Data Inventory and Quality Sprint

*This course will be primarily facilitated in English, with interpretation into Spanish and Portuguese.

Overview

This Sprint will help government staff inventory data collection methods across the city in order to improve data efficiency, increase accountability, and ease citywide reporting, decision-making, and performance optimization. Data inventories answer the questions of what data is being collected (and if there is any duplication among departments) and what systems are in use in order to promote transparency, and develop data publishing plans. Additionally, this Sprint will discuss the data quality fixes and the implications of using ‘bad’ data. Participants will walk away with a Data Inventory and Data Quality Remediation Plan for their city.

Audience

This Sprint is meant to provide municipal staff with the foundational tools and plan needed to perform a data audit. Participants will be expected to review provided reading materials and videos prior to the live sessions and complete the relevant assignments to establish a data inventory and develop a data publishing plan in their cities.

Format

Each week there will be a live session and office hours held over Zoom. The sessions will be 90 minutes and focus on learning and applying key concepts in the process of cataloging data assets, with facilitated discussions with instructors and peers. The Office Hour sessions will be 30 minutes and focus on application strategies, with guided exercises to help take the learning into your workplace.

Sprint Objectives

• Your local government follows a documented methodology for routinely collecting and updating the data inventory at minimum every 24 months and is in compliance with the methodology.
• At least 80% of departments in your local government contribute datasets to the data inventory.
• The data inventory is made available internally to local government staff.
• A version of the data inventory is made externally available and published online.

• Your local government has implemented and published datasets that conform with at least one civic data standard (e.g., GTFS) in order to improve external interoperability.
• Your local government implements processes to document the provenance, collection methodology and/or known quality issues with datasets and to improve identified data quality problems (ie.conducting regular data quality audits, establishing feedback channels for data users, etc.)
• Your local government documents standards for internal data in order to improve internal interoperability, so that certain common fields (e.g., street address) are consistent across the organization.
• Your local government produces high-quality and complete metadata for both protected and openly published datasets.
• Your local government solicits community feedback to identify data quality issues and improve the quality of datasets determined to be inaccurate, incomplete, or suffer from fundamental limitations.

Course Outline (Subject to change)

• WEEK 1: IMPACTS AND BENEFITS OF DATA QUALITY AND INVENTORY CHECKS
• WEEK 2: PERFORMING DATA INVENTORY AND QUALITY CHECKS
• WEEK 3: DATA STANDARDS - EVALUATION AND ADOPTION
• WEEK 4: APPROACH TO IMPLEMENTATION AND SUSTAINABILITY