Durham Strategic Plan Dashboard
Prosperity
Status Indicator: 
In Progress | 
On Hold | 
Complete/Ongoing
Initiative: 2.23 Increase awareness and visibility of the data most important to residents (i.e. dashboards, surveys, live feedback portal)
Creating a Safer Community Together
Description
The ultimate aim is to use data as a vehicle for meaningful communication, engagement, and problem solving with Durham residents. To do this, we propose adopting an emerging trend in research called “stats-in-action” that brings a community participatory process to data analysis. Through such an approach, a cross agency public safety team would meet with residents to share data and ask for their assistance in interpreting it, thinking through how and where it is presented (online v. in-person, centralized resource v. multiple resources, multiple languages, data guides and documentation, etc.), and in identifying other questions of interest they would like to consider answering using data. This approach can help the city create data dashboards that are more intuitive to Durham residents that increase their understanding of the challenges facing our city and current efforts underway to address them. The data would likely inspire questions, thoughts, and ideas on the part of community members. This collaborative process would, then, lead to a further round of data analysis—which we rename “data-in-action"—and further conversations, coupled with improved data dashboards. This design would require an ongoing commitment in terms of staff time and creativity.
Key Measures & Data Analysis
The chart shows data webpage engagement for Public Safety Departments through quarterly numbers of views of the data pages for each department, except for the Fire Department. The Fire Department does not currently have a webpage for displaying data, so the chart shows the number of views for Fire's main departmental webpage.
The data presented so far will be used as baseline data. Baseline data helps determine if an improvement has been made, once the new initiative or a pilot of the new initiative is in effect.
Once the new dashboard is in place we hope and anticipate that we will see higher numbers of page views. The first iteration of the new dashboard is on schedule to be in place by the end of FY Q2 2025.
Webpage Views
Why is it important?
This initiative would prove useful by encouraging public safety agencies to more actively use data-driven analysis to report on and improve their programs. They would also have more regular and fact-driven spaces in which to explore their programs with community members (using data). There is likely little reason to believe that this initiative would result in traditional savings in time, money, or risk, but it would offer the opportunity for greater gains in the realms of trust, program innovation (driven by data), and accountability.
What have we been doing?
- Established cross-agency team with representatives from Community Safety, Emergency Communications Center, Police, Fire, NIS, and the City Manager's Office.
- Held weekly team meetings.
- Selected as 1 of 21 organizations for Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy Spring Consulting Program.
- Received over 400 hours of pro-bono consulting services from Sanford School of Public Policy.
- Presented recommendations for the initiative and community engagement for public safety data to executive team.
- Assessed current data and data needs of each Public Safety Department.
- Formed partnership with Open Data Durham through the City's Technology Solutions Department.
- Ran comparative studies of what other jurisdictions are doing.
- Designed Community Engagement Listening Sessions.
- Conducted initial Community Engagement Listening Session.
What's next?
- Implement recommendations from Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy
- Create internal policy and standard of operations procedures for Public Safety Data.
- Continue to schedule and conduct community engagement listening sessions
- Build the prototype dashboard
- Conduct 2nd round of community engagement and user testing with the new dashboard.
City Website Home Page: Durham, NC | Official Website (durhamnc.gov)
Budget Website Page: Budget & Management Services Department | Durham, NC (durhamnc.gov)
Budget and Management Services Department
Office of Performance and Innovation
Strategy and Performance Division