February 18, 2011 07:17 PM UTC

City Forward: a tool set for transparency

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• by: Raf

(full disclosure: I’m doing some consulting work for IBM on this project)

Late last year, I wrote briefly about an IBM project, the Smarter Cities Challenge. Briefly, it’s a competitive grant program whereby IBM gave away $50 million worth of technology and services to cities around the world.

Today, I want to concentrate on one of those services: City Forward.

City Forward is an IBM-designed tool that allows municipal governments to analyse and visualise data across various systems. We’ve all dealt with city government; we know that oftentimes, the right hand has no earthly clue what the left hand is doing, making it incredibly aggravating for someone to find out with whom they need to talk, let alone where and when. And that frustration isn’t limited to the general population – many dedicated civil servants share it, because of the pride they take in doing their jobs efficiently.

In a harsh economic climate, efforts to improve effectiveness and efficiency are half-hearted at best, making it difficult to take a larger, 30,000-foot view of municipal systems and plan properly for their integration.

That’s why City Forward is such a key tool – because at your hands you have a tool that can create unique data explorations which allow you to see at a glance whether certain policies have had their intended effect.

For example: New York City followed the example of London in imposing toll increases in order to manage traffic congestion. Using the City Forward tool set, you can explore the question: are toll increases helping reduce traffic congestion, or are other factors responsible? Looking at the data collected in this manner, you quickly see that while a rise in unemployment did have some impact on traffic congestion (because fewer people were commuting to work), toll revenues increased because of the higher rates, and because of those increases, more people used mass transit in order to travel into New York City.

Which brings me to the other reason why City Forward is important: transparency. Without the City Forward tool set, it would take a considerable amount of time and research dexterity (using various databases that may not even be connected with each other) in order to derive the same conclusions from the data. As a geek, it gives me great joy to use technology tool sets like City Forward (and others, like those created by Sunlight Labs) in order to advance public policy.

City Forward allows you to be an informed citizen, and it gives hard-working civil servants a versatile tool set with which to examine policy and systems. There’s not much more you can ask from a tool set like this. If you’re interested in creating your own data explorations, all you need is an account on Google (or a similar OpenID provider, like Yahoo! or Facebook) in order to get full use of the tools and data on the site.