 Hello everyone, welcome to Smart Cities Lab 2021. My name is Lillian Corral and I'm the Director of National Strategy and Technology Innovation for the Knight Foundation's Communities Program. Smart Cities Lab 2021 is a convening of Knight grantees and national ideas. Over the last 18 months, communities have faced the toll of a global pandemic, economic instability, political polarization and irrational reckoning. Some say our way of working and being has been questioned, perhaps changed forever. Whether it be the great resignation as it's being called, or this week when a young woman of one sports high stage has said she's prioritizing her well-being, we're experiencing a unique moment in time. And a common thread in all of this, often unseen is the powerful role of technology. At Knight Foundation, our mission is to foster more informed and engaged communities. Founders John S. and James L. Knight believe that a well-informed community could best determine its own true interest. To that end, Knight's Communities Program is driven by our belief that engaged, equitable and inclusive communities matter. And tech plays a role in all of this. This is why our Smart Cities Strategy is centered around residents. The intelligent application of digital technology should be driven and serve every resident in our communities. Our goal is to encourage and shape solutions that build the innovative cities of tomorrow while amplifying the voices of everyone in the community. So in the lead-up to the Smart Cities Lab, we've been focused on three broad questions. How can our communities use technology and engage the public as they continue to rebuild and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic? How do we harness the lessons we've learned over the past year to build resilience and prepare for future challenges? And what is the meaningful application of technology to serve engaged, equitable and inclusive communities during this time? I wanna thank all of the grantees, community leaders and technologists that have joined us today. We're so glad that this new medium allows us to convene a broader audience for what we think will be an engaging two-day agenda. Today, we're gonna delve into three themes. First, the use of data to power civic engagement. How do we seize on unprecedented levels of investment to build the networks and strategies that support meaningful civic participation? Then we're gonna dive into digital infrastructure and broadband. How do we advance affordable and meaningful access for all? The key here is meaningful. Lastly, we'll close out the day with a discussion around equitable recovery. How can data and the application of digital technology enhance the way our cities plan and the future public realm is created? So throughout the day, we're gonna be hosting workshops for grantees as well. Those are gonna be tailored around storytelling and grants management. And we'll be closing out with a virtual exposition hall where you can meet night grantees across the US and learn more about their efforts and initiatives. This is a fabulous group of people and critical discussions and personally, I can't wait to dive in. We encourage you to use the chat buttons and please foster that discussion amongst yourselves even in this virtual format. So with that, let's kick it off to our first panel. I'd love to introduce my colleague and boss, Kelly Jin, our new vice president for communities and national initiatives. Most recently, Kelly served as the chief analytics officer for the city of New York, where she focused on delivering insights for a more equitable and efficient city, including in its response to COVID-19 pandemic. She's gonna be leading this first discussion on data for civic engagement. Welcome, Kelly. Thanks, Lillian. It is fantastic to be here. Good afternoon, everyone. And I am delighted to kick things off today with our very first panel, as well as kick things off for day one of the Night Smart Cities Lab. We have a jam-packed two days of session topics and esteemed speakers that are really designed to push both our thinking as well as learning for community leaders and technologists, all of you across the country, as well as, I'm sure, across the world tuning in. So to kick things off today, I'll be moderating our first panel, Data for Civic Engagement, a topic that is very near and dear to my heart, having worked at the intersection of data and civic engagement in local and federal government, and of course, today in philanthropy at the Knight Foundation. Given that we have a short 45 minutes today with our panelists, I'm going to quickly introduce them, their organizations and their titles, and ask them to say a few words about themselves and their organizations before they answer my very first prompt to all of them in a minute here. So today, we have joining us in no particular order, Jordan's son, Chief Innovation Officer for a Knight community, the city of San Jose. Jordan leads up the mayor's office of technology and innovation. Next up, we have Corey Zarek, director of the Digital Service Collaborative at the Georgetown Beak Center for Social Impact and Innovation. Fun fact, Corey was also a former colleague of mine and used to serve as the Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer during the Obama administration at the White House. Third up, we have Dana Amma here, is a designer developer and data journalist. She recently left conventional newsrooms to start Code Black Media, a digital media consultancy that lives at the intersection of data design and equity. Dana, I have a lot of questions for you. It's just a heads up for our panel here. And then last but not least, we have Stifon Merlhurst, co-founder and chief research and development officer of the governance laboratory, also known as the GOV Lab at New York University. So I have a very exciting panel here. Let's go ahead and just start with a basics with all of you. Could you each provide some examples of how you and your organization have used data to engage with communities? And also tell us what lessons and kind of challenges have you learned over time? I will maybe start in the same order that I just went through the name. So Jordan, we'll start with you. It's a pleasure to be, you know, when I took it out, was really government needed to operate more apparently on a roll, especially during the pandemic, and building with the Delta. Hey, Jordan. We're, I'm getting a little bit of sound issues. So maybe we'll skip next to Corey while we see if we can work on some sound issues here. Thanks, Kelly. Hi, everyone. Glad to be here today. So the Beck Center for Social Impact and Innovation is an exciting space at Georgetown University that brings in practitioners like me, people who came from the public sector or the private sector or the social sector who've been working on ways that we can use the tools of data technology, design and innovation to make systems work better. And a lot of our work centers on how we can engage with different types of communities. So one example to answer your question, we've had this longstanding network of chief data officers, a role that's familiar for you in states. So more than half of the states in our country now have this new role of a chief data officer. And it's still sort of finding its way to determine what is this role and how does it work? And so one of the things we have done at the Beck Center is bring together these CDOs to better define their role, to better understand how they can be useful in their communities and to engage the folks around them to consider how to use data and more evidence-based activities in their policymaking in achieving the goals of the executive in actually serving their communities. So these different state leaders got together and really better understood the priorities where they are around workforce and jobs, around education, around access to safety net benefits. And so these folks have been pulling in community leaderships in their different states to better understand what they can be doing to use data to address some of these big challenges and issues. That's something we've been excited to play a role in. And I've shared a variety of links with our team, so maybe they can drop in a link about the State Chief Data Officers Network here if you wanna read a little bit more. I'm sure we're trying to keep this moving, but I can't not mention the other really big data-focused project we have had at the Beck Center, which has been in partnership with the Knight Foundation and the Center for Public Impact. Over the past six months, we partnered up with Jordan and team in San Jose, as well as a team in St. Paul, Minnesota to dig into some of their open housing data and consider ways to increase access to affordable housing to address evictions, challenges, and other issues that have been exacerbated in the pandemic. And it's been really exciting to test out that project and pilot it into Knight communities. And we're really looking forward to expanding it to many more places. And I think we have a link for the report that is a bit of a preview still, but we're happy to share that and know that it may get tweaked a bit more, but looking forward to future work in future communities where we can continue bringing together community leaders and those who know their communities well to solve problems using data design and technology. Perfect, thanks, Corey, for sharing. And for anyone out there who has not yet come upon the Beck Center, please do check out the resources that they provide extremely, extremely helpful network building and collateral that you all have. And I actually think a perfect key up back to Jordan. Jordan, we're gonna try again to see how your audio is there. Perfect, hopefully I don't strike out this time. So really thank you again for allowing us to share a little bit about our data story, both in civic engagement, but also transforming City Hall. And so in terms of the efforts that we've done as you've heard about what we've done with the Beckman Center and housing, the way we look at data transformation is threefold. One is data-driven operations, right? And the first starts with how does staff use data more effectively to ultimately deliver better services and outcomes for the residents in their day-to-day activities? The second part then is data-driven product management. And so that's where things like we did with the top cities as well as other initiatives such as for three on one where we actually incorporate data-driven decision-making into better product management to ultimately deliver better digital products and experiences for residents. And the third where I'd really like to get at eventually is data-driven policies. And we've tested some of that already with our pandemic response funded by the Knight Foundation where we've reached over 3 million in terms of impressions and views, but also leveraging 59 or 49 local creators, influencers across TikTok and Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to be able to improve ultimately the vaccination rates in our communities. And we actually saw a spike going from around 50% all the way up through 85% during that timeframe of the campaign. And so that's kind of how we see data in terms of transformation. Happy to talk more about the tactical steps that we took. Perfect. Well, next up we'll shift gears a little bit over to Dana and Stefan. I'd love to hear from both your kind of individual and independent perspective on work that you've done at the intersection of data and civic engagement or even just sharing some of the communities and institutions and organizations that you all feel have done a good job over the last couple of years here. So Dana, I'll turn things first over to you. So in terms of how I've worked with data at organizations to engage communities, as a journalist when I was in conventional newsrooms, I tried really hard to leverage data as a tool to explain, to inform, to break down difficult concepts to make people just feel something about what's going on in their communities through narrative, whether that was anger, dismay or even gratitude about something that was good. I wanted whatever that emotion was to spur them to do something, to not just be reactionary, but to have some sort of agency. So one of the projects that I was part of when I was at KPCC, we were part of a collaboration called the California Reporting Project, which was a collection of media outlets across California which came together after the passage of SB 1421 in California, which opened up increased transparency to police records. So we submitted thousands of now public records request for police records on police misconduct, including use of force, official dishonesty and sexual assault, trying to put together a database of police misconduct that's never been done before. In order to show the public, this is what's out there. We have these officers who sometimes move from department to department, who have these really bad track records that make the rest of the officers who are doing a really good job look really bad. I mean, it's something that had not been done before and that had to be built from scratch. And I think that's something that definitely has the potential to engage communities to do something about it, especially in this age of Black Lives Matter and trying to bring more awareness about police brutality. Terrific. Thanks, Dana, for sharing. Stefan, we'll go to you next and then we'll kind of come back on this journalistic perspective and get some of Corey's thoughts here. Okay, well, thank you so much, Kelly, for having me on this very distinguished panel. And if you would ask me what are some of the best practices, well, have it here on the panel. So I won't go and reiterate what some of them already have referred to. But coming back to the question on how do we leverage data to engage communities, one of the elements that we have realized more recently in our work on how do we leverage data to improve the way we go about making decisions is that the data is only as good as the questions that are informing the use of the data. And so towards that end, we have started instead of focusing on the data, we have started focusing on what are actually the questions that matter to communities and others for which data could be used to be transformative vis-a-vis the question if asked and if data would be made accessible as such. And so we launched a few years ago now something called the hundred questions, i.e. what are the hundred questions that matter that we have not yet answered. But if we would find a way to leverage data, we would be able to answer it and as a result make an impact on communities and on people's lives as such. And we've done this now across a variety of topics, whether it's around migration, for instance, or gender or air quality or we just kicked off food sustainability. We also work with partners in Australia, for instance, around cycles of disadvantage. And so we do this in two ways. A, we created a community of so-called bilinguals which are people that have a domain expertise, better data expertise as well. And then we also engage the communities themselves in actually looking at what did the experts come up with and what are your questions that somehow never get asked and as a result never actually have the insight or data being used for. And so that's one way to engage communities is not around the data but around the questions because to a large extent data is all about answering questions. And so if you don't start at the early stage, then anyway, engaging around the insights might be too late because the insights might not be relevant to the questions that actually communities care about. And so the big lesson learned and then I'm gonna move to you again, Kelly. The big lesson learned is that this is not easy and that we've spent a lot of time on data science and I've been advocating, we actually need a new question science that really tries to focus on what are the types of questions that data really can answer and how does one go about actually formulating them in a way that serves communities? Absolutely and Stefan and I who corresponded back in my New York City days, this is the constant challenge of not analyzing or collecting or integrating data for data's sake, but what are the actual questions that we have or policymakers and decision makers have that we need to inform by using good data as it were. Let us, so going back, I'm gonna go back on Dana what you had brought up which is analyzing, visualizing data really to, I have in quotes here in my notes to spur people to do something. So I'd love to ask both Corey and Dana, oftentimes governments and institutions really struggle to do civic engagement genuinely and authentically. I have now left government for the moment so I can say sometimes it feels a bit performative, right? What are we seeking to engage the public on and it oftentimes is a struggle and a challenge for how do we do this authentically through the course of a particular project or initiative. From both of your backgrounds, who is doing this well and what advice do you have for institutions that are really seeking to do this authentically? Corey, we'll start first with you. Sure, well, it's such an important question, right? I mean, what is meaningful engagement or meaningful participation look like as opposed to what can be a little performative? And you know what? Frankly, we've all been a little guilty of that. Sometimes it's hard to, hard things are hard and sometimes it's really hard to get the community involved. And one thing we found through our work with the work I described earlier the opportunity project for cities work that we were doing with the Center for Public Impact and the Knight Foundation in San Jose and St. Paul was and maybe this will ring true for Jordan as we solicited feedback from our government partners. One of the messages that kept coming up was we didn't realize it was so easy to talk to the community. We didn't realize we could just have a conversation and learn from them and build that into what we were designing and executing on. It almost seemed like there was this misperception that there's this huge barrier and it didn't always have to be that way. Now, of course, sometimes there are those barriers but I think through this program and by designing some of those touch points and being really intentional about how we brought in community members and ensure that they were treated as experts for the expertise they brought the city partners really came to regard them as true partners, not as someone to consult five minutes before you go live but instead true partners to bring in through the co-design. And I'll give one other example and one of my side hustles and passion projects I'm on the board of an organization called the Muckrock Foundation. It promotes transparency for an informed democracy and has its roots in journalism and access to government records and government data. One of the recent activities that Muckrock engaged with is to build essentially a crowdsourced database of cities activity around smart city work. So different types of implementations where there are different algorithmic activities. More than 300 different instances of smart city activity came together in this crowdsourced database where dozens and dozens of dozens of community members participated and we're glad to kind of share and showcase what was happening in their communities and also ensure there was an opportunity to ask the right questions about what that activity was and provide a little bit of community oversight and really be part of thinking through the, what's appropriate for the city efforts along those lines. And so it's not always, it doesn't always have to be a whole big thing, right? A simple crowdsourced database, you throw it up online and encourage people to drop their inputs and lots of different organizations have taken this approach and it's a very light touch and kind of low cost, low energy way to get different people to participate in their communities and really bring their own voice and kind of feel part of that community. Dana, same question to you. What advice do you have for institutions trying to do this well? And you brought up the criminal justice and policing universe, any lessons that you have on those types of collaborations? So just to start out with, I wanna highlight a group that I think has done this really well, has used data to engage the public well. It's not a criminal justice example. It's in the COVID arena. It's a local government. It's actually New York City. Their data portal for COVID, I think it's something that a lot of other municipalities could look at and learn from. It's something that it provided a lot of transparency, it provided really up to date information and it was really easy to use as opposed to a lot of these COVID dashboards that you went to for different cities, different states that gave you PDFs of things to try and work with that gave you like strange implementations of how to download or whatever, which I can definitely say was very irritating as a journalist trying to figure out how to get the data out of this page that I'm like, I need it, but I can't get it out and I'm not gonna hand transfer it. And then just as far as the engagement part of it, as critical as some people were of Governor Cuomo going on TV and like going over the data points every day, I think that that's a really low hanging fruit way of engaging the public with the data, just trying to break it down into a couple of slides, like this is what it means. It's not something that's really complicated online anymore. It's like, these are the high points that you need to know that you can take with you to really act upon. And as far as groups that I think other organizations could emulate and could really learn from in terms of collaboration, you mentioned the California reporting project that I had talked about earlier for collaboration. I think that there are other groups out there that are doing equally as meaningful work with some of the same tenants. I think SHI vote, CHI dot vote in Chicago, which was a collaboration of contributors from Chalk Beach, Chicago, South Side Weekly, Univision, they were all media outlets that kind of covered different arenas, but they came together to create an election resource for elections in the city of Chicago that was just better. It was easier to navigate through than what the city was offering and what some other government entities were offering so that you could go, you knew who was in the lead, you knew who was running, you had some background and it was just a really easy guide to figure out who was in the race and where to go to vote and to make the voting process easy and to have low barriers to participation in voting, which I think in this day where we've got some very high barriers with voter suppression is a really important thing. I mean, other places that organizations could learn from are places like the Eviction Lab or Documenting Hate from ProPublica because both of those projects, they started with a data-driven mission to start with data to release to the public and to continue to update it. It's not just enough to put it up there but if you don't continue to update it and to maintain it, it's kind of useless. It grows stale and it's just sort of, it's an archival record but you can't do anything with it after a certain amount of time except refer to it as this is what happened way back when and I love Documenting Hate because it's crowdsourced. It's people reporting in on things that are happening in their community and spurring other people to say, hey, this is happening in my community too and trying to find correlations and relationships and say, well, here's a pattern. Here's something that we need to address and this has been going on since 2017. So yeah. I just want to reflect that first off, you guys are such a powerhouse panel because you guys are giving such juicy examples. I feel like whenever I'm a participant or somebody listening in to a whole bunch of experts talking, I'm like, what are the web links that I should be going to to go learn more about what folks are doing across the country? So I really appreciate you all sharing more there. Just very quickly for folks who are tuned in, we are going to save some time at the end for questions from the audience. So please do pop those in. They will make their way to me. We'll save a little bit of time again at the end for that before we wrap here. And I think we're actually on a perfect note to switch to one of my favorite topics that we've actually covered here both on the usability side as well as what I'm starting to hear about storytelling, right? It's not just about the data itself, but how do residents, communities, the state of New York understand what's actually going on behind the data? I think I can just make the statement that I feel data and civic literacy is very low in the United States. And that is something I think all, everyone you see on the screen here has grappled with in some form or another. So it's just fun, maybe starting with you. Can you help enlighten us to work that the GovLab is doing either on the research front or in collaboration with practitioners to help to really try to move this needle? And do you have any comparisons to other countries that are beating the United States when it comes to data and civic literacy? Yeah, thanks for that, Kelly. So yeah, I mean, have this one get data literacy, but then more importantly also, how does one engage the public in a meaningful and sophisticated way around data as well? And so one of the initiatives that we have developed during COVID-19 is something called the data assembly, which was the first ever citizens assembly here in the US around the reuse of data for COVID-19. And I emphasize the reuse of data because a lot of the discussions as relates to COVID-19 quite often ignore that we are really talking about reusing data that was collected for one purpose for another purpose. And from our point of view, in order to facilitate the reuse of data to inform, for instance, the pandemic or anyway, the recovery, we really need to not only assume that the public at large will be fine with that, we actually do need to go the extra mile and get a new social license to use data that was collected for one purpose for another purpose. And that needs to happen in a more deliberative way and in a way that you actually co-design the framework in which data can be reused in order to improve people's lives. And so that was the task and the mission of the data assembly, where we engaged with a variety of so-called mini-publics, but also the public at large in order to co-design the framework in which reuse could be seen as legitimate as it relates to COVID-19. And one of the key elements that we embedded in the design of the deliberation was actually the integration of a literacy component because we felt that in order to have a meaningful conversation around data, you actually first need to explain a few components. Meaning if we're talking about anonymized and aggregated use of data, well, what do we mean by anonymized and aggregated? If we are talking about, well, this is about cold detail records from a telecom operator. What do we mean by cold detail records? And so my view is that you can establish that level of literacy by engaging and co-designing the public at large who actually cares about that and are really sophisticated in having that kind of deliberation, but quite often need this extra layer of insight and literacy. And here the key to success from our point of view was to actually collaborate with the libraries because again, I go also and pick up what was mentioned as well is that this is great to do once, but then you need a pathway to do this on an ongoing basis. And I think we closely worked with the libraries to actually identify what was it that the public had problems understanding and what was it that actually were the gaps in understanding what we got to data literacy. And so now libraries in New York, and of course, more than one as Kelly knows well, are looking into, anyway, how can we leverage the insight of the needs and then turning that into data literacy programs moving forward? And Stefan, I am very familiar with there always a lot of things in New York City, even though I'm currently have moved to the city of Miami now, I was actually in Queen's Public Library at this point, I think two plus years ago during a town hall session, trying to explain and have a conversation of how do computers function and how do we define algorithms to just your kind of everyday resident who walks into the library. And so that's my T.F. Jordan to you, which is in the city of San Jose. How do you think about data literacy when it comes to whether it's the staff and agency staff there or the executives? How does it really inform your capacity building there? Yeah, we've really been fortunate here with support from the Knight Foundation, coupled with other fellowships such as Coding at Ford that we'd be able to grow our data science team from essentially one data analytics person to now a suite of 20 on the team inside the mayor's office, but also very much so embedded within our city manager construct to be able to do data transformation across departments. And so we take what I call a hamburger approach, which is from the bottoms up, but also from the top down. Bottoms up is really training the capacity of analysts from thinking about data analytics training for training analysts to be more data literate inside the city manager construct, but also guiding policy makers and electeds to be able to understand dashboards and to be able to eventually set what we like to call OKRs for the city. On the second part of that though, as y'all talked about and touched on is that community engagement aspect. And that's where I think the data products and I say products because any dashboard, any data tool that we build, we have to treat it from a product management standpoint in terms of what is the real core customer that we're serving out here. And I really think right now until we can improve data literacy rates across the population of not just San Jose, despite we have 40% college educated folks, we need, before we can get there, I think the real conduit is actually enabling journalists such as Dana to better understand what's happening in the city and be able to transit that. And I think the other part is actually then meeting the presence where they are, not just physically and digitally, but also cognitively. And so influencers was something that we learned was incredibly powerful to be able to reach millennials and Gen Zers, especially when we've heard 88% of them believe influencers in terms of what they tell them. And so that authenticity piece of the cognitive is also where we need to meet our residents outside of city hall. Yeah, and Jordan, I'm thinking to your last point here on the connection to journalism and reporters. I'm thinking about early 2020 when I never thought the population in the United States would be understanding exponential growth and logarithmic graphs. And here we have different charts being portrayed kind of daily in terms of coverage around COVID rates. That is a key up, of course, for Dana, any additional thoughts that you wanted to share here on data and civic literacy when it comes to the work that you've been doing. Yeah, so I have two examples that I'd like to point to that are both related to COVID, actually. So the first one is when I was back in conventional newsrooms. So when everybody was working with COVID data, we were all trying to figure out which populations were hardest hit, which areas were hardest hit and working with a couple of reporters on trying to figure out, okay, which areas of LA are struggling the most with COVID deaths and COVID cases and just trying to educate and help them understand, okay, well, you can't judge or evaluate an adjusted rate for cases or deaths the same as a non-adjusted rate for population because it skews what your answer is. I mean, if you're talking about Latinos, which is almost 50% of the population of LA County versus the black population, which is less than 10%, you're gonna get a very, very different number. So and as the primary messengers for our audience, we're that lifeline to understanding what's going on. They're not necessarily gonna go to the data portal for LA and try and figure out who's hardest hit by COVID. We're distilling that information for them. And just this morning, I was on Twitter, a friend posted some really awful data visualization on COVID data released by LA County. The scale was all wrong. The biggest circle was 4 million and there's this inner circle that's supposed to be 30 and the scale looks like it really should have been like a hundred thousand. So the numbers weren't what you as the audience would be focused on because the presentation was so bad and so confusing and on something that's so important where the message is so important and where the government agency wants you to listen to them and to act based on this information, we have to do better than this. And so I think the core issue is just really educating people, whether that's the creators of the data and the data viz or it's the consumers of the data and the data viz that it's not just a matter of just throwing the data out there and throwing the numbers out there. Like there's logic behind this, there's design behind this, there's critical thinking behind this. And maybe it's a kind of question posed to our other three panelists. Where should folks go if they're trying to learn how to be good data visualizers and how to do good storytelling when presented with a lot of complex data and information that you are trying to be transparent about and publish out into the world. Dana, this is a big challenge in New York and other places that I learned that we have a lot of information. We always want to make sure that we're providing context around that information as well. I don't know, maybe Stefan or Corey, do you guys have thoughts there? I'll jump in quickly and hand it over to Stefan, but one of the best organizations out there, training journalists, but anyone on how to use data in their storytelling is IRE, the Investigative Reporters and Editors, and NICAR, the National Institute of Computer Assisted Reporting. So IRE and NICAR do workshops and seminars and conferences all the time. And I've been fortunate to attend some of those and increasingly, sparingly, but increasingly, started to see government folks actually showing up and considering ways that they can learn some of these skills and traits as well. It's an interesting mix, certainly, and yet these are really important skills as the group has noted in how we can do more than just liberate the data. We have to provide that context. We have to understand how it can be useful and what it means to community members. And I think those types of training and teaching opportunities are so important and whether it's through a formal organizational program like IRE or NICAR or in other methods where there are more opportunities for community-based education, right? We've got these community experts and advocates on housing and on so many issues in our communities. How can we help them maybe not become data scientists, but as to Stefan's point, learn how to ask the right questions and scope the problems. I think there's a lot of opportunity there that organizations like us at the Beck Center, which this is something we do and are doing more of, and GovLab and others can really step in to do in our own communities and beyond. Yeah, just to build upon what Corey said, I think data visualization is part, from my point of view, of a larger challenge which is really about how do we go from data intelligence to decision intelligence? Because that's quite often where we fail, meaning we spend a lot of time on, anyway, generating data insight, but then we forgot on how do we actually make this data actionable, right? And again, journalists have a key role to play in actually then generating a story and contextualizing and then also asking the question, so what, right? But I think we need to do a lot more work within government, within communities, within even journalism to really think about what does it take to go from data intelligence to decision intelligence? Data visualization is one, but also really starting to think about how do we connect that then with other efforts, such as behavioral science that really looks into, anyway, how do people actually really make decisions? So if we wanna start using data, for instance, around COVID-19 to inform decisions that individuals can make in order to protect themselves, we not just have to rely on data visualizations. We also also have to start thinking about how do people actually make decisions and how does then the data fit within their decision process moving forward? So I would argue, yeah, data visualizations is key, but also think about anyway, how do we go and make data actually actionable in a meaningful way? And that involves embedding other aspects, such as behavioral science, but also other ways in which actually people make decisions and then understanding how that actually is based upon data. Stefan, you've teed up my next question perfectly because individual decision-making and government decision-making is critical with the $350 billion that are flowing as a part of the American Rescue Plan Act funds to state and local governments. For those of you who are not keeping a prize on this, definitely do look up more on ARP, the American Rescue Plan Act, which was passed earlier this year, I believe, in March. And communities are seeing huge, huge injections of dollars that will not only offset a lot of revenue lost in 2020 as well as this year, but also more generally. They're now making decisions about how we're going to spend all of this funding. And so, Cori, I'd love to turn it to you for your perspective over there at back, which is how might governments and communities best use what we've just talked about, data and civic engagement to inform this local decision-making and are there any communities that you'd be willing to share who are doing this well already or kind of proactively thinking about this? Yeah. So the Beck Center works with a lot of state and local governments and when the American Rescue Plan Act finally passed, despite all of us waiting for it for months and months, there was a bit of a, oh, now what moment where we recognized a lot of our colleagues really were a bit overwhelmed in trying to navigate this massive piece of legislation and this massive infusion of resources into their communities. And one of the things we wanted to step in and do was to try and be a partner to help them think thoughtfully and strategically about how to really invest these funds in ways that can sustain to one of the questions that has been asked to sustain all of these important investments well into the future so that we're not just showing up with band-aids and clips and chewing gum to fix the unemployment insurance system but instead rebuilding a system that can work and sustain through crises and ordinary times and to use components perhaps that are reusable or replicable for other systems and other programs that government administers. So the Beck Center has been bringing together state and local leaders, both tech leaders, data leaders and policy leaders to ask those hard questions and really make the space to think carefully together about how to strategically invest these resources for the long-term success and for the really kind of, you know, the back-end infrastructure that we really need to rebuild. We know this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity but we also, unlike the CARES Act, actually have some time and so we want to be sure that communities are learning from each other and of course, to your question, Kelly, there are some great activities already underway. You know, in New Orleans, they've been doing incredible work to bring in the community and really be participants and partners in thinking about how to invest those funds and to transparently and responsibly chart how those funds are being invested so the community can have oversight and really hold government accountable for where it's putting its funding. And so I think as we recognize there are so many opportunities in this legislation. There's also a real need to think through very carefully and thoughtfully how we can support communities to learn what's working so that they can replicate some of those opportunities and build up from that. And so our, maybe a colleague can share in the chat that the Beck Center has been compiling some of those great lessons, including that New Orleans example and others so that other communities can essentially adapt that, replicate it, make it their own. And we'll continue these workshops into the future as we know there's just so much need and opportunity and risk and uncertainty and it's important to be able to show up and support each other. Terrific. We certainly here at the foundation have been keeping a close ear to the ground on all of this to see how we can help to continue to support communities, night communities as well as across the country. Jordan, keeping on the topic of the American Rescue Plan Act, tell us more about how analysis there is helping to inform equity generally when it comes to decision making and to also piggyback off what Corey just highlighted. We had a question come in around the sustainability about all of this work. So how have you, Jordan, been thinking about how to keep sustainable this work, whether it's through the capacity, the staff, or even some of these stories that are being told around the work? Yeah, we've really driven home that a lot of our work around data is to produce more equitable outcomes for our residents through the programs that we work on when it comes to the data transformation projects. But really, I think you all really touch upon two things that I think are important to highlight. One is on the talent side of things. Until cities really formalize chief data officer roles and elevate them to the C-suite level that they deserve to be able to make and influence those strategic decisions down the organization as well as up to the electeds. I think it's very tough to see a city transform. We've been fortunate to be able to do some of that with our data equity lead passage inside our city budget message for this fiscal year. But the second part then is creating the technical capacity and giving young technologists a career track and some level of mobility as well as mentorship, technical, and overall professional in terms of their careers inside a local government. And I think that also simultaneously needs to happen to be able to sustain the talent effort that we've talked about so far. I think on the flip side of things is procurement. And so when we talk about ARP when we talk about government expenditures the biggest issue and struggle I have consistently with government from federal to local and I think federal is doing it better now especially in the national security community is procurement. And we need to fix procurement at local levels and I know there's messaging being pushed forward at the US conference for mayors next week and I really hope some headway does happen where we can have more transparent, flexible and outcomes oriented, challenged based procurement methodologies to be able to move and upgrade up level local government operators and are elected so that we can be more transparent, accountable and ultimately effective in addressing equity and improving city residents and other residents their lives and opportunities and experiences and where they live. Thanks, Jordan. And thanks, folks. I've been given the virtual hook off of the stage here so we are wrapping up. Dana, I wanted to give actually you the last word from the journalism and reporter perspective just running out of time this go around but what predictions do you have for the future as the next year, year plus unfold when it comes to the intersection of data and civic engagement? Is there anything that we didn't touch upon today or that you wish we were talking more about as we recover and return from this pandemic across the country? Oh, and Dana, you might be on mute. Oh, sorry about that. So I'll keep it brief. I'd say we're starting to see this wave of diversity initiatives and focus on equity and belonging and civic engagement especially following the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and all that. Not that it wasn't present before it's just that it's exponentially grown since then. I think one challenge going forward is really maintaining that momentum to amplify the needs and the voices of Black communities and other marginalized communities as a whole and really bringing them into a more data driven space upping data literacy across the board and really keeping in mind that civic engagement and data are inextricably tied. It's not just something that's new and trendy for now it's something that we have to make a permanent mindset. So, that's it. Perfect. Well, please I really want to say a big thank you to all of you. Please join me in a virtual applause for all of them. I hope sometime soon next year that we all get to visit together in person and also hope that for our participants we provided plenty of examples and websites and links that you all can consult in addition to our conversation today. With that it has been an absolute pleasure to join all of you today. Please stay right here. We will be starting the second session very shortly in a few minutes. The second panel for the Smart Cities Lab will be titled Broadband and Digital Inclusion led by McKenna Kelly and will be naturally flowing from a lot of the topics that we just covered today on our very first panel. Thanks again from me, thanks again from the Knight Foundation and thanks again to all of our panelists for joining us.