Could you please tell me about your platform project that visualizes city data?It is called
UrbanEyes. The idea originates at Harvard, where it was born when I took a class on Urban Innovations with Stephen Goldsmith, former deputy mayor of New York and mayor of Indianapolis.
We will get a subjective assessment if we ask urban residents how well or poorly the city is governed. And the idea is to create a platform and application that collects and visualizes city-data.
The fundamental difference from most city dashboards is that they appear at the municipality's initiative. And the municipality decides what to show and what not. In cities with a democracy deficit, for example, Bishkek, where we cannot elect a mayor, we have no tools to influence urban processes. We don't know what's going on. But at the same time, we noticed that public opinion matters.
We have created both the platform and the application, where, for now, we will evaluate three main elements. The first is an assessment of the quality of municipal services. Second is an assessment of the city's infrastructure; third, I want to measure the city's emotions.
Imagine you have an app that, once, twice, or three times a day, depending on how you set it up, asks you, "Dina, how do you rate the quality of the sidewalk?" And you give a rating from 1 to 5.
Of course, your rating might be 3. Mine might be 5. We get an averaged parameter when there are 10,000 or 100,000 such ratings. Then, we map and visualize it all. So when you open the city map, you see yellow, green, and red lines. You immediately understand the state of the city's infrastructure. When this data is visualized, it is easier for journalists to create a narrative and for city residents to demand change.
Now, when you try to talk to officials, they start showing the best streets and convince you that not all is so bad. Everything is great. Precisely the same situation we had with air pollution. Until we started to measure, visualize, and map indicators of air pollution, all officials denied there was a problem with the air. We supported a major effort to visualize air pollution data at the foundation.
It took 6-7 years to get any reaction after installing the first sensors. For two years, there was denial. They said your data is wrong; you are all lying; you are NGO people, to blacken us here. Then, there was a very long acceptance phase.
When we collected the data, we visualized this data. We started saying, guys, we have bad air. And look, today in Bishkek, the air is even worse than in Beijing. People know that Beijing had terrible air, and everyone is like, oh my god, is it worse than Beijing? So this whole “worse than Beijing” turned out to be more effective for people than saying we have a pollution level of 243. People do not know benchmarks: what’s bad, awful, good. When you say we are worse than Beijing, it offends national dignity. Here, we boast about our mountain air but lack clean air.
And third is what I am now discussing here at Yale—the methodology of measuring emotions. Many have done similar things, but they only measured the level of happiness. And I want to measure the emotions of the city. We have now determined that we will have five parameters, of which two are positive emotions, one is neutral, and two are negative. So we'll see that certain areas are happier than others.
In this application, we do not collect personal data, only age and gender. This will allow us to see that men feel comfortable and pleasant in a particular area after sunset, while females feel a hostile environment.
We will be able to visualize all of this later and open up opportunities for subsequent researchers to pay attention to why this area is happier than another. I want to translate our assumptions into concrete data. This is what I call data-driven civic engagement.
I hope someone in other cities will also want to create and replicate this product because we will make it all openly available, all code and measurement methodologies, so people can create similar tools in their cities and make the work of municipal services more transparent and accountable.
Can this somehow be monetized? Monetization is needed, but at the same time, I don't want monetization to kill the core idea. Here, when I pitch, everyone asks how you will make people use your app. We will have such a condition that if you contribute your data at least once a week or two, you get a discount somewhere.
We are now negotiating with small and medium-sized businesses. This costs them nothing while triggering their social responsibility.
I don’t want to think about monetization yet because monetization becomes a limiting factor that starts taking you in the wrong direction. I need the freedom of thought to create a product. Twitter did not set monetization for itself, yet it sold for billions of dollars.