Rutgers Transparency and Governance Center Hosts Digital Dashboard Training for City of Newark Officials
The Transparency and Governance Center (TGC) at Rutgers School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA) hosted a training session for city officials from Newark, NJ on Tuesday, May 23 to provide insights on digital dashboards the center developed as part of a three-year $2.3 million Smart and Connected Communities project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The project is focused on working collaboratively with the City of Newark and Newark residents to advance digital public services, and is part of a larger digital literacy initiative of the TGC, which is led by Rutgers SPAA faculty, Director Suzanne Piotrowski and Associate Director Gregory Porumbescu.
The interactive training session introduced three digital dashboards, which display various types of visual data in one place. It was conducted in a computer classroom to allow participants to navigate through them and ask questions. The dashboards include:
- Newark Integrated Dashboard: This dashboard aggregates data from different sources, such as air quality, e-scooter activity, traffic cameras, the Newark Connect app, Newark Fiber Wi-Fi access, and parking tickets.
- Newark Connect Dashboard: This dashboard shows the spatial distribution of different types of service requests in the Newark Connect app, how requests vary by time, and how efficiently different departments handle these requests.
- Abandoned Properties Dashboard: This dashboard tracks abandoned property cases across Newark from early 2013 to early 2023. It shows the status of these cases, how the distribution of cases has changed over time, when these properties were last inspected, and where these cases are most concentrated on the map with respect to socioeconomic status.
Toward its commitment to using technology and government information to empower Newark residents, TGC has also developed multi-language trainings for the Newark Connect Reporting Tool for Citizens app to help Newark residents utilize the app to report non-emergency neighborhood issues or file complaints.
About the Transparency and Governance Center (TGC)
The Transparency and Governance Center (TGC) in the School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA) focuses on programming, research, and projects related to public sector transparency and governance at both the local and global levels. TGC understands that governments have an obligation to inclusively give citizens the opportunity to play a part in decision-making.