Drowning in Data, Cities Turn to ‘Citizen Scientists’

Government has a data problem. Put simply, it collects so much of it that it struggles to analyze most of it.

Of course, states and localities already use data analytics for a lot of things. Departments of revenue, for instance, rely on it to curb tax fraud. Public schools use it to measure student performance and figure out how to boost grades and graduation rates. Cities turn to it to manage traffic congestion and monitor air pollution. But despite all of this, governments are still collecting vast amounts of data and, well, doing nothing with it. “A lot of time is spent and wasted trying to find the right data,” says Adnan Mahmud, founder and CEO of LiveStories, a firm that creates digital tools for visualizing data. “Very little time is spent exploring it.”

Mahmud estimates that government workers spend about 80 percent of their time trying to find data and only about 20 percent of their time analyzing it. “We need to flip that number,” he says. He and others argue that government needs a better way to sift through and tell the story that lies behind the data it collects. But most important, it needs people who can analyze and diagnose what it means.

That’s where “citizen data scientists” come in. These people aren’t statisticians or analysts by training, nor are they coders -- the people who build apps using government data and programming software during hackathons. Rather, these are skilled workers who can generate predictive models or pursue data analysis using new software tools or apps. The technology research firm Gartner predicts that as much as 40 percent of data science tasks will be either automated or conducted by these nonexperts by 2020.

In the public sector, citizen data scientists range from volunteers to government workers. Dr. Matt Willis, a public health officer for Marin County, Calif., uses citizen data scientists to tackle a range of problems, from finding better ways to manage the county’s emergency services to stemming the exploding opioid epidemic.