Champion City Part 11: Some early numbers!
Hi New Rochellians! I was scanning through some of our Mayors’ Challenge data this morning and thought I would share some numbers with you.
There is a lot of interest in our Mayors’ Challenge project. 378 of you have filled out our survey. If you haven’t yet, get on it! Even more impressive is the fact that 254 of you have provided us your email addresses, indicating that you want to receive updates on the Challenge as it progresses. Wow! Approximately 60 of you showed up for our public-facing Sprint 2 on June 16th, a great turnout for an event of this nature.
As far as the survey goes, you’ve made it clear that you’re very invested in this community. See a snapshot of one of our questions below (note that the survey is still open, so data is subject to change.) If something is happening , you want to know about it.
Actually, you don’t just want to know about it. You want to influence your community by sharing creative ideas with the City:
An engaged and interested citizenry is such a useful resource for a city. But right now, there is a perceived discrepancy between the community’s desire to engage with the city (an average of 7.5 on a scale of 0–10), and the venues in which to do so, as the next image shows…
By adding more citizen engagement platforms earlier in the development process via immersive media, ideally more people will feel like their quality ideas do, indeed, have an even greater chance of being utilized, or at least being heard and considered. Of course, I think we all agree it would be silly that any idea thrown out there, no matter how wacky, expensive or untenable, should be considered for implementation by city government. It was interesting how many members of the public attending our Sprint 2 made it a point to tell me that while they want more citizen engagement, they don’t want nonsensical things being built, just because their fellow citizens may have asked for it. That’s why we are also looking at immersive media as a tool to help nurture, identify and extract the most relevant, informed and actionable feedback coming from citizens.
But how do we do that? And more so, how do we measure that? As you can imagine, it’s challenging to codify and “rate” qualitative feedback; but we have brought on a data scientist, and a market researcher to help us make progress in this area. In the future, we would like to see if the enhanced and non-biased information that immersive media is able to present, will manifest in more informed, relevant and actionable citizen feedback regarding proposed projects in the built environment.
Bloomberg Philanthropies published a recent interview with IDEA’s Executive Director Amelia Bearskin-Winger that is worth a read. But before you jump to the article, let me remind you of one final set of numbers: 7/21. That’s the date of our third and final sprint for the Bloomberg Mayors’ Challenge, and we hope you will attend. It will take place between 10–1 at the New Rochelle Grand Market. Your participation allows you another chance to win a gift card available to spend at local businesses, while helping our hometown team advance in this national championship. Let’s go, New Ro!
