 So it was my great pleasure to introduce Bob Gradek. He's with the Regional Data Center at the University of Pittsburgh, and he's going to talk about Civic Data Ecosystems. Thanks. So I'm going to kind of fly through this. I'll tweet out the link to my slides. And everybody can hear me okay? Great. So I'm with the Regional Data Center, and I'll tell you about what I'm all about in a second. But the way that open data looks like in a lot of other cities is the mayor will come write a big check to a vendor who sets up a data repository. They have a big press conference, and then the mayor checks off the open data check box, and all is right with the world. But in Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, we built an inclusive open data infrastructure. And so what that means is we have a two-page legal agreement. We can add any number of organizations to publish on our open data portal, and they don't have to really pay another vendor. They can just work through us. So we manage the open data portal for the city of Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and all those other organizations that you saw there. And a big role that we play is also helping to improve data quality and manage the ETL process. So we have some data sets that update hourly, daily, and even monthly. And so there's a list there. If you want to go back and read those on the slide, you're more than welcome to do that. But the role that we also play in managing everything is providing the role of being a data intermediary in the community. And I'm going to take a very broad view of data intermediaries here today, and I'm going to define them as organizations that really help people apply data to achieve impact in whatever it is that they do. So three roles that our community practice, the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, identifies for data intermediaries is to assemble, transform, and maintain data. Second is to disseminate information, apply the data to achieve impact. And the third is to use data to strengthen civic capacity and governance. And so what I'm going to do now is actually fly through a lot of examples from within this network of NNIP that are going to illustrate a lot of the roles that data intermediaries play around the country. And a lot of this is going to be us, but a lot of it's not. So really intermediaries are really important to overcome obstacles to data use. And this is just me putting a list of things together. But you could see things that get in the way of people using data include the data. The skills aren't out there for the data users to make use of raw data, for example. Both the producers and the data users lack context. So how is the data created? What does the community need? All those things are missing in a lot of cases. Producers aren't trusted by data users, vice versa. Data quality is an issue. We heard a lot today. Accessibility is an issue. Awareness does this data exist as an issue. And then even things like exclusionary messaging. When we talk about data being for the tech community and hackers and everybody who can hack on data, we're excluding a lot of people that don't have those skills. So these are all some obstacles that we've seen in our work that really inhibit data use. So just to take that framework that NNIP put out there, the first is assemble, transform and maintain data. So one role is to curate data. So our partners in New York City and D.C. both curate data on affordable housing from a number of federal, state and local data sources. And they built nice platforms and tools that enable people to go and look up when the subsidies might expire on a property in their neighborhood. Intermediaries also can help broker data requests. So we have on our site a data request feature, but communities get together. And actually do processes like the open data vote in Philadelphia is one, for example, that is really neat where they really go out and try to get the community to participate in making data requests. Intermediaries also improve data quality. And this is actually a map of tax liens in one neighborhood in Pittsburgh. This is a data set that our team has helped to assemble and put together 2.5 million records of tax lien data transaction by transaction over 20 years. We throw that at data users and there's like probably isn't even one that can make use of this in any kind of substantial way. So this data can't be used for land banking. This can't be used to understand, you know, how to intervene at a neighborhood or even a property scale, unless somebody comes in and improves the quality of it and makes it useful for users. So we did that with Scripps and a lot of going back and forth to the data publisher at Court Records to really understand what they do with this data. So we wound up with a whole summary of how many liens are on every property and the amount delinquent and every month we get an update. So the liens that are satisfied come out of our database and the liens that are new get added to the database. And that's all out there so people can use this data in their work. Archiving data is a big role for intermediaries. And in our community, our university librarians actually came together from a couple of different institutions and held a data rescue event at our public library. And it was a big success. We had about 50 people show up, get involved, and we were even involved in helping to provide food for the event out of one of our budgets. So we kind of have this ecosystem view of being a data intermediary and this is just one example that illustrates that. We also have the ability to work with our university librarians who are fantastic. Some of you may recognize Aaron Brenner in the center of the top picture. This is our digital scholarship team. And they actually partnered with us because the city had questions about how do we release 311 data so it doesn't harm anybody. So who cares where a pothole is, you should share that coordinate. But they needed to make the case that we're going to treat the data where somebody's complaining about their neighbor's dog a little bit differently from that pothole complaint. So getting the data management experts at our university library involved allowed the city to actually roll out their Bergs Ivy tool which has data on crime, 311 complaints and a number of other things. And now they went out to do meetings with the community and show them how to use the tool. And all of that really happened through a lot of the work from our partners both at the city and the university library. So kind of building these connections is an important piece of being an intermediary. I'll talk about more in a second. Intermediaries are also involved in primary data collection. So you may have heard of the Motor City Mapping Initiative a few years ago in Detroit. Our partners at Data-Driven in Detroit were involved in helping to collect visual observation data on every parcel in Detroit which was no small undertaking. But they're kind of in the weeds and working to really get data that can be used in those important decisions that affect that community. Another sort of category from the NNIP framing is to disseminate and apply data. So our partners in Baltimore at the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance at the University of Baltimore put data out through their vital science project where they take a lot of census and other data, aggregate it and then publish it at a neighborhood scale. And having all that stuff in place up front when the whole Freddie Gray death and the media storm around that hit, they were able to provide information to reporters from all over the country and the world about the kind of conditions that were in place in that community. So the reporters had a little bit more local context to understand the kind of things that were affecting his life and his neighborhood. Technical assistance is probably one of the things that we do most of as an intermediary across our whole NNIP network. Some have forms on their website, others will just pick up the call and answer emails. I think lately we've been getting four to five requests from people every day asking for help with data. So that's an important role that intermediaries play. Intermediaries also help build data tools and we've built some where we link together a lot of different property data feeds that we get from the city and the county, for example, and publish it on a property data dashboard and Steve here in the front row is depicted here in the front at our community meeting where we roll the tool out. That's an actual photo. Data intermediaries also build data into community processes. So our partners in Cleveland have developed this neighborhood stabilization team model where they pull together community organizers, community development organizations, code enforcement officers at the city, housing counselors, police, and they bring the data to the table and they roll it out and they say, here, what's happening with this property? What's changed on this block in the last three or four months? And everybody gets together and talks about what's happening and they devise some property, private property targeted intervention strategies based on the data that they see. And then community analysis is another important part of disseminating data. For example, our partners in New Haven do a giant statewide community survey where they ask about community well-being and quality of life and put out reports with a lot of really valuable information. And the third main category is to strengthen civic capacity and governance within the ecosystem. And so one of the things that we and many of our partners serve in that role is as a community organizer and that is Bert Reynolds on the screen. It was actually a shot taken at our last data user group meeting. So we use these data user group meetings that we pull together people that have a shared interest in a particular topic and just ask them what they're looking for, learn a little bit more about what they're doing and provide feedback on the kind of tools that we're developing. So Steve was at that meeting showing this tool and getting feedback from a lot of the people in our community. And so out of this kind of meeting we put together a roadmap of what kind of data these organizations want to see and then we'll go out and work on it or we'll work on tools or we'll work on a lot of other things that are going to meet their needs as a data user. Another way of getting feedback is really by setting up events like City Camp in Oakland through Open Oakland and a lot of other folks out there. They've been doing this for a number of years. Every year they have an event at City Hall where they bring together people from the community and people from government and get them all together and start to talk about their jobs and kind of like job shadowing where that feedback can happen in that one-on-one personal interaction like what a City Camp can do. Data intermediaries can also provide context for data users. An important thing that's really missing is kind of that information that's in your heads about a data set if you're an expert. So what we try to do with a lot of the guides that we've written, I think we've covered about 30 data sets now, taking that task acknowledge that's in people's heads, codifying it on paper or on the computer so that everybody can understand, hey, what does go into the arrest data? How does the whole process work? All this kind of things are important if you're going to use data and use it effectively and use it accurately. And so what we've really tried to do is provide context through things like these data guides. Training is another role that data intermediaries play. And this is, again, a picture of our Data 101 trainings that we partner with the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, our community library. We're from our data user group meetings. We heard from our users that they just weren't even ready for computers. They knew data was important, but they were intimidated and didn't quite know where to start. So we took an exercise from the MIT Media Lab and built on that to offer a Data 101 training series, which is all paper-based because we realized pretty quickly in just doing a few test experiments that paper offers no barriers to entry for anybody, for the most part. And people communicate when you lay out paper on the table in a way different than when everybody's staring at a laptop. So we're going to roll out like a paper-based GIS class this summer, a paper-based data visualization class. And this is all done in partnership with our library, who will take this and kind of own and maintain this set of training sessions. Intermediaries can also connect organizations. And this is a meeting of last month's Civic Data Roundtable that we put together, where we pulled together all of the actors that we knew in our Civic Data ecosystem. So the city, the county, us, our university librarians, our student organizations that work with data-related projects, our Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, we all come together every month. We talk about challenges that we each face. We talk about ideas for events. And we're even doing exercises now to map out the ecosystem so we could see where we can act to strengthen the capacity within each of the organizations. It's important to also celebrate your data users. A lot of organizations that we work with have Data Days, which is just like a celebration of data where users come and show their work and talk about what they've been doing. And this is a picture from ours last October. We even had Andrew Cardenaghy, the library mascot, show up, which is really special. He doesn't show up at all these events either. Advocacy is something that data intermediaries do. So in the intermediary role, Code for America Brigades, for example, have been active in being an advocate for open data and open data policies and really encouraging their local governments to adopt them. So this is another role that these intermediaries can play. But even if you're not an intermediary or you're a data user, you can even just tell your story about a data set. That goes a long way when somebody's making the case for releasing additional data or improving data quality. If you tell your stories about how people are using data, your intermediaries and everybody else, all the other data users will thank you. And then one of the final roles that we've identified is storytelling. And this is an example from Portland Pulse here in this city, our partners in NNIP, where they do a lot of publishing of curated data and storytelling with the community. So that wraps up this sort of look at what they do. But in terms of the roles intermediaries play in the organizations that they come from, they can come from a lot of different places. I'm at a university department, but a lot of these roles are actually played by other organizations. So you could have nonprofit organizations, civic libraries, and university libraries play these intermediary roles, as do civic organizations like Brigades, volunteers, even through Data Refuge or Rescue Event, journalists, and even public agencies. And so if you think about it as a network, you know, the requests or the needs come into any note on this network, and if everybody's connected, they can kind of flow. So if there's a question that we get from a local government agency about privacy, we can relay that to the university librarians. Or if somebody has an idea for a training workshop, we can connect them or even just they can go and connect with the civic libraries. So it's kind of like one way that we look at intermediaries. What does it take for them to be effective? It takes institutional support. A lot of the organizations on that list actually were parts of larger institutions. So the leadership there matters both at the top and also within the project teams as well. So we have a lot of really good partners who really work closely with us on a lot of these kind of things, and that's leadership. It takes legal infrastructure. I mentioned our two-page agreement. But you know, if you can create a vehicle for people to share data without a whole lot of friction, you're going to be a lot more effective in your work. Technical infrastructure matters. We have our open data portal, which is kind of a community resource for this type of thing. Relationships matters. You've heard from some of these stories. If you have an organization that can kind of know who all the players are, at least to some degree on what everybody's doing, those connections between those institutions and those intermediaries in your own ecosystem can be made. Communities of practice are really important. And just being able to be flexible and agile with all of this matters as well. So some takeaways as I wrap up here from Pittsburgh. So create a culture and ethic of stewardship for your civic data ecosystem. Get people to work together. You know, encourage your brigade to have their meetings at the public library instead of at the bar. Those are the kind of things that you can do within your own ecosystem to strengthen it and improve the capacity. It takes a lot of work to build the capacity of people and institutions in that ecosystem, so everybody can play a role. Think about who that network manager is in your ecosystem. We play that role, I think, in a lot of cases in Pittsburgh. But those network managers can really do a lot of work to strengthen the intermediaries, to establish new connections between players in the ecosystem, and to coordinate across a lot of different actors. Third takeaway is really 3A and 3B. Sustainability really depends on institutionalizing roles and funding. At the point where we're halfway through our three-year start-up funding, we need to figure out the next step. So we're trying to think about how we institutionalize our funding sources. And then view your intermediaries as part of the civic data infrastructure. It's not just technology or computers that are infrastructure. It's also people and organizations, and think about it that way. And then the final one is really communities of practice are really invaluable in providing inspiration and knowledge transfer. So, you know, some of the communities that touch our community are in NIP, which has a guide to starting local data intermediaries should go about. Code for America, the American Library Association, Civic Analytics Network, which our city's chief data officer participates in. A coalition for networked information is one, I know that our librarians at the university work through, and then even things like the What Works Cities initiative, or some national organizations like Sunlight Foundation, also touch our networks. And that's it for that. If you need to contact me, that's me on the phone. I do answer my phone. And then all my other content from information. So I'm happy to talk more about that, but open it up for questions.