Stae, the MDS Policy API, and our vision for the public-sector API layer

For the past 18 months, Stae has been supporting the Louisville Metro Government in Kentucky with our Civic Intelligence Platform, the data layer that enables the city’s management of its dockless mobility program. As a founding member of the Open Mobility Foundation, the stewards of the Mobility Data Specification (MDS), we’ve led the charge in helping the City ingest operator data from the MDS Provider API to understand KPIs on dockless mobility like fleet counts, trip paths, and parking locations.

Using MDS Provider, Stae made dockless mobility in Louisville legible to City staff like James Graham, the City’s Mobility Coordinator. James has used Stae’s ability to create insights in real time and historically from data ingested through the MDS Provider API.

Implementing the new MDS Policy API, we built a lightweight tool for James and his team to communicate policy changes quickly and consistently to all dockless mobility operators in Louisville. Expanding on the understanding of the public right-of-way supported by MDS Provider, adding Policy allowed us to close a loop, giving City staff the ability to publish digital policies and evaluate performance against those policies in one tool.

The kind of push/pull API layer that we’ve implemented for Louisville Public Works has applications in other public-sector verticals. Every public agency owns data in some form, and many have existing processes and tools in place to operationalize that data. But often, organizational challenges mean these sources and tools don’t always play nicely together.

Despite mountains of data and expensive tools, the usability, flexibility, and accessibility of civic data is often hobbled. Outcomes suffer. Significant resources are allocated to manually assembling data workflows and static reports, and communicating data to stakeholders, grant administrators, or private-sector partners.

Our Civic Intelligence Platform is an API layer that can ingest data, static or dynamic, from varied inputs from CSVs to active API endpoints. Flexible reporting functionality, dashboarding, and data visualizations are available, pulling from the diverse data sources our government partners integrate and community sources like U.S. Census data and 311 complaints. In Louisville, our dashboard for Public Works focuses primarily on system-level reporting for commercial micromobility. Going beyond analyzing these inputs, the platform can publish insights or data back out to stakeholders like micromobility operators and other analytics platforms as one-time exports or active API endpoints.

In concrete terms, this means our platform is able to streamline process, democratize access to insights, and enable agency program managers to drive more informed decision-making or policy implementation with less time spent wrangling data.

How have we leveraged this vision in the mobility sector? We’ve supported transit agencies in automating previously onerous reporting workflows, pulling in data from farecard transaction databases, passenger count databases, complaints databases, and others to report back to leadership and the Federal Transit Administration. We’ve helped other agencies with reporting on groundbreaking autonomous shuttle pilot programs. And, of course, we’ve used APIs to create a common language between city agencies and micromobility operators.

Beyond mobility, we’ve expanded how we support agencies with data workflow improvement needs in other verticals. We’ve supported city-level affordable housing agencies in incorporating housing production, demographic, and small business data and creating dynamic visualization dashboards. The end goal? Illustrate a department’s impact over time with constantly updated, fresh data, and export insights to other analytics platforms like ESRI ArcGIS and Tableau.

We also support agencies managing complex budgeting processes, integrating with ERP systems like Tyler Munis and platforms like Microsoft Power BI to enable agency finance professionals to report on budget allocations regularly and transparently to leadership and the public through white-label Stae-architected or third-party open data portals.

These are just a handful of the applications we’ve implemented so far. There’s a conception in the government technology world that an agency can either procure a narrow off-the-shelf solution to a technical problem at a lower cost, or engage expensive consultants to implement a complex custom solution. When it comes to working with data, Stae’s platform supports custom-level flexibility off-the-shelf.

If you’re a public agency looking to streamline reporting, access more cross-functional insights, or integrate your siloed data sources and BI systems with each other, we might be able to help you get the most out of your systems. If you’re in the private sector working with government and have questions about how to use your own data to collaborate more effectively with public agencies, we can be a resource.

We’re happy to get on a call to learn what specific challenges you’re facing. Find us at we@stae.co or @staehere.