A common vocabulary to communicate Digital and data work in local government

[vr00n]

Say Local Government Agency {x} needs {y} digital service. How best can the needs be expressed?

These services could range from:

• Data discovery (creating an original dataset)
• Data analysis (analyzing an existing data set)
• Data integration (integrating disparate datasets)
• Visualization (visualizing some data, includes mapping)
• Web/Mobile-application. (An application to perform some digital task)
• Algorithm/Bots (Implementing a service built on Machine Learning)

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• Type of Data :
  • Spatial,
  • Text
  • Numeric
• Is data personally identifiable, confidential, sensitive
• Is the tool / service public facing or internal?
• Common sense Legal (Dos/Donts)

Construct contract. Boom

[patwater]

Those really aren't the relevant categories of municipal professional services work. These operate at a different level of abstraction

Would be hard pressed to find any muni contracts that use those terms. SCAG is moving very strongly in this direction and their most relevant opportunity is "big data research: demographic change, housing choice and socioeconomic trends"

Usually the data work is framed in terms of the domains and the tooling is irrelevant. See items like "transit survey feasibility study" or "regional transportation plan" https://www.planetbids.com/portal/portal.cfm?CompanyID=14434

[vr00n]

The goal here is to work towards a common vocabulary to share digital work with local government.

State and Federal governments are perhaps not in the scope of this but open to discuss.

You and I have famously disagreed on what the term Algorithm even means in a municipal operations context.

It is this semantic dissonance that I believe is the root of the problem and causes friction when defining needs and delivering simple digital solutions to LOCAL agencies.

A Transit feasibility study is too broad and can contain door to door surveys and other non-digital work.

So What are the digital components of a typical Transit feasibility Study?

Data Collection - Car Counts, Pedestrian Counts
Data Integration - Integrating GIS shapefiles with count data
Data Analysis - Analyzing trends over time
Data Visualization - Visualizing these trends across different locations to support key questions

• Are these locations being served by transit?
• Are there other locations that need to be served by transit?