Policy Talks: "Improving municipal governance through better data sharing: A data dashboard for Kingston"

Date

Thursday November 24, 2022
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Location

Robert Sutherland Hall, Room 334

** Light lunch will be available for in-person attendees

Also available via Zoom. (registration is only necessary if you are joining remotely.)

Speakers:
Carolyn DeLoyde, Post-Doctoral Fellow and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning

Fernando Hernandez LeivaSenior Analytics Developer, Centre for Advanced Computing, Queen’s University

Queen’s University is collaborating with the City of Kingston, Kingston Economic Development, and the Kingston and Area Association of Museums, Art Galleries and Historic Sites to create a data-driven decision-making tool that can support community planning and help measure municipal resilience to COVID 19. Improving community engagement using new, web-driven tools is one way to support better policy development and local democracy. Kingston In Focus (https://kingstoninfocus.ca/) is an online interactive dashboard that provides a range of indicators and allows for comparisons with federal and provincial indicators. Dashboard indicators are grouped by overarching themes of Local Economy, Employment, Community Health, Mobility, Environment, Housing, Cultural Heritage and Demographics. The dashboard also includes links to Kingston-centric research (i.e. dissertations and theses) related to dashboard themes. The indicators provide insight into baseline and historic information and illustrate Kingston’s pandemic resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic, inequities exacerbated by the pandemic as well as on-the-ground impacts influencing the everyday lives of Kingston residents. The project uses advanced computing techniques including daily data updates and visualizations to animate the dashboard and make it accessible to a wide range of users. An investigation of community engagement with use of information and the dashboard is being undertaken by way of an embedded research survey. The dashboard will ultimately provide a platform of gathered data which will help to inform policy and strengthen Kingston’s ability to (re)build post-pandemic.