb is fulfilling his pledge so far? 

This sort of data is important and useful to show Clevelanders the results and value of taxpayer-funded services. Even during the last administration, there were already a few other sources of civic data from Public Safety and City Planning, but it wasn’t often advertised. I’m curious to see what other data projects and policies are adopted by the city, and also paying attention to who the Mayor hires in the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer role.

Any tips for Clevelanders who want to take on similar civic data projects? 

Start small, with an issue that you really care about and are willing to spend time learning the details. Spreadsheets and lists are a great way to get started – you can get started just with simple tools. I’d also recommend learning about how to access public records from the city – these are often the best sources of public information. The free training from Cleveland Documenters seems really cool!

If you like learning about local history, then also make sure to spend some time browsing the resources at the Cleveland Public Library downtown. They have so many government records and books, there’s always something new to learn about this city!

Check out Angelo’s tracker here, and the city’s tracker here

 

 

Angelo Trivisonno lives in Cleveland’s near west side, and enjoys making and sharing maps and apps that enable neighbors to impact our community for the better. Reach him on Twitter @Trivisonno.