I arrived in Seoul, South Korea at the same time that President Trump was warning North Korea—just 35 miles away—that it may “face fire and fury like the world has never seen.” It gives a special flavor to a research trip to look around and ask yourself, “Are these the people with whom I’m going to be incinerated?” I wasn’t researching nuclear policy, though, but rather something that will be of vital importance if the peninsula doesn’t turn to ash: data. The Mayor of Seoul is taking steps that may be important to the development of more genuine democracy in South Korea.

Susan Crawford is a columnist for Backchannel and a professor at Harvard Law School. She is also the author of The Responsive City and Captive Audience. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

The backdrop for this story of creativity is one of crisis. Having raised itself from rubble over a few short decades, South Korea is looking for new economic and social justice opportunities for its people as China and the US tussle over world domination. It’s not a very big country, but its leaders want to show the world how cutting edge it is. (And it is!) At the same time, like Japan, South Korea is facing a decline: Its birth rate is at an all-time low, college graduates are having enormous trouble finding jobs, and trust in government (so close to the enormous conglomerates that dominate the country’s economy—Samsung’s de facto CEO was recently convicted for bribing the nation’s former president) is not high.

Yet some things coming from the South Korean government are worthy of envy, starting with projects at the local government level. The current mayor of Seoul, Park Won-soon, is a long-time social activist who won re-election to a four-year term in 2014. He pledged to pursue “a Seoul where people are safe; a Seoul where people are warm-hearted; a Seoul where people dream and create; a Seoul where people and the city breathe together; and a Seoul that is upright and dignified.” According to journalists, he was reacting to the Sewol ferry disaster of April 2014, and the deaths of young people that had been caused by that profit-at-any-cost overloaded, unsafe journey. He was also talking about larger ideas of shared prosperity. And he clearly has his eye on retaining his post after June 2018, when the next election will be held.

I got an advance look at what might turn out to be a powerful tool in his reelection: a visually beautiful data dashboard—its formal name is “The Digital Civic Mayor’s Office”—that is tied to the broad themes the mayor identified in 2014: How safe is the city, how welcoming is it to the very old and the young, how green is it, how open are its operations?

Ma with “The Digital Civic Mayor’s Office.” Susan Crawford

Here is a picture of this top level of data visualization, with Kyung Keun Ma, the talented team leader of the Data & Statistics Division of Seoul’s metropolitan government who built the dashboard, standing in the room across the hall from the mayor's office, showing me his work. So far, so simple—the dashboard is simply reporting yearly data in a colorful way, counting up outputs: how many sports facilities, how many senior care places, how much public data is being disclosed. The press loves this stuff, but it’s not very operational; it’s a postcard with bright colors.