Data for Decision-Making

The state of California reached out to USDR to support their 2021 redistricting process, in which a Citizens Redistricting Commission is required to collect public input on coherent communities with the goal of keeping them together in new districts. The Commission had a tool to collect geographic data from user-drawn maps, but needed a way to digitize and store the unstructured feedback mechanisms, including public forums, email, and phone calls.

The USDR volunteer team deployed a database for digitized comments and a cloud storage system to hold any images, maps, or other artifacts associated with the inputs. By building the back-end systems to ingest, hold, and show the data, the Commission was able to accept over 35,000 pieces of public input and make them publicly available.

Leading up to their 2021 elections, leaders in Arlington county wanted a tool to rebuild trust in the elections process by transparently showing what voters were doing in real time. They envisioned a dashboard that would display live information on the number of votes cast by type of voting and how many mailed ballots were counted, outstanding, or returned.

A USDR volunteer first worked closely with Arlington to wrangle their data sources into the right format and build connections between them. They then focused on how best to visualize the wealth of data, ultimately building out a map that allows users to click into individual precincts to see a breakdown of ballots. The result was delivered on top of internal tools and launched in time for their November 2, 2021 election.

USDR built a publicly available platform for leaders to access vaccine appointment data and conducted analysis on factors such as appointment availability outside working hours, equity in availability and flexibility, and correlations between appointment flexibility and vaccination rate. Each of the angles studied provided policy implications for increasing the vaccination rate, e.g. providing paid time off for hourly workers to get their vaccine during working hours.

Beyond retroactive insights, the platform can support smart policy and operational decisions with a wide range of data offerings, like systematic reporting, dashboards monitoring critical vaccination supply and demand metrics, cross-geo comparisons, metric threshold alerting, and custom analyses. We released the data and code as open source.