Working with the City of New York Department of Parks and Recreation, Datapolitan developed and conducted a training in the fundamentals of data analytics and the process of data-informed decision-making for 18 employees. This was based on Datapolitan’s highly successful data analytics training program with City of New York employees and intended to help NYC Parks employees better leverage data and technology for operational success. The class materials were customized to include datasets from NYC Parks and software readily available to NYC Parks employees. The course outline and content was based on interviews with NYC Parks employees to ensure the training was relevant to the day-to-day work of NYC Parks analysts.

Datapolitan is working with the Johns Hopkins University Center for Government Excellence to help bring advanced techniques of data analysis, machine learning, and predictive analytics to mid-sized cities as part of the What Works Cities Initiative of Bloomberg Philanthropies. Working with both the talented GovEx staff and the many excellent partner cities across the country, Datapolitan is also helping develop training programs to make the great data work reproducible and sustainable.

Working with the New York City Department of Education Office of Innovation, we designed and led a user research session testing the key pieces of information educators and administrators need when evaluating and purchasing educational technology (edtech) products, providing wireframes for a portal to display this information in a visually engaging interface.

In partnership with TigerSwan, Datapolitan is working to bring greater awareness of how data can be used to drive decision-making in the City of Lancaster, CA in order to improve the quality of life for the 160,000+ residents living in this city north of Los Angeles. This includes data gathering, analysis, mockups, and training to enhance the capacity of city employees to collect, interpret, and communicate insights to those who need it.

To better enable the NYU Tandon Online staff in this task, Datapolitan developed and led a series of sessions to develop a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities in creating a high-quality learning experience for content creators and learners. Taking as fundamental that online learning is both a platform for learners and content creators to come together, as well as a process for the creation and dissemination of content, these sessions looked at both the technical and the social aspects of the work NYU Tandon Online staff perform as a means to achieving success. Taking as a given that quality is in the eye of the beholder, these sessions started by understanding what’s important to users. Leveraging proven techniques in design thinking and user-centered design, these sessions creatively engaged all participants with the ultimate goal of developing key insights into what users value and connecting them to concrete actionable outcomes to measure and improve value to these users.

Through a collaboration with the New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services, we have created a very popular series of classes covering a range of topics in data analytics, statistical analysis, information visualization, and mapping. Consistent with our philosophy of openness, you can find the course outlines for the four (4) full day courses in data analytics and one (1) half-day course in Open Data. Read the blogpost and see the course outlines. Additionally, we've created a series of classes in spatial analysis with open-source tools. The class outlines and lecture materials for the introductory course and intermediate course are available online.

In cooperation with the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management and linepointpath, we visualized the availability of jobs to those living around New York City via public transportation. See the visualization and read the report.