Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Philadelphia Champions Collaboration and Data to Increase Opportunity.

Project Type:
Community Engagement, Communications, Cross-Sector, Economic Development, Equity, Finance, High-Performing Government, Homelessness

Philadelphia most recently achieved 2024 Silver What Works Cities Certification. The following narrative was written for Philadelphia’s 2020 Silver What Works Cities Certification. Some content may be outdated. For the most current information, please visit www.phila.gov.

At a Glance

Created an open data program that prioritized cross-departmental collaboration to secure the best possible equitable outcomes for residents.

Helped the city save money and amplify the impact of its programs and services such as reducing litter, social rewards and school district meetings with teachers through the Philadelphia Behavioral Science Initiative.

Through a detailed and thoughtful analysis of the City’s homeless intake system to maximize efficiency and effectiveness.

Philadelphia’s Open Data Program

In a room adjacent to Mayor Jim Kenney’s office stands a long wooden table where he often holds meetings. He chooses to sit in the middle of the table, embodying his commitment to distributed leadership and collaborative problem-solving in the City of Philadelphia.

As the birthplace of American democracy, the City of Philadelphia is no newcomer to collaborative leadership. To find sustainable solutions that get results, the City pairs data-driven decision-making with efforts to ensure key stakeholders — from inside and outside City Hall — bring their varied perspectives to the task of solving local challenges. Whether it be city agencies, academic partners, or local businesses, everyone has a role to play in building a better city.

Philadelphia’s open data program is executed by the Office of Innovation and Technology CityGeo team. By using the department’s platform, Atlas, residents can easily access city data on permit history, licenses, and 311, and more; much of the data is also mapped via GIS. To open up an additional 300 data sets of information on both municipal and non-municipal data across the region, the City partnered with a local geospatial firm to build OpenDataPhilly. And the Open Budget section of the Philadelphia website shares how the City is spending taxpayer dollars alongside data visualizations that make the numbers digestible. To make the connection between innovation and city data more apparent, the City has collaborated with Temple University’s Department of Journalism to showcase the experiences of residents, from business owners to activists, who have used the City’s open data.

The City’s strong collaborative foundation has enabled it to incorporate data into nearly every aspect of governance. From silo-busting behavioral science initiatives to equity-building workforce development efforts, Philadelphia’s increasingly innovative programs are delivering better outcomes for residents — and opening up even more seats at the table.

Spreading Behavioral Insights

The results of the trial were so promising that Mayor Kenny and his administration established the Philadelphia Behavioral Science Initiative (PBSI) in 2016 to continue improving the City’s delivery of services. In 2017, PBSI grew to become a key branch of GovlabPHL, the City’s multi-agency team focused on bringing evidence-based and data-driven practices to city programs and initiatives through cross-sector collaboration.
Now when departments have a policy issue or a possible project, they are teamed with local academic researchers whose expertise matches the nature of the work. From there, the City and academics collaborate to determine the goals and the kind of data that will need to be collected, and to create a data-licensing agreement. The trials run through PBSI have already helped the City save money and amplify the impact of its programs and services, including reducing litter, as well as putting social rewards and identity salience to the test with school district teachers. Each year, the City of Philadelphia co-hosts an annual conference to generate new research partnerships and ideas.

The relationship through PBSI is a win-win for everyone, with the City working to better serve residents, while academics are able to test hypotheses that could turn into potentially publishable studies.

Improving City Service Delivery

The Office of Open Data and Digital Transformation (ODDT) believes in a City government that supports the success and well-being of all Philadelphians. ODDT is composed of a multi-disciplinary team who has deep expertise in design research, service design, content strategy, product design, and accessible technology development. With these comprehensive skill sets, the team partners with policy-makers, service providers, and the public to transform policy ideas into holistic and implementable solutions that meet people’s service delivery needs — improving how the government serves the public from an evidence-based design perspective.

Stakeholder engagement is a crucial component of the PHL Participatory Design Lab.

For example, through the City’s PHL Participatory Design Lab which is co-led by ODDT and funded by the Knight Cities Challenge, the City’s homeless intake system has become a learning lab for service design. Through a detailed and thoughtful process of journey mapping, identifying “pain points,” and soliciting input and feedback from those seeking services and staff who help them, the Lab identified two main areas for improvement. They are: 1) approaching information as a service, such as through transforming informational materials like signs, videos, and forms to better equip people with knowledge of what to expect, and through making the service delivery process more of a partnership and 2) improving physical space. Both ideas seek to improve the experience of people entering the homeless system and the experience of the staff working with them to maximize efficiency and effectiveness.

Supporting Local Business Owners

Another crucial community partner — local businesses — were once disadvantaged by outdated contracting laws. The City’s charter formerly required that contracts be awarded to the bidder with the lowest price, regardless of the contractor’s level of experience or other considerations. In May 2017, the City went to voters with a measure to award contracts based on factors such as expertise, quality, and experience to ensure that taxpayer dollars were leading to the best possible outcomes. Voters passed the new law to shift from “low-bid” to “best-value” procurement. The $25 million the City spends every year on food services — from after-school programs to feeding people experiencing homelessness — is one of the first areas the City is applying the new approach toward, teaming up with the Sunlight Foundation.

Philadelphia has since structured its RFPs around strategic goals and desired outcomes that can be measured through performance metrics. And to help leverage the expertise of previously overlooked vendors, the City has implemented a point system in its RFPs that rewards contractors on certain criteria; one of them is being a local business, helping the City work toward its goal of reinvesting more taxpayer dollars back into the local economy through vendors that were once priced out by less expensive options. The City is also prioritizing increasing the number of contracts with minority-owned and women-owned businesses.

Investing in the Future Generation

A focus on stronger collaboration between the city government and residents is also transforming the very composition of City Hall. Philadelphia yearns to build a government for its residents, by its residents. But when the City looked into employment data, the average age of a City employee was 45 years old, and Philadelphia’s diversity was hardly reflected in the government workforce.

Mayor Jim Kenny meets with a member of Philadelphia’s workforce.

The problem was not so much how to create talent, but how to get it into the pipeline. Part of the City’s workforce development strategy is designed to activate talent in the city and connect young people, communities of color, low-income neighborhoods, and formerly incarcerated individuals to family-sustaining jobs — and City government is ripe with these kinds of employment opportunities. In collaboration with ten city departments, the City as Model Employer program hopes to transition a minimum of 200 underserved individuals from temporary work into permanent employment by 2020.

While there’s still progress to be made, Philadelphia’s vision is clear: The future will be imagined around an inclusive table.

Join Our Certified Cities!

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Project Type:
Community Engagement, Finance, Infrastructure and Utilities, Technology

2024 Gold Certification

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, cut serious worker injuries by over 70% in the Department of Public Works (DPW) by introducing a Real-Time Safety System (RTSS) to share worker safety issues and introduce root-cause problem solving among leaders and front-line workers.

Pittsburgh set a goal of a 30% annual decrease in its DART rate, injury incidents that lead to days away, restricted, and transferred, per 100 employees. Using the RTSS, DPW saw a 73% decrease by the end of 2024 – from 30.0 to 11.5 incidents. A program evaluation found that DPW’s early adoption of RTSS showed a statistically significant decrease in DART with a before-and-after comparison to all other departments across the city. Introducing RTSS helped front-line workers remain on the job – 2022 saw the lowest lost-time
injuries in a year in the past 15+ years – since the City began measuring. This focus on a culture of safety resulted in an overall 33% decrease in DART – from 11.7 to 8.2 incidents by the end of 2024, marking a better workplace for all City workers.

2021 Silver Certification

The City overhauled its 311 system to automatically fix spelling and other errors, anonymize requests, redact objectionable material and link related tickets.

Launched Dashburgh, a data dashboard detailing city services that includes the latest 311 data, including pothole repair requests, broken down by neighborhood.

Pittsburgh is now using 311 data as a criterion for measuring procurement outcomes.

Out With the Old

In Pittsburgh, locals quip that if it’s not snow season, it’s pothole season. To prioritize its street repair To Do list, the City’s Department of Public Works (DPW) relies in part on residents flagging problems via the 311 Response Center. 311 operators field tens of thousands of nonemergency requests each year via phone, mobile app, and social media channels. Pothole repairs are among the most common.

City’s Department of Public Works reviewing 311 response center — Image Courtesy of the City of Pittsburgh.

“In some ways, 311 is the city’s first line of defense,” says Trever Stoll, Civic Innovation Specialist in Pittsburgh’s Department of Innovation and Performance (I&P).

The 311 system worked well for more than 15 years, but service request data the 311 team shared with relevant city departments wasn’t perfect. A resident might misspell an address or include a phone number in a format the software couldn’t parse. A person’s complaint about a neighbor’s illegally parked vehicle might include personal information about the alleged offender. Multiple residents might submit requests about the same brutal pothole, creating separate repair tickets in the system that then all needed to be reviewed, addressed and closed.

The legacy system’s data quality issues were all consistently adding up to more work for staff. And they often posed obstacles to the responsive delivery of services from the DPW and other departments. In a deeper sense, unreliable data makes it harder for the City to understand residents’ needs and make equitable resource allocation decisions, says Heidi Norman, director of the I&P department.

“We knew better data could provide the foundation for our entire government to better match the services we provide to the needs of residents.”

Heidi Norman

Cleaner, Faster Data Streams

The overhaul project’s goals included upgrading the system to automatically fix spelling and other errors, anonymize requests, redact objectionable material (such as profanity), and link related tickets. The I&P department’s engineering team found solutions through a mix of its own custom-made code and off-the-shelf software tools incorporating machine learning and natural language processing.

One big aim of the 311 project was to integrate the system into the City’s open data portal, says Chris Belasco, who led the change effort as the I&P department’s data services manager.

Another open data benefit: Outside groups can leverage city data sets to build and publish useful apps and tools.

Pittsburgh’s Department of Innovation and Performance office meeting — Image Courtesy of the City of Pittsburgh.

The I&P department has also built data-driven tools for both internal use and public engagement. Last year, it launched Dashburgh, a data dashboard detailing city services. The latest 311 data, including pothole repair requests, are broken down by neighborhood. Another I&P-built tool: a new internal 311 dashboard for the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services (ONS). By analyzing ticket volume, type and location, the tool enables ONS staff to flag emerging issues and better respond to constituent requests and coordinate with City departments.

I&P’s team is currently developing a pothole dashboard for the DPW to help it more efficiently prioritize and act on pothole repair requests. The internal tool’s functionality includes automatically linking multiple requests to the same ticket and flagging when a resident’s request doesn’t include precise location details. “If the address is just “Main Street,” we now flag that as imprecise,” says Valerie Monaco, a senior data analyst in the I&P department.

When it launches, the pothole dashboard will be a win-win: The DPW will be able to do its work more efficiently, and drivers will see potholes disappear more quickly.

“It’s about transparency, about building trust with people by giving as real-time of a look into city operations as we reasonably can”

Chris Belasco

“The 311 work is indicative of the City’s momentum toward more data-driven governance. At a basic level, our work is about ensuring that everyone has access to the data and information needed to make the best possible decisions. Where are residents’ needs not being met? Where are we seeing challenges? Those are the kinds of questions we’re looking to answer, to break down barriers and improve the lives of residents.”

Heidi Norman

The Big Picture

When it comes to data-driven governance, knowing which pothole to fix first is the micro level. Those decisions matter to residents, translating into tangible outcomes and improved quality of life.

But Pittsburgh’s leaders see big potential to prevent bumps at the macro decision-making level as well. The I&P department views building a solid data foundation — in part through the 311 data upgrade — as a crucial part of helping the City’s various operations departments understand if they’re effectively and equitably delivering services, Belasco says. The I&P department sees a range of data-driven governance upgrade possibilities that could set the stage for insights into costing, resource allocation and performance.

An example of how better data supports performance management can be seen in the realm of procurement. Pittsburgh is now using 311 data as a criterion for measuring procurement outcomes. The City has put out an RFP seeking contractors to maintain vacant city properties. One performance expectation is defined via the number of 311 complaints received about the properties. (What Works Cities’ expert partners, including the Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University, the Behavioral Insights Team, and the Government Performance Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School, have supported Pittsburgh’s capacity-building around procurement and data governance and evaluation.)

Pittsburgh city roads with skyline view — Image Courtesy of the City of Pittsburgh.

The road ahead may not be perfectly smooth, but Pittsburgh is clearly moving forward.