With DataCuse, the city hopes to create a data-driven culture in government and the community.

Hack Upstate was built with two key goals: community development and facilitating collaboration. Previously, we’ve discussed the great potential of CNYs sleeping STEM giant, but in order to expose the possibility for achievement the community had to adapt to data and tech driven change.

Step One: Information

Luckily for us, the city of Syracuse and their Office of Innovation has created, DataCuse. Pioneered by Chief Data Officer and Syracuse University iSchool alum, Sam Edelstein, DataCuse seeks to centralize meaningful data about the city in an easily accessible platform. DataCuse offers to students, developers, designers, and entrepreneurs a tool typically reserved for the nation’s largest cities — a central location for open data, maps, and visualizations.

While Edelstein was pursuing his MS in Information Management at SU he kept running into the same problem, “A professor would say, ‘we’re going to do a project and I want you to find a data set,’ and of course first I would try to go and use some data in the city of Syracuse [but] it wasn’t always available.”

That’s the hope, that it can be a collaborative process.

This is where the creative partnerships begin. Data is broken down into four categories: Neighborhoods, Housing, Infrastructure, and Lead Risks. From community events to interactive maps of lead pipes within the city, DataCuse is a centralized resource for every bit of data collected by local government. By creating this portal Edelstein is hoping to empower citizens, students, and creatives of Syracuse to better understand problems in their neighborhoods so they can help find unique solutions. Edelstein is is excited to see what the community can do saying, “If someone built something or did a project to show what the data can do, we’ll share it immediately. That’s the hope, that it can be a collaborative process.”

Step Two: Accessibility

At a first glance, the datasets on DataCuse seem overwhelming but no matter your skill level there are resources for you on the site. Open Data Tutorials are one way that DataCuse tries to inspire folks to learn and work with open source data sets. These tutorials show you how to package the data in R, Python and even Excel, but the future of DataCuse hopes to do even more. “We’re not going to teach you how to use R, or Python but we would like to showcase some resources so you can go and learn if you’d like and once you learn you can come back we’ll show you how to duplicate this chart we created, or this map that we created.”

However, DataCuse is not just for developers, programmers, and students — that’s only a portion of the site. In Edelstein’s words the site is for people who are, “technically versed on a variety of subject matters but also for people who have never seen a data set before and just want to be able to get a high level view of some of the data.” Do you want to see where every pothole has been filled in the past year? There’s a map for that. How about a map of vacant housing in Syracuse? There’s a map for that too. DataCuse is and will continue to be a resource to help citizens understand their neighborhood in new and unique ways.

Step Three: Results

So, how do we connect these dots? Edelstein says that events like Hack Upstate are one way, “It’s always so much fun to see people from all over the region come together with this common idea about creating a community around building technology in this type of way.” He also acknowledges that DataCuse is by no means a perfect site, and thinks that it can be made better through community interaction. He asks users to send in constructive feedback on how it can be better from a technical point of view or from the user experience side. More than anything DataCuse is a resource for anyone that wants to learn about, see, or experience Syracuse by the numbers.

The hope is that folks at hackathons and universities can use this information to sharpen their skills while providing the city with unique tools and solutions to deal with persistent issues. Edelstein, and the Office of Innovation are confident that this is the future of problem solving in Syracuse, “it shows us that there are people who are interested in these problems and that you don’t have to be in NYC or Chicago or LA to have that type of community, we have that community here.”