At your service: what we've learnt doing data science at the City of Cape Town
Speaker: Gordon Inggs
Track: Data Science
Type: Keynote
Room: Main Hall
Time: Oct 13 (Thu): 10:00
Duration: 1:00
Other than wearing lab coats for no apparent reason, the best part about having the word science in our job titles is that we can legitimately spend all of our time learning. The City of Cape Town has had a Data Science unit for over 4 years, and we would like to share some of things that we have learnt while working on behalf our residents.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of what we have have learnt is about people, which we'll illustrate using some examples from our work:
- From reforming performance targets, we learnt how data can provide vital context to decisions
- From running a turnaround program, we learnt the value of using data to illuminate trade-offs
- Finally, From the seeming end of the world bearing down on us, we learnt the real use of data-based dashboards
This is not to say we haven't learnt important technical lessons, too:
- The value of Tidy Data, and more generally, building coherent datasets
- The curse of dimensionality and how it sneaks up on you
- The simple effectiveness and resilience of pre-rendering as much as you can, so that you just have to serve up static HTML files
Ultimately though, we're civil servants, and we serve our residents. Throughout the talk, we'll try our best to convey how we think modern data analytics can and should meaningfully play a role in contemporary South African local government.
We think this talk will be of interest to anyone who is curious about how modern "tech" such as data science fits into large, public sector bureaucracy; how we have resisted doing a series of flat mountain related projects; and what we're currently most excited about.
