Cleveland Should Embrace Civic Tech

These days, Brian Cummins is riding high. The jittery, paragraph-long-sentence-slinging wonk of a Cleveland City councilman shows up to interviews on a red BMW motorcycle. He finally got his first committee chairmanship last year. He even has a pet project: getting government to solve problems with technology. That’s a tall order in a city with a website that’s as mid-’90s as a pair of wide-leg JNCO Jeans. But Cummins has seen the shining light of modernity. 

He just had to meet Candace Faber, Seattle’s first civic technology advocate, to find it. “She’s got a wonderful title,” he says. 

When Faber visited Cleveland last year, Cummins learned how Seattle was using publicly accessible data and a tech-friendly philosophy to deliver better city services. Faber, for instance, started Hack to End Homelessness, a hackathon that produced an app to help homeless youth find shelters.

“We don’t have [that position],” says Cummins. “I frankly don’t see us getting that unfortunately, until there’s a major change in culture within the administration.”

Across the country cities are experimenting with opening up data to the public. In Pittsburgh, for instance, the University of Pittsburgh, city and county government partnered to put data such as 311 call lists and sheriff’s sales online. 

The message coming out of Cleveland City Hall, meanwhile, is one of shrugging Luddism and unresponsive bureaucracy. City leaders praise corporations like IBM, which signed a lease for downtown office space last year, while rejecting the very innovation those tech firms embody. They hold up Cleveland as a model of municipal government, even as workaday public records requests languish for weeks or months.

Ambitious civic hackers are working around the problems. But if that keeps up, those techies won’t find their feet. Worse still, the city will miss a chance to show off an organically grown culture of innovation. Yet again we’ll start the race 50 yards behind. 

Cleveland’s leaders, from the mayor on down, need to decide: Is Cleveland actually the 21st-century city they say it is?

As Cleveland dawdles, another Ohio city is leading. Cincinnati recently launched the CincyInsights hub, where citizens can view a map of all police, ambulance and fire calls, updated daily and tallied for the entire year. 

To show the impact of the heroin epidemic, Cincinnati maps the location of every overdose publicly, every day. Want to see how much crime there is in a neighborhood or on your street? Just input the address. During snowstorms, residents can track where snowplows are working too with a live Google map, updated every 10 minutes.

By contrast, to build a map of potholes in his ward during a few months in 2014, Cummins had to make his own Excel spreadsheet. He and his assistant, Taylor Henschel, combined records of calls into his office with those to the city’s 311 line. They ended up with 28 different spreadsheets which they compiled into one. With that hacked-together data, they managed to crunch out a map. 

As far as Cummins can tell, it was the first time anyone in city government had tried to make a comprehensive data set of calls for pothole service. “Obviously, there wasn’t any indication that this data was being used in any way, shape or form for performance measures,” he says. And figuring out when the snowplow will come? A snowball has better odds in July. 

By necessity, Cleveland’s civic tech movement is making headway outside City Hall. Hack Cleveland created a digitized version of the consent decree between the Justice Department and city. And Open Cleveland, a local affiliate of national civic tech nonprofit Code for America, began meeting in 2014. 

Will Skora, co-founder of the volunteer group, was spurred to action after trying to find a recycling drop-off spot on the city website. “It was a pain to find,” says Skora. “The city’s website, frankly, was atrocious.”

Within a week he had rallied about 12 Twitter followers. They quickly got to work. 

In early 2015, Open Cleveland launched ClevelandLots, an online tool where residents could apply to buy vacant lots adjacent to their homes. Open Cleveland digitized the paper process. But the project fell apart when the city land bank couldn’t accommodate it. “It ultimately wasn’t adopted,” says Skora. 

The group’s next project was a map of where to get free flu shots. That fell apart too after the point person in the city health department left for another job, says Skora. They have since pursued projects that require less direct city involvement. The most fruitful one is an attempt to digitize the City Record. 

Most of the city’s legislative work, such as passing ordinances and allocating money, is summarized in the City Record, an arcane-looking publication available online as a massive set of PDFs with tiny type. 

It’s nearly impossible to find anything buried in the texts. Even the experts have trouble, which Open Cleveland discovered after staffers at the council clerk’s office offered the group a how-to demonstration. 

“For instance, if they wanted to find out when the LGBT legislation was passed, they had to go to Cleveland.com,“ says Skora. Staffers determine the date of when something was passed using such sources before manually looking it up in the record.

When even city employees use a jury-rigged system, the public doesn’t stand a chance. So Open Cleveland is making an online tool to make the City Record searchable. It’s due out in late February or March. 

DigitalC, the descendent of local high-speed connectivity nonprofit OneCommunity, funded the City Record tool with $10,000 won as part of a contest. In November, DigitalC also launched the Civic Insights Hub, an online repository for Northeast Ohio data. It contains more than 500 data sets and resources, with more added at the suggestion of an advisory panel that meets monthly. It’s publicly available.

The goal is to get the data into the hands of programmers and analysts to make apps and software that an average citizen could use, says Dean Trilling, senior vice president for data-driven solutions at DigitalC. 

Likewise, providing data for community-oriented organizations and researchers is the driving force behind Cleveland’s oldest data archive. The NEOCANDO system, run by Case Western Reserve University, has served up data from myriad sources since 1992. A quick registration gets you reams of useful statistics. But the data is raw and unintelligible to the average person.

“Most people don’t want to have to figure out how to use advanced analytics and predictive modeling tools,” says Trilling. ”If we can get people simple applications that can help them make decisions, and everything’s under the covers, that’s great.”

We won’t get the full range of those cool, useful apps if the city isn’t willing to be an active partner. City leaders will have to buck decades of precedent, their own instincts and budgetary limitations. They’ll also have to come to terms with the greater accountability that open data brings. 

“Open data definitely facilitates a culture change,” says Skora. “And generally, in Cleveland, culture change isn’t always welcomed or easy.” 

Our leaders often speak glowingly of a revival Cleveland fueled by innovation. It’s time they lived up to their words.