An agreement between Syracuse University and the city of Syracuse will allow SU students to work with municipal data provided by the city, potentially relating to city services and code violations, among other things.

The city both collects and creates a large amount of municipal data, said Sam Edelstein, chief data officer for Syracuse, in an email. Through the partnership, the city will share select data with SU students, who will the analysis and work on projects with the data, he said. 

“We know that students get great experience working with real data like the types that we collect, and we get the benefit of experts helping us to make sense of the information,” Edelstein said. 

The city’s goal is to have the partnership up and running by the fall, Edelstein said in a second email. For the past couple of years, the city has been working on similar projects with SU’s iConsult Collaborative, he said. Students involved with the university-wide collaborative work with real clients to help them bring more digital technology into their organization, according to the collaborative’s website.

Syracuse Common Councilor Bryn Lovejoy-Grinnell, of the 3rd District, said the agreement could potentially be a great partnership that she hopes can lead to policy solutions for the city. 

“I believe there’s power in data aggregation,” Lovejoy-Grinnell said. 

The Common Council approved the agreement at a July 29 meeting. The agreement was also discussed during the council’s study sessions, during which some councilors expressed concerns surrounding the security of sharing data. The Syracuse City School District and Onondaga County Public Library faced a ransomware attack in July, Syracuse.com reported. 

Edelstein said over email that there are no security concerns surrounding the data sharing agreement. The city chooses the data that is shared and is sensitive about what data is presented, especially if it contains personally identifiable information, he said. 

Edelstein said the students will not have access to the data’s source systems — the systems or files that hold the data. Instead, they will be given a copy of the original data, he said. 

An initial project for the data-sharing agreement could include building dashboards for the city’s individual departments, Edelstein said. Mayor Ben Walsh’s administration crafted the City of Syracuse Performance Dashboard, which displays city-wide data for issues including fiscal stability, city services and neighborhood stability. 

“It is smart to take advantage of the resources offered by students and faculty at the university,” Edelstein said. “As we move toward a city that uses data to inform decision-making, more projects working with the university just makes sense.”

Published on August 27, 2019 at 10:06 pm

Contact India: [email protected]