GovEx Data Points

Iowa City and GovEx collaborate to solve a problem: How do you gather ridership data without fares? --- In the latest episode of the Data Points podcast, GovEx and Iowa City staff about collaborative efforts to track bus ridership for a free-fare program aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Iowa City is a participant of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative Data Track, a program aimed at...

--- GovEx Executive Director Amy Holmes introduces highlights from the organization’s recent event marking the DATA Act’s 10th anniversary --- In the latest episode of GovEx Data Points from the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence, GovEx Executive Director Amy Holmes, a key figure in the passage and implementation of the 2014 DATA Act, reflects on the organization’s recent event marking the...

--- The Data Track at Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative helps leaders to the see the people behind city-level data. --- Today, we’re throwing a spotlight on the Data track of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, a collaboration between Bloomberg Philanthropies, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Business School, and GovEx. Launched in 2017, the Initiative has worked with 539 m...

--- In this episode, we celebrate Women’s History Month by talking to some of the women who made history by leading the development of the Coronavirus Resource Center, or “CRC.” Launched in January 2020, the CRC became the indispensable source for data about COVID-19 for government officials, academics, journalists, and the public, surpassing 2.5 billion website views before winding down last year...

--- In this episode, we discuss City AI Connect, a global learning community and digital platform for cities to trial and advance the usage of generative artificial intelligence to improve public services. --- Generative AI, powered by advanced machine learning algorithms, has the potential to analyze vast amounts of data to predict trends, helping cities improve emergency response, mitigate sever...

In the latest Data Points Podcast from the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University (“GovEx”), GovEx Chief of Staff Dr. Rudy de Leon Dinglas talks to Amy Edwards Holmes, who recently completed her first year as the center’s Executive Director. Amy came to GovEx with years of public service experience in both the non-profit and government sector. In this podcast, Amy e...

In the latest Data Points podcast from the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University (GovEx), GovEx Research Manager Jacquie Greif talks to Justin Elszasz, Chief Data Officer for Baltimore City. Elszasz describes the city’s long-standing partnership with GovEx, including the collaborative development of the ground-breaking Baltimore Data Academy, which is providing cit...

Among the lessons many cities learned from the COVID-19 pandemic was that local governments need to be better prepared for disruptions to the food system caused by public health crises and other natural and man-made disasters. To help local leaders address this need, the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence (GovEx) and Johns Hopkins’ Center for a Livable Future (CLF) developed a new tool,  F...

The past several years have revealed a major shift in the way we relate to our jobs, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing political and civil unrest. Increasingly, the roles of social and emotional wellbeing in the workplace have taken center stage as we negotiate our return to the office. This changing paradigm about our relationship to our work has prompted employers to re-evaluate t...

Place-based partnerships can serve a major role in supporting governments’ commitment to serving and improving the lives of residents. But partnerships on a city-wide scale rely on good data governance practices in order to be successful, data-driven, and self-sustaining. In particular, collaboration between government and non-government organizations (NGO’s) poses an extra layer of complexity, an...

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how unprepared our public data reporting practices were to handle such an event. Incomplete, poorly-formatted, or irregularly-released datasets were a norm, and drawing useful insights from these data presented a major challenge for governments seeking to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. While working on the Coronavirus Resource Center, GovEx analysts took note...

Innovation is about solving problems. Every problem and crisis a city encounters can unlock new opportunities to innovate and create better results for residents. In this episode, Amanda Daflos, the new Executive Director of the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins, shares her thoughts on the role of innovation in government, the data and innovation connection, and how the early...

When tackling society’s big challenges, we often find ourselves collaborating with other departments or organizations external to our own. But as any siloed government employee will tell you, building the relationships needed to rise to the occasion, and sustaining those relationships, is often no easy task. Today, we’re joined by two individuals familiar with this reality: Ryun Jackson, Special A...

Governments are often on the hook for some of society’s most pressing challenges. How can city leaders find novel and flexible solutions to address these issues and improve the lives of residents? In a world filled with ever more complex technology, leaders are looking to data science as the answer for previously unsolvable problems. Today, we’re joined by Richard Todd, Enterprise Data Lead for th...

How can cities and their partners help families start saving money for their children’s future college or career training expenses? Since 2013, Lansing, Michigan has been tackling this innovative opportunity with the Lansing SAVE Initiative, a program providing all incoming Lansing School District kindergarten students with a savings account. In this episode, we discuss GovEx’s performance managem...

Accountable, transparent government is something we all strive for in public service. But how do we make this aspiration a reality? It's not enough to simply collect results from the programs and initiatives we launch - we need to turn these results into meaningful insights about the efficacy of these efforts. Today, we're joined by GovEx Academy Instructional Fellow Richard Williams to discuss th...

Today, we're joined by the Economic Mobility Forum's Policy Fellows as they wrap up a year of research and discussion at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Applied Public Research. The Policy Forum is a community of practice focused on connecting forum members with vetted policy fellows: experts and practitioners who are working on economic mobility initiatives in their cities. Members intera...

The disruptive effects of COVID-19 were widespread, but that didn't prevent the City of Paterson, NJ from moving forward on mayoral priorities. Today, we join Mayor Andre Sayegh, Chief Data Officer Harsha Mallajosyula, and Business Administrator Kathleen Long to discuss their collaboration with GovEx in developing much-needed foundational data practices in the city. We'll look at how this work beg...

Is it safe for pregnant women to get vaccinated against COVID-19? What if they're breast feeding? The answer, it turns out, is hard to find, and it depends a lot on where in the world you live. Today, we're looking at COMIT (COvid Maternal Immunization Tracker), a Johns Hopkins initiative designed to track and report the world's nations' stances on COVID vaccination for pregnant and lactating peop...

Today, we're joined by the creators of the eSchools+ Initiative, a program designed to address inequity caused by school closures through connecting parents and teachers with school reopening data and research. We'll explore the initiative's conception and the unique challenges this effort posed given the rapidly changing landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our guests are Dr. Ruth Faden, founder o...

In today’s episode, we’ll discuss the Love Your Block program in the City of Lancaster. Love Your Block is a Cities of Service initiative that connects city leaders with residents to help them organize neighborhood improvements, cleanups, and other volunteer-led projects. We’re joined by Lancaster’s Director of Neighborhood Engagement as well as researchers from the Urban Institute who recently co...

In today's episode, we discuss our engagement with the City of Baltimore and its CleanStat program. We'll also look at how the city relied on this initiative to care for residents during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We know that collecting and analyzing data generates insights. But how can we transform those moments of insight into enduring knowledge that guides the organization, even when priorities and staff change? In today’s episode, we discuss Knowledge Management - the work of collecting insights into a big-picture understanding of our how our organization and efforts work. We’ll look at how this proces...

Today, we take a look at GovEx's engagement with the City of Rochester, MN to support their affordable housing initiative. We'll look at where the initiative came from, explore how Rochester collected and leveraged its data, and cover valuable takeaways for other cities looking to conduct this work.

We're all under pressure to cope during the COVID-19 pandemic. But how can we make the most of this time, and what benefits of this situation might we be overlooking? Today, members of the GovEx Academy explore how COVID-19 has placed a greater emphasis on distance learning, bringing an instructor's perspective to the challenges we face and exploring some of the tools you can use to make your onli...