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Our City-Wide Data Strategy

How we engage with data can support how we make Boston a home for everyone.

For the first time, we've developed a Citywide Data Strategy to deliver on resident needs, bring greater insight to decision making and operations, and show our work so we can learn together.

READ THE CITYWIDE DATA STRATEGY

OUR WORKING PRINCIPLES

Contact: Analytics Team
This is a living description of how we strive to work with data across the city. It will evolve as the City's practices evolve.
  • Co-creation: we define success with the teams doing the work, not for them
  • Access: we treat friction as a design problem, not an afterthought
  • Learning: data serves learning and improvement, not only reporting
  • Visibility: we surface and share work so we can build on each other
  • Responsible innovation and ethics: we build guardrails as we build capability.
  • Data readiness for emerging technologies: foundations like access, documentation, lineage, and trust are preconditions for using AI and other emerging technologies well. Readiness is organizational, not just technical.

Mayor Michelle Wu speaks about the City of Boston's vision on how Boston can improve services for residents by using data more effectively during the City Alliance Program Kick Off.

City workers stand alongside Mayor Michelle Wu, convening at the City Alliance Program Kick Off.

HOW WILL WE GET THERE?

Strategy 1: Democratize Data: 

Promote data literacy and expand access to data tools and resources across city departments.

Strategy 3: Data for Learning and Decisions: 

We define metrics with the teams doing the work, grounded in a shared theory of change about the outcomes we seek.

Strategy 2: Data Beyond the Dashboard:

Tell more complete stories about resident needs and public impact by combining traditional operations data with qualitative feedback, resident stories, and other unconventional data sources.

Strategy 4: Build a Learning City:  

To move from isolated departmental research to a culture of “working in the open," where research and data assets, methodologies, and findings are shared resources across the City of Boston.

Boston's Analytics Team

Check out our tools, open data, and the projects we've worked on with our partners throughout Boston.

Analyze Boston, Boston's Open Data Hub

Where you can access Boston's municipal open data.
Boston Maps

A centralized location to access our authoritative GIS data and web maps.
Analytics Team Projects

Showcasing how we help Departments make data-driven decisions and improve operations.
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