Innovations in Health Policy

Phillip Guo, 2013

• Overemphasis of the analysis and reflection phases

• Underemphasis of the preparation and dissemination phases

• Problem spaces may have no data to begin with

• Insights have few outlets to actualize into action

The story of how a visiting faculty member at the Pratt School of Architecture with a penchant for civic improvement saved New Yorkers over $55,000 a year in parking tickets.

• Parking Tickets via NYC Open Data

• Ben Wellington, IQuantNY

• Reddit, Twitter, and the Media

One person can instigate change at the community-level:

• Open Government Initiatives

  • Data.gov
  • NYC OpenData
  • Open New York

• Exploratory Data Analysis

  • Scoping for outliers
  • Descriptive statistics

• Social Media

  • Disseminate findings to larger audiences
  • Generate public discussion

• How can we use Open Data to inform change at the local level?

• What are some avenues for turning insight into action?

Service Request Data from 2010 to Present

Dynamic Version

Large clusters of complaints occurred at the following locations:

• 151st between Amsterdam and Broadway
• 106th/107th between Amsterdam and Broadway
• 127th/128th and Morningside

• Open-source software

• Mixed-methods

• Time-series analysis

• Accountability of New York City Council

• NYPD Motor Vehicle Collisions

• New York State Medical Misconduct Cases

• Reproducibility

• Motivates "neighborhood-specific" research

• Encourages collaboration and new developments

• Removes barriers of civic engagement

Downsides to Open Data

• Potential for abuse

• Quality of data sources

• Difficult to go beyond correlational studies

• Software

  • Statistical Analysis & Visualization - R
  • Geographic Information Systems - QGIS
  • Data Munging - Python/pandas

• Blogs

  • NYC Open Data Analysis - IQuantNY
  • Story-telling with Data - FryanData

• Datasets

  • Data.gov
  • NYC OpenData
  • Open New York

• Final Report - Rpubs
• Code - GitHub
• Slides - GitHub