Bringing Data-Driven Governance to Local Governments

Imagine waking up in 25 years, what sort of community will you be living in? More importantly, in 25 years, what sort of community do you want to be living in? City and county municipal governments want to be responsive to their residents, improve their quality of life, determine what services are needed, and to stimulate economic growth. During the course of administering public services and allocating resources, an abundance of data is generated. The story of the community is in these data. Every community has a unique phenotype, a set of characteristics that are influenced by its environment and drive its evolutionary trajectory. We call our approach Community Learning Data Driven Discovery (CLD3). The CLD3 process starts with asking local leaders what their questions are but cannot currently answer; identifying data sources that can provide insights; wrangling the data (profiling, cleaning, transforming, linking); using statistical and geospatial learning along with the communities’ collective knowledge to inform policy decisions; and developing, deploying, and evaluating intervention strategies based on scientifically based principles. Working with community leaders through the CLD3 process can build capacity at the local-levels for data-driven governance and evidence-based policy development. In this context, our work with Arlington, VA and other localities will be presented.