The city of San Jose shares Data Equity Strategy

On Thursday 4th of February 2021, Christine Keung, Technology and Innovation Advisor from the City of San José presented their work towards a Data Equity Strategy. 

Data Equity for San Jose means that data should be used ethically and in ways that drive equitable outcomes for constituents that are different in each project. The city has developed a Data Equity Framework starting from the equity objective followed by the equity metric and as the final stage the monitoring and evaluation. San Jose promotes Equity rather than Equality and programs over scholarships as the scholarships enable access to programs but the goal is to improve program access. The city also highlights the importance of community engagement and cross-participation and acknowledges that everyone’s need is different and there are historical inequities. The question here is how they can measure this; scholarship access by gender, by race, distribution per district? An example of this is a qual program penetration rate (+/- 10%) for groups defined by household size and wealth. Finally, the city is open to feedback and other insights to develop further this framework.

Some important takeaways from the City of San Jose are the following

• Operating metrics create choices and levers for improving service delivery
• Administrative data allows you to test multiple hypotheses 
• Invite feedback on your equity metrics and disaggregate as much as possible.
• Process and procedures impact data integrity and quality. 

You can find the presentation here