Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode #94: Lilian Coral
171 Plays7 years ago
Welcome back to the show! To get you ready for the September 23rd National Day of Civic Hacking, I’m very happy to have Lilian Coral on this week’s episode. At the time of this interview in late August, Lilian was...
The post Episode #94: Lilian Coral appeared first on PolicyViz.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Lillian Coral and Open Data
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. On this week's episode, I'm very excited to have Lillian Coral, who is the chief data officer for the city of Los Angeles, join me on the show to talk about the importance of open data and how cities use open data. And we're going to talk a lot of different things about mapping and different topics that Ellie is working on. So I'm really excited to have this conversation.
Career Transition to Data and Technology
00:00:34
Speaker
So Lillian, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.
00:00:37
Speaker
Thank you for having me, John. Happy to chat data and mapping. Yeah, it's going to be great. Thanks so much for coming on. So I have a bunch of questions for you about how LA uses open data and the portal that was created. But before we do that, could you talk a little bit about yourself and your background and what you and the city have been doing to open up data to more and more people? Sure.
Implementing a Data-Driven City Vision
00:01:00
Speaker
So my background actually is a little bit untraditional to your typical chief data officer in that I actually most of my career was spent in public policy and advocacy and then about eight years ago I started to transition towards data and technology in the public sector. So focused a lot on public health and human service systems and that's where I really started to see how especially after the release of the first iPhone how people were adopting that technology especially low income
00:01:30
Speaker
communities and then really trying to think through how does government make better use of those systems so that we could actually be more effective at delivering public services.
Publishing 1100 Datasets for Public Access
00:01:39
Speaker
So that's a little bit about my background now as the chief data officer for the city of Los Angeles. What my team and I have focused on is one on executing the mayor's vision of a data driven city. So we focus a lot on working with city departments and civic tech partners, academic institutions in using our data and in supporting the
00:02:00
Speaker
you know, the wider use of data analytics and data science to solve city problems. And then the other thing that we're really focused on is really making sure that we're publishing the best city data and the most high quality city data. So right now we have a total of 1100 data sets that includes things from operational data to anything that's geospatial. So assets that the city owns or has like every street light pole.
00:02:29
Speaker
that we have, where it is, what kind of poll it is to like where every crime is in the city,
Challenges in Data Sharing Within Departments
00:02:35
Speaker
et cetera. So we do a range of data and then we also do some financial data as well. And we're constantly working again with civic tech partners, private companies and the city to make sure that we're leveraging that data to build what we call, you know, digital tools, digital services that, again, are all focused on improving the quality of life of citizens and the way that
00:02:57
Speaker
Our city provides public services. With all the data that you have, I mean, it sounds like LA has a lot of data and a lot of it's being put into the open data portals being put out there. Was it hard for you to come in there and was there a culture that needed to be changed? And if so, how did you go about trying to change that culture to make it more focused on opening up the data?
00:03:19
Speaker
I think there's always a culture shift issue with any new initiative. But what we find with open data and data sharing in particular is that there's less of a resistance to doing it. There's
Barriers to Data Sharing: Time, Training, Tools
00:03:34
Speaker
some hesitation sometimes when folks are worried about, will there be some sort of liability? Will the city get sued? Because frankly, cities get sued a lot. The average citizen doesn't realize how much litigation goes on.
00:03:47
Speaker
You know anything that opens you up for litigation that always worries public servants but the real barriers that we see to participating are less like a cultural shift or less even that fear of liability and more just a question of time and really the lack of access to training and tools so most city governments.
00:04:08
Speaker
Actually, we see this even in the private sector because I connect with private sector colleagues all the time. A lot of big organizations, frankly, don't actually spend a lot on technology and data in terms of their budgets. So what you tend to have is just a real strong, especially now because technology is so rapidly evolving and changing and new tools. So it's really hard to keep up, especially in the public sector where it takes
00:04:34
Speaker
There's even less resources and it takes so much to be able to write up a contract or get a lot of stuff through.
Enhancing Data Sharing with GeoHub
00:04:41
Speaker
It just takes a lot of training, access to new tools and then just even time because there just isn't a lot of growth in public service staff. So that to me I feel is the biggest challenge and it's less an issue of I don't want to release data. Right. So what strategies have you tried to employ to get over that hump?
00:05:03
Speaker
We work as what we usually say like as a catalyst. We try to bring in resources into the city, whether they be like, you know, pro bono resources or literally like we'll have access to certain pools of funds and buy resources that then we extend across the city. So we really try to work almost like in service to our departments.
00:05:28
Speaker
because we're probably that unique team that could do that and could actually focus on that. So, for example, with our GeoHub, we noticed that one of the challenges with
00:05:41
Speaker
data sharing and even opening up data was that in order to show the value of data, you needed to have some platform that allowed you to share that data in a much more integrated way and coordinate it across the city that allowed you to have a private space for city employees to actually work on data before they even think about releasing it, a platform that allows you to collaborate and to build apps and even do analysis on it.
00:06:10
Speaker
If the city were to try to do that in the typical way, you know, they'd have to go through like this whole consensus building process and contracting process and all that stuff. We saw the need and we could just purchase it. And then now our real like job is just to go out there, make it accessible and just focus on adoption and utilization and helping people kind of see the value and then show them how to use it so that they start to derive like value on their own.
00:06:36
Speaker
So those are kind of, that's one example, but we've been doing that with a couple of different types of tools.
Engaging Communities Through Hackathons and Academies
00:06:43
Speaker
And then similarly, like on something like data science, where it just may be like in a department, they don't have some of the technical skills to, you know, do that kind of work. What we try to do is either help them do it through some training or hands-on support ourselves, or we actually connect them
00:07:00
Speaker
primarily academic institutions that have that capacity so that the work can be done in partnership or collaboration with like an institute or a professor or things like that. So really try to provide resources.
00:07:16
Speaker
Yeah, so it sounds like you are trying to be the connector of all these different groups within and around the city. So when you think about connecting individuals to the data, do you try to go through these other organizations or do you also try to connect directly to citizens and say, hey, we have this open data or we're going to have this hackathon or this event, come help us work with the data, explore the data, tell us how we can improve the city.
00:07:45
Speaker
Yeah, so we do it through multiple routes. So definitely through that first example, trying to connect people to like, academia, institutions that are out there that are doing this kind of work. So do that one on one connection there. We've definitely done a lot of the hackathon and the civic tech engagement, especially, you know, in the first kind of year and a half that I was here, we did believe about four or five major hackathons. And then now every year we run
00:08:12
Speaker
a hackathon for the National Day of Civic Hacking. So the next one's coming up at the end of September and that one's going to focus on recycling, which is part of a huge campaign. The city's running around increasing recycling in commercial and multi-family units.
00:08:26
Speaker
We definitely try to connect one-on-one with individuals in the community. Hackathons have been really great at creating a lot of momentum. The next level of engagement that we've done and I think we've learned from the hackathons is that there are a lot of interested folks wanting to give of their talent to the city. People always e-mail us and say, are there projects that you guys have that we can work on? I'm willing to do it for free.
00:08:55
Speaker
So what we did is we created an open Trello board and we've been working with a group called Data for Democracy that has like an open Slack channel to try to create a followership and a partnership with Data for Democracy and then we send people to our public Trello board where we actually post projects and these are projects that we're working on that a department has mentioned to us or that we actually need help with and then
00:09:21
Speaker
individuals, like, and we call them our data angels, because they really are huge angels, they will come in and actually start working on the project. And the cool thing about Trello is since it's a project management tool, we can sort of see where in the pipeline the project is. So, you know, we can kind of actually keep track of like, is this project getting done? And we've actually had a couple of pretty successful, we just launched it
00:09:46
Speaker
a couple months ago, and we've had already a couple of successful projects get completed. And so, you know, trying to really harness that energy in really creative ways to get the work done. The last thing I'll say is, we're also trying to really harness the interest in government and the use of data and technology by creating more pipelines into the city. So this summer,
00:10:14
Speaker
We ran this program that we call our Data Summer Academy, which we're hoping we can run again at least once a year, maybe a couple times a year. And essentially it was just, we get a lot of, again,
Contextualizing Data with Community Engagement
00:10:26
Speaker
students at all phases of their career, PhD, master's, undergrad. People are just really talented and want to work in the city. And then at the same time, we have departments who need all this help because, like I said, they don't have time or resources.
00:10:42
Speaker
So this summer, what we did is we got 10 of our best fellows. We matched them with 10 projects across the city and we placed them in city departments and we had some really amazing, we just did a little symposium, you know, because everybody's sort of heading back to school. And again, had really interesting projects.
00:11:05
Speaker
ranging from looking at congestion patterns at the airport, traffic congestion, all the way to redesigning a project website for a Bureau of Engineering that lets people know the status of capital projects across the city. So it's a real range of skills and talents and trying to put them to good use. And hopefully connect. Yeah, yeah. Well, connecting and being able to tap into the talent that's in the city is fantastic.
00:11:35
Speaker
Yeah, and actually people from across the country. We had a guy from Michigan, a PhD from Michigan, and an undergrad from Harvard who... Oh, that's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'll certainly put the Data Summer Academy link on the show notes. And if people want to, hopefully they'd be inspired to imply. And yeah, get some more people involved.
00:11:57
Speaker
That's great. I wanted to shift gears a little bit and talk or get your thoughts on the relationships of the type of people who are working on the data and for whom those data are trying to help or the neighborhoods of the lives it's trying to affect. Have you thought about
00:12:18
Speaker
What I suspect, and I could be wrong, but what I suspect is sort of an imbalance between the kinds of people who attend the hackathons and work with the data versus how that data is helping certain people. So poverty, for example, crime, people coming out of prison or jail.
00:12:38
Speaker
Data or issues that are trying to affect people in high rates of poverty or at risk of certain types of behaviors, I would guess those sorts of people are not attending hackathons and data camps and applying to the summer, the Data Summer Academy. And so I guess my question is twofold. First, is my intuition maybe right? And if so, how do you think about that imbalance between the two camps, the two groups?
00:13:03
Speaker
So I think the intuition is right, although I will give a caveat that I think in Los Angeles, in particular, we've been really heavily invested in making sure that our hackathons and our civic tech community is representative of the city's population and its own diversity. And we're really fortunate that, for example, in South LA, we have organizations like this group called Urban TXT.
00:13:29
Speaker
which is Teams Exploring Technology. That group is focused basically on training young men, African-American and Latino men, I think mostly in the high school age range, teaching them not just how to code, but to actually participate in different aspects of the technology development process and gain skills and gain on the job experience and mentorship, etc.
00:13:55
Speaker
We're really lucky that we have groups like that that participate in the city that have their own hackathons as well. But I think in general, you're right. I mean, we don't have, I would say, you know, nationwide, sometimes you don't have the neediest of people involved in these activities. And so it's really important to kind of engage them. What I would say is that I think what we need to remember is that data needs context in order to become meaningful. So that it's really an onus on us who are working in the data space.
00:14:25
Speaker
to make sure that if we're trying to solve a problem that we actually go out and really engage with the folks that are kind of living that problem and really understand what the data is trying to tell us. You know, data really is just a fact. And so I'll use the example
Data Visualization Tools and Access Challenges
00:14:40
Speaker
of, you know, X percent of illegal dumping is happening on this one street. In order to do something about that fact, you actually have to go out there and really understand what's going on in that street and why the dumping is happening there and not in the next street over.
00:14:53
Speaker
And that's when you have to engage citizens. You can't just really sit behind a desk at city hall and crunch a lot of numbers and pretend to know exactly what's happening in the street. So for us, I think there's a couple of ways we try to do that. One is we try to create these digital tools that are really about helping our operators, decision makers across the city solve those problems. So the data is really an enabler for them to be able to go out and connect
00:15:20
Speaker
at the local level to understand how to like come up with actual solutions. The other thing we try to do is we really rely on the power of mapping to really understand what the data is telling us and the context of the community. So we've found that mapping allows you to then layer a whole bunch of information to really understand again why on that one street segment there's a lot of illegal dumping and it could be that one, that street segment actually is a freeway
00:15:50
Speaker
underpass, right? And so maybe that makes it easy for people to come in and dump. Or it could be that too, like in that neighborhood, people don't know about our public service 311 and that they can call and get their, you know, big bulky items picked up for free. And so and we can track that by looking at all where all the 311 calls are coming from. And we can see, oh, the street with high dumping doesn't have any 311 calls. So maybe it's an outreach issue. So
00:16:18
Speaker
The data kind of helps us understand things and enables us to do better, but it's really important to connect to the community and then to use things like mapping and context awareness and demographic information to really understand what that piece of information is trying to tell you.
00:16:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. It's the way you frame it. It's a great framing is you have some data and use the data to create a tool that organizations and individuals on the ground can use to actually affect change as opposed to saying we have some data and that, you know, we do something with it. And that's the end of the game. Whereas there's this additional step that needs to be taken.
00:16:53
Speaker
You mentioned mapping. So can you talk a little bit about the tools that you use or that your teams use when it comes to visualizing data and using data? My sense is that some of the mapping tools lag behind or the development of mapping tools sort of lags behind a lot of the other data analytics tools and the data visualization tools. Yeah, so our team focuses, again, because we don't have a whole lot of unlimited resources, we really try to leverage
00:17:21
Speaker
what's already out there. So we use, in terms of just analytics, we use a mix of Microsoft's Power BI, we use Tableau, good old Excel. We help support people understanding how to maximize Excel across the city. So those are kind of our range of tools. In terms of mapping, we've actually relied heavily on ESRI, and that's what our GeoHub is based off of. And it's for a couple of reasons.
00:17:49
Speaker
I use a very well-known, highly utilized tool across all levels of government. And then in our city, of the 41 departments that we have, we have an enterprise licensing agreement. It's probably used by over 30 departments across the city. So it's one of those tools that you can really leverage, especially if you want to create more interoperability across departments or maybe even with other jurisdictions.
00:18:14
Speaker
I think the question about mapping tools lagging behind. Oh, and by the way, some folks on our team use R, and across the city, some folks will use perhaps R with a mix of Jupyter notebooks and Python, but that a little bit less so. In terms of mapping tools lagging behind, I think the challenge we have is, and this is from my perspective, I think a tool like Esri is really, really robust and dynamic.
00:18:40
Speaker
to do a lot of the analytics and the geospatial work that you want to do in a city like ours. The challenges, they're kind of hard to use and not as well known by like a younger crowd coming into the city. And then on the flip side, you have maybe kind of newer tools, newer mapping tools that are out there, but they're just not as robust in their analytical capability. And so
The Need for Interactive Data Tools
00:19:03
Speaker
I think there's a lot of space for improvement in that sector, and part of it is just a mix and match of your staff and their skill set and what you can do. But there's some new integrations between Python, R, and Esri as an example that I think are really interesting because it could be the wave of bringing some of that analytical capacity to maybe younger folks who are more
00:19:30
Speaker
accustomed to like working in R as an example. Right. When you're putting out visualizations and you're working with the data, how important is it for your team to make things that are really engaging visually as opposed to, you know, putting out something that, you know, here's the data. So, you know, people like maps because they get to engage with them and they know that they live in this part of the city and they live on this block and they can point to it. But it may not be necessarily the best way to visualize the data with, I'm putting best in quotes here.
00:20:00
Speaker
Yeah. How important is it when you're putting things out? Part of your goal is to highlight in some ways these data are available. How important is it to make visualizations that are engaging, that draw people in and get them to see that there's data there that they can use?
00:20:15
Speaker
It's extremely important, and we actually have a woman on our team who, her name is Leah, who focuses on design. Her background is in communication. She has a PhD in informatics, and then she helps us to really think about the design of our digital tools, the design of our data displays, and even just the way we talk about data.
00:20:40
Speaker
Because the reality is, for you and I, we get it when everybody has their own learning curves, but we get the value, we get excited. But for the average person and also just in all the noise within city government, you say data and technology and people, they gloss over and they're just like, that's not me. Get yourself out of the conversation. So we spend a lot of time really thinking through just even how we talk about data and technology,
00:21:10
Speaker
but definitely how we display things is really critical. Then the interactivity of things, maybe we can share a link for your audience to our Clean Streets Index. That's one that we're really proud of because you can put raw data out there and it's tabular, and then you lose the average Angelino. So we want to make it consumable to everybody. So we created a way for people to visualize,
00:21:36
Speaker
not just aggregate numbers on a map, but like literally type in their address, find their street score, see how the score was comprised, see how it compares to other parts of the city. So we'll kind of do some of the thinking for kind of the average individual so that they can interact with it too. Cause they're, I mean, for as much as I love our data angels, I mean, we're trying to really serve all Angelenos.
00:22:02
Speaker
Right.
Conclusion and Call to Action for Open Data Engagement
00:22:05
Speaker
Well, this is great. I mean, it sounds like you've got a lot of great data getting it out there and working with a lot of interesting groups and interesting data to help improve the city. So it sounds terrific. I'm going to put all of these links on the show page and hopefully folks in and outside Southern California will be able to take a look and take advantage of it. Yep, definitely. Lillian, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been really great talking to you. Thank you, John, for chatting with you as well.
00:22:32
Speaker
And thanks to everyone for tuning into this week's episode. If you have comments or questions or have a story about how you've used open data in your city or in Los Angeles or DC or wherever you are, please do let me know, um, on the show notes page or on Twitter or via email. And please do rate the show, review the show on your favorite podcast provider. And so until next time, this has been the policy of his podcast. Thanks so much for listening.