What if adding more money to our school budget doesn’t help our children as much as we hope?

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Matt

Someone questioned why I posted an article from The Onion in the Watertown Residents for Strong Schools Facebook group. Thought it might be useful to cross post it here.

Hi,

I was hoping that posting the satirical article from The Onion about our education crisis might prompt further discussion. Plus it was just damn funny and I didn’t see the harm in bringing a little levity to the seriousness of the discussion.

When I read The Onion article it reminded me of a common topic on this group about how much money the school department should receive and also of a segment I saw recently on the TODAY Show about Unschooling.

Dialog in this Facebook Group reinforces the message the media covers at the national level http://www.educationnation.com/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/education/ that our current public education system is no longer producing the results we expect. Many of our conversations in this group have focused around increasing the funding our school department receives from the town and by doing so we will better support our students and teachers.

This morning I Googled, “does increasing spending on education help?” and you land on this article which does a pretty great job of dealing with the question: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2011/06/06/School-Budgets-The-Worst-Education-Money-Can-Buy.aspx#page1 Basically – just spending more money won’t help as much as we think.

Maybe we should ask the tough question:
What if adding more money to our school budget doesn’t help our children as much as we hope?

When I met with former Superintendent Ann Koufman last spring she handed me a book called Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: http://www.amazon.com/Rethinking-Education-Technology-Education-Connections-Education-Connections/dp/0807750026 which spends the first few chapters describing how our current educational system came to be. Reading how our industrial revolution shaped the education system was enlightening – it also makes it clear that the 150 year old structure of our education system is ripe for radical transformation.

Self directed learning is so easy now – with just a few mouse clicks you can learn more about just about any topic on the Internet, you can attend FREE in-person computer programming classes: http://meetup.bostonpython.com/events/17433132/?eventId=17433132&action=detail or attend university courses: https://www.ai-class.com/. The Khan Academy http://www.khanacademy.org/ is educating millions. TED talks inspire us to learn more about our world and spark conversations and jumping off points for learning: http://www.ted.com/. Go to a Maker Faire with your kids: http://makerfaire.com/ or better yet start one.

When you examine our town budget and after you add in the town appropriation, health care, pension and state and federal grants you see that our school department budget is north of $50,000,000 per year. With our 2,800 students that comes in near $18,000 per student. What if all of that money, and I mean all of it went to teachers/facilitators that interact with our kids? Imagine a world in which each educator could earn $108,000 per year to work with only 6 kids?

Could we become more involved in educating both ourselves and our children if we shook up the institution? Could we better engage with our local scientists, artists, engineers, bakers, welders and electricians if we didn’t carry the baggage of a 150 year old institution?

I believe that our government should fund the education of it’s citizens, it benefits all of us to have a more engaged and informed society. I just want to know – can we do it better and more efficiently.

Thanks,
Matt

Posted in Budget, Government, Municipalities, Schools, Watertown | 1 Comment

He Said, She Said – Extracting data from 5 years of Watertown Town Council meetings

Posted on August 28, 2011 by Matt

Hi,

I think I found a way to to raise the visibility of some pretty boring civic data and present it to the public in a more useful manner. Like most cities and town Watertown, MA keeps detailed meeting minutes for each Town Council meeting that takes place. Since 2006 those meeting notes have been placed in the Document Center as PDFs. I doubt that many people are reviewing those notes, I’d honestly be surprised if there was anyone else but me looking through them. If you do review them, please say hi in the comments! Check out He Said, She Said if you want to skip the details and get to the data extracted from 5 years of Town Council meetings.

Project Goal

For this project I wanted to see if I could take the very dry and challenging to read meeting minutes from the Town Council meetings and present them in a way that might make it more interesting to people in Watertown. I’ll consider this project a success if just a handful of people explore some of these meeting minutes.

Challenges

Once again my primary challenge is working with information that is locked up in PDF documents. So what could I do to take these vanilla, boring presentations of our civic employees and create a more engaging experience.

Data for this project

Tools used in this project

  • We’ll need the trusty Typhoeus and nifty Nokogiri  ruby gems to help us screen scrape and download the PDFs
  • The wonderful pdftotext tool to liberate all that juicy information from the PDF
  • Open Calais will help us find interesting people, quotes and business mentioned in the minutes and we will use the Calais Ruby gem to help us here.
  • A number of ruby scripts to use all these fine tools
  • Ruby on Rails running on Heroku will serve up the now super awesome meeting notes

The Result?

He Said, She Said is the website that shows quotes from the Town Council meetings. I’m pretty happy. I was able to pull down the PDFs, convert them to text, run them through the Open Calais web service and present them in a Rails app in a much more compelling way. The basic website that shows quotes from Town Council meetings is called He Said, She Said (thanks for the name Kimmi!) I’ve found it a fun way to look at quotes and dive into older meetings. There is obviously much more that should be done but I’d like to get it into the hands of more people in Watertown to collect feedback.

“Councilor Lawn indicated that a few business owners contacted him and stated that they would be willing to pay more for the service than lose the service altogether.”

Steps to reproduce this project in your town

  1. Locate your town meeting notes. Hopefully they are online and if you are lucky they are at least in a PDF format.
  2. Download one PDF and try to use the scripts and tools mentioned to extract the text. You may even want to copy the text from the PDF to try the Open Calais Viewer. Using their free viewer, you’ll get a sense of how useful their entity extraction is before you commit all the way.
  3. If Open Calais seems to provide useful results for your town meeting notes you can use, modify or improve the Ruby script (town-council-parse.rb) that I have provided, to screen scrape your town website and pull down the PDFs for you to locally work with them.
  4. After you have downloaded the PDFs using the script you’ll need to convert the PDFs to a plain text format so Open Calais can extract meaning from them. Take a look at the convert_to_pdf.rb script. It is very, very simple as it just converts all the PDFs it finds in your current directory into text files. If pdftotext can do batch jobs I didn’t find it right away. After running this script you should see a .txt file with the same name as the pdf.
  5. Now after you have your text files you’ll need to send the text that was extracted from the PDF to the Open Calais web service for them to generate meaning and structure from your documents. The script, extract-entities.rb uses the Calais Ruby gem to make our requests much easier. When running this script it will take a while to generate the files from the plain text documents. I like working with the JSON data format so that is what we get back from Open Calais.
  6. JSON isn’t the most user friendly format for people to look at so we should do something about that. How about we convert it to the more Excel and lay person friendly format of Comma Separated Values, CSV. Using the Siren Ruby gem we use create-quotes-csv.rb to parse the JSON returned and stored in our new csv files.
  7. At this point in your file system you should have 3 files for each meeting. The PDF, the .txt file and the .txt.json file. You should also have a new file called quotes.csv that provides a CSV file containing all of the quotes from the meetings that Open Calais located.
  8. Upload the PDFs to Scribd so people can more easily read them on the web. I currently have moved over 93 of the 126 documents before I hit the Scribd rate limit. Hopefully I will remember to go back and add the remaining documents. For my own reminder Scribd shut me off at TC%20Minutes%204.24.2007.pdf.
  9. You may find this is a place where you might stop. Having the CSV file of quotes gives you quite a bit of ability to store it in a relational database and perform fun interesting queries. I wanted to provide a more visible face to this information so I used Heroku to run a very, very simple Rails server that only currently shows a single random quote from the meetings.

Next Steps

I have known about ScraperWiki for a while but haven’t yet really tried it out. I’d like to see if I can migrate the collection of scripts that I’ve been using over to that tool. I also need to finish uploading documents

Thanks,
Matt

Some of the scripts

require 'rubygems'
require 'typhoeus'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'uri'
require 'json'
require 'calais'

BASE_URL = 'http://www.ci.watertown.ma.us'

# the request object
response = Typhoeus::Request.get(BASE_URL+"/Archive.aspx", :params => {:AMID => "36"})

puts "REQUESTING DOCUMENTS FROM WATERTOWN WEBSITE"
puts response.code    # http status code
puts response.time    # time in seconds the request took

begin
  archive = Nokogiri::HTML(response.body)

  archive.css('span.archive a').each_with_index do |node, index|
    if (index > 0)
      document_url = BASE_URL+"/"+node['href']
      puts document_url
    
      document_response = Typhoeus::Request.get(document_url)
      doc = Nokogiri::HTML(document_response.body)

      document_link = BASE_URL + doc.css('span.archive a')[0]['href']
    
      file_url = URI.escape(document_link)
      puts "DOWNLOADING: " + file_url
      system("mkdir town-council-minutes")
      system("cd town-council-minutes > /dev/null ; curl -O "+file_url)
    end
  end

rescue Nokogiri::XML::SyntaxError => e
  puts "caught exception: #{e}"
end

# convert all the PDFs to text
Dir.chdir("town-council-minutes")
files = Dir.glob("*.pdf")

files.each do |f|
  system("pdftotext "+f)
end

# now send each of the PDFs through Open Calais
Dir.chdir("town-council-minutes")
files = Dir.glob("*.txt")

files.each do |f|
  result = Calais.enlighten(:content => content, :content_type => :raw, output_format => :json, :license_id => "r6q88uv3d2pwjfrsr4e8d9j5")
  
  # write the json result out to files
  File.open(f+".json", 'w') {|f| f.write(result.to_s) }
end
view raw gistfile1.rb This Gist brought to you by GitHub.
Posted in Hacks, hackwatertown, Municipalities, OpenGov, Watertown | 1 Comment

Mapping the location of building permit submissions in Watertown, MA

Posted on August 24, 2011 by Matt

Hi,

I’m trying weekly to identify and hack on data that is published in the Watertown, MA document center in order to provide it in a manner that people might find more useful than a PDF, Excel or PowerPoint presentation. Today I decided to focus some effort on the building permits. We’re about to do some water damage work in my daughters room so this felt like a relevant area to hack on.

Hack Goal

Determine the effort involved in creating an automated process to place issued building permits from Watertown, MA on a google map.

Data for this hack

Tools used in this hack

My Hack Results and a description

Overall I’m pretty happy with how this hack turned out. I was able to take a very boring presentation of this pretty interesting information that was locked up in a PDF and display it on a map. Here are the hoops that I had to jump through to get this working.

  1. Download the PDF from the Watertown, MA website.
  2. Open up DeskUNPDF and use their conversion tool to identify tabular data in a PDF so it could be extracted as a comma separated value (CSV) file.
  3. Write a little Ruby script that further cleaned up the data in preparation for generating the latitude and longitude coordinates for use in the Google Geocoding API. After getting the lat/long coordinates from Google I then had to write it out as a new CSV file for Socrata to take over.
  4. Upload a new data set to Socrata and mark the lat/long fields into a location field
  5. Use Socrata to generate the Google Map view

How to improve this

Automation

  1. Automate the downloading of building permit PDFs from the Watertown website
  2. Detect when new PDFs are available for download
  3. Script the PDF to CSV conversion using the DeskUNPDF command line interface rather than the UI
  4. Automate the updating of the dataset on Socrata

Better data to start with

Extracting this data from a PDF is something that we shouldn’t have to do. This data resides in a computer database somewhere so why should we need to write scripts to scrape and cobble this data together. If you feel like joining me in writing to Ken Thompson, CBO, LCS Inspector of Buildings at kthompson@watertown-ma.gov to see if there is a better way to get this information I’d be grateful.

Data integrity

One major sticking point that I have is that DeskUNPDF isn’t picking up the first two rows in each PDF so I need to ask them if they know what might be going on with that. Missing the first two rows isn’t a huge deal but I’d like the dataset to be accurate.

Trends

While I think seeing the individual permits on a map is better than looking at a list in a PDF, I would like to see this data in graph form with permits plotted over time. Obviously summer months are high for permits but I would be quite interested to see how weeks and months compare with previous years.

Code

Not a ton of code here but you can find the Ruby script below. If others are interested in helping me write scrapers for this data the scripts will be updated in github.

require 'rubygems'
require 'csv'
require 'typhoeus'
require 'json'


GOOGLE_GEO_URL = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?sensor=false&address="

# Create the output file
CSV.open("geo-coded-permits.csv", "wb") do |csv|

    csv << ["address", "description", "lat", "lng"]


  # open up the zip code csv file
  CSV.foreach("building-permits.csv") do |row|
    
    info = Array.new
    
    # for each record in the csv perform this action
     number = row[0]
     street = row[1]
     description = row[2]
   
     if !number.nil? && !street.nil?
       address = number.strip + ", " + street.strip + ", " + "Watertown, MA, 02472"
       puts address
       info << address
       info << description
       
       # the request object
       response = Typhoeus::Request.get(GOOGLE_GEO_URL, :params => {:address => address})

       puts "GEO CODING FOR ADDRESS: "+address
       puts response.code    # http status code
       puts response.time    # time in seconds the request took

       data = JSON.parse(response.body)
      
       lat = data['results'][0]['geometry']['location']['lat']
       lng = data['results'][0]['geometry']['location']['lng']
      
       puts lat
       puts lng

       info << lat
       info << lng

       sleep(1)
       
       csv << info
     end
  end
end
view raw gistfile1.rb This Gist brought to you by GitHub.

Thanks,
Matt

Posted in Government, Hacks, Municipalities, OpenGov, Software, Watertown | 3 Comments

Series: How to replace your city or town website and improve it for free

Posted on August 21, 2011 by Matt

This is the first in a series of posts that will evaluate the Watertown, MA website, platforms like CivicPlus and offer suggestions for methods to improve online services and reduce costs for citizens.

Union contracts, local government budgets, school district shortfalls, pensions and dealing with debt pulled me in.

We purchased a home here in the spring of 2010 and as a new home owner with one kid in the school district and another coming soon, these were topics that I wanted to learn more about. Over the past 10 months the Watertown, MA town website has become a weekly destination, where I look for budget, personnel, meeting notes and other documents. After spending significant time with the official town website I have thoughts about how the online services provided by the town could be modified to better support the citizens of Watertown.

What gives me the qualifications to evaluate the town website? Well I live in Watertown, pay taxes, I’m a software developer by trade and I’ve been in the profession of creating high end web and mobile projects since 1997. I spend all of my work hours on the web, using online tools and services to help with my job. I also read quite a bit about user experience, user centered design and visual information design to keep up to date on trends and techniques so that I can apply them to my work. I am also very interested in local government and understanding how it operates here in Watertown, MA.

Watertown has a mildly useful although challenging to navigate, website developed on the CivicPlus e-government platform. The features offered on the town website would be great if this was 2001, but a decade later, features like a content management system, document repository, events calendar, email notifications and a staff directory are commodities that a collection of free online tools can provide.

CivicPlus developed the Watertown website and they build websites that are solely focused on the government sector. They have stated that 800 cities and towns use their products. With ~87,000 municipalities there are a number of competitors that have developed products similar to CivicPlus. CivicLogic and eGov Strategies are two of the more popular but they all sell themselves by touting industry expertise and knowledge:

We know government. We know how government works. And we know how it can work better. CivicPlus transforms standard sites into powerful communications hubs.

or

Your government entity is unique, therefore your business challenges require a team that will create distinctive solution strategies with you in mind. At eGov Strategies, we provide technological and real-world expertise so that you can achieve success; measured by the delivery of customized services to your customers, 24×7.

The website features that each of these e-government companies offer are now baseline, table stakes for any modern free, open source web platform like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or as plugins to web frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Django. E-government web platforms have features that are now commodities and those companies now must market unique knowledge of the municipal industry to set them apart from thousands of other web development companies.

The problem with this marketing technique is that most cities and towns face the same problem that any group or organization has when they want to share information and collaborate with each other. This is not a problem that is unique to government.

I am writing this in hopes that I can convince employees in Watertown that there are alternatives to CivicPlus that are free and can provide better engagement with citizens than the commercial e-government solutions. I also hope that a few people living in one of the ~87,000 local municipalities in the United States stumbles their way to this guide and attempts to try this.

What gives me hope is that the city of Manor, Texas has already done most of it.

Part 1: The competition

We should understand exactly what the current state of the Watertown website is so the first post in this series will review the website product from CivicPlus called CivicPlus GCMS. Watertown uses this product so I’ll use them as the benchmark for identifying issues and offering alternative, free solutions.

Let’s review the CivicPlus website marketing materials that describe why they provide the best government website solution and what features they offer.

The CivicPlus Difference

1. Helping Communities Engage & Interact

Many companies provide municipal websites. But CivicPlus does more. We create community engagement tools. Our online solutions have the power to transform the way your community does business.

2. Save Money

Let’s go straight to the bottom line. With CivicPlus services, you will save time, budget dollars and — by moving more government paperwork online — help protect the environment. We have budget-savings solutions for all types and sizes of cities and counties.

3. Work with Experts

CivicPlus has more than a decade of expertise in government best practices. We’ve launched more than 800 municipal websites for cities, counties, associations, school districts and colleges. Visit our portfolio to learn more.

4. Affordable Innovation

The overall value we offer as opposed to our competitors is truly superior. Compare both upfront and five-year costs and discover the difference. Our modules make day-to-day functions streamlined. And we provide new modules and upgrades free.

5. Update Info with Ease

Our Content Management System is easy to use. It is an intuitive interface that allows staff members to update and maintain your site in just minutes a day. Delegate user access to individuals or a group. A dynamic, up-to-the-minute site is yours. Go here to learn more.

6. Be Secure

Enjoy the security and efficiency of cloud computing. All sites are hosted within our secure facility in Kansas City, Missouri. You are assured 99.9% uptime and full data protection.

7. Power Up

When you partner with CivicPlus, you join a team of government website experts dedicated to the absolute success of your site and your community. Our work results in cost savings, efficiencies, end user benefits and industry recognition. Since 2008, CivicPlus clients have won more than 150 prominent website awards. That’s good for you and your community’s progress.

My Summary

Reviewing each of their core differentiators:

  1. Marketing Fluff: The first bullet about helping communities engage and connect is pure marketing fluff without measurable metrics so there really isn’t anything to say here.
  2. Saving Money: I’ve been to numerous town council and school committee meetings over the past 10 months. I don’t see less paper floating around the gallery – nearly all the documents presented in the Document Center are printed as handouts to the audience. I say this is straight B.S. the environment isn’t being helped by having PDFs up in the Document Center.
  3. Experts: There is nothing unique about a knowledge sharing and CMS driven information website. When I read this it says… We use our relationships with city and town managers to build a customer base. Also kudos for managing 800 clients that is nothing to sneeze at but it isn’t the 50,000,000 websites that WordPress.com has.
  4. Affordable: The second time cost is mentioned so this must be important to municipalities. They talk about comparing costs to the competition but maybe they don’t think that free solutions are competition? Just how much does CivicPlus cost? Well, John McKown wrote an article that shows it can cost nearly $27,000 for a three year contract. Given that the annual Watertown budget is ~$100,000,000 this is a drop in the bucket but as we look to trim everywhere, I’m planning on writing to the Town Manager to understand the full cost to Watertown.
  5. Update information: A great feature in 2001.
  6. Be Secure: Nice that the town doesn’t have to run it’s own hardware to host the website. Only one data center that is centrally located? What does the backup and redundancy plan look like when that data center goes offline?
  7. Power Up: This sounds great! How are those cost savings passed on to the citizens of the town? I respect the profession but building your own custom CMS when so many well tested, scalable and proven tools exist why not build on top of them?

Core Features

I’ve spent several months using the Watertown website so I’m intimately familiar with the various features that CivicPlus is providing that the town is using. If I have missed some features I’d love for either a Watertown or a CivicPlus employee to catch my mistakes and add a comment.

  • A Content Management System or a CMS allows town employees to update pages of information, upload documents, photos and change text on the website without having to pay expensive web developers to make the changes. This feature keeps people informed with more recent information and allows individual employees to make changes without having all text changed centrally. Pages of information are usually created with a CMS and provide a method for linking to other pages or websites.
  • The Calendar of Events provides information about meetings, concerts, recreation department events. Generally anything that you might think to put on a calendar so you can be reminded about it. Watertown happens to break their events into a few useful categories like Recreation, Town Calendar and Senior Events.
  • The Document Center is where meeting minutes, agendas, forms, reports and other documents can be stored so that people using their computers at home can read them without having to go to the town office. Most of the documents are stored as PDFs, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint or Excel files.
  • The Resource Directory contains names, phone numbers, departments and email addresses for town employees. You can search for a particular person if you happen to know their name.
  • The Emergency Alert system provides a graphic on the town website that changes color when something important happens. You can also be notified by email using the Notify Me function.
  • Notify Me provides a way for people to sign up to email distribution lists and have either an email or an SMS/text message sent when the list moderator sends a new message.
  • For a fee each CivicPlus website allows for a city or town to have a Custom Design using images, colors and fonts that provide a more unique visual design.
  • A Mobile Website Template provides easier accessibility when using mobile devices like smartphones. I don’t believe this is enabled on the Watertown website.
  • Structured Job Postings can be created and posted where visitors can sort and view job listings.

I believe I have accurately described how Watertown is currently using the CivicPlus platform and captured the key differentiators as CivicPlus sees them. If you live in Watertown, maybe you found a new feature on the town website that you were unfamiliar with. If you have thoughts or comments about your experience with the town website please add a comment to this post.

Next up

I’ll be reviewing each of the features of the Watertown website as described above and offering suggestions for improvements and alternatives.

Thanks,
Matt

Posted in Municipalities | 3 Comments

How to get twitter alerts from your city or town

Posted on August 20, 2011 by Matt

Hi,

I wanted to solve a problem that I saw with how the town of Watertown, MA shares alerts with the public. Watertown uses a website tool called CivicPlus to manage their online presence. The tool has an alert system that allows town employees to send out notifications about various goings on in town via email and SMS. I think this is a great service but with the point-to-point communication of email and text messaging it felt like it was missing a public broadcast method.

Alerts that are sent via a private list-serv and SMS have no public history and are not searchable by search engines. I wanted to create a method for those alerts to reach a larger audience and so decided to make the alerts available as Tweets on Twitter. The @WatertownAlerts account on Twitter will tweet the alerts that are sent out from the town. I’ve tested the flow but am waiting for real alerts from Watertown to start flowing in.

There is nothing magical here and I’m clearly not the first to setup an automated tweet workflow but I thought it might be useful for other cities and towns using CivicPlus to know how they can create a wider distribution for their alerts.

  • Step 1: Register for the alerts on the Watertown website “Notify Me” service
  • Step 2: Enter your email address, select the alerts you want and confirm the list-serv email sent from the town list-serv
  • Step 3: Create a new Twitter account for the tweets (@WatertownAlerts)
  • Step 4: Crete a new TweetyMail account using your email address that you entered in Step 2
  • Step 5: Confirm your TweetyMail account
  • Step 6: Create a filter in your email system (I used GMail) that looks for keywords (From: civicplus Contains: Watertown)
  • Step 7: Configure your new filter to forward alert emails to TweetyMail (post@tweetymail.com)

When email alerts are sent by your city or town tweets should now start flowing from the list-serv to the Twitter account that you setup.

UPDATE: @WatertownAlerts posted the first alert Tweet from the town!

Watertown Recreation Fall Fun: Registration Begins Monday, August 22 View this in your browser Watertown Recreation…http://t.co/IhzuGNV

Thanks,
Matt

Posted in Municipalities, OpenGov, Watertown | Leave a comment

API access questions for Tyler Technologies creator of MUNIS

Posted on August 20, 2011 by Matt

Below is an email that I wrote to TylerTech in early July. Summer is nearly over so it’s time to pick back up on this.

UPDATE: I heard back a few days after I posted this and the official response is after my initial email.

Hi,

I’m a resident of Watertown, MA and a professional software developer. Watertown uses the TylerTech MUNIS system. I have an interest in my local government and helping my fellow residents get improved access to raw information and data currently stored in the MUNIS system. Currently the town auditor and school business administrators are only able to send either PDF or Excel spreadsheets of specific reports that they run.

I’m wondering if there is a more interactive method for citizen software developers to be able to query and understand the data/information that is stored in the MUNIS system.

Does the MUNIS system provide an API (Application Programming Interface) exposed as a web service in one of the more popular forms of either REST or SOAP over HTTP? If there is not currently an API and web service in place where does the priority of this feature exist on the MUNIS development roadmap?

Thanks,
Matt

TylerTech response on 08/22/2011

Thank you for your request for information.

We value our relationship with our clients and are committed to protecting their privacy and security protocols.  I have shared your request with the town and would direct you to the Town of Watertown for information regarding your request.

Regards,
Patty Leino

Patty Leino, HDI-CSR
Senior Technical Support Analyst
Tyler Technologies, Inc.

P: 800.772.2260 ext: 4152
F: 207.781.3585
www.tylertech.com

Posted in Government, MUNI, Municipalities, Software | 2 Comments

Reaching out to Matrix Consulting Group about the Watertown, MA Public Safety Study

Posted on August 20, 2011 by Matt

Dear Richard Brady and Robin Haley,

My name is Matt MacDonald a resident of Watertown, MA, a town that has contracted services from Matrix Consulting Group to perform a Public Safety Study. I wanted to introduce myself with the intent of discussing interest in your methods for collecting and more importantly sharing the raw data required for this project.

I have been actively working and communicating with both Chief Deveau and Chief Orangio to retrieve raw incident data from the computer aided dispatch system. This has been an ongoing, slow and challenging process. I am a software developer by trade and have an interest in the underlying data. I believe that citizens should have access to the most granular form of the data to help them perform their own analysis and ask more detailed questions. The data that is collected in these systems is owned by the people and should not be locked up in proprietary systems.

I’m very interested to see the output of your report but would be very grateful to have a conversation about your methods for retrieving this information from the public safety departments and what level of detail you will be providing.

My notes and communications with the various Watertown, MA personnel can be found here: http://www.mattmacdonald.com/category/police/

Thank you for your time,
Matt MacDonald
34 Hardy Ave, Watertown, MA

Posted in Fire, Municipalities, Police, Watertown | Leave a comment

Summary of my conversation with Police Chief Deveau and Fire Chief Orangio of Watertown, MA

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Matt

Hi – below is a summary email that I sent to Chief Deveau and Chief Orangio from our conversation this morning.

Hi Chief Deveau and Chief Orangio,

Thank you for taking the time today to meet with me. It was nice to meet in person and have a conversation about how the public can get better access to police and fire incident data as well as discussing the outstanding Freedom of Information Request. While I wish we had more time to talk, I believe there was positive movement in understanding how the public can work with the Police and Fire Departments toward a shared goal of increasing awareness and improve useful access to incident level data.

The conversation was helpful in getting a better understanding of the current time demands placed on the two departments and the existing challenges that both departments have in accessing your own data. You mentioned how you have previously partnered with Tufts and Northeastern for other projects and I hope I clearly expressed my desire to help the departments in a similar way.

While our conversation was helpful, I left the meeting feeling like we hadn’t fully stated actionable next steps.

A common thread throughout the conversation was “What would be the benefit to the Police/Fire departments by doing this?” Chief Deveau, you mentioned wanting to get more realtime incident data available to the public. I wonder if you would be willing to work together to create a shared “wish list” of technology/software/hardware items that you wish existed. Think about questions you might want your Computer Aided Dispatch reports to provide or how the existing reports might be made available to the public.

Another area that was mentioned was the 50 community surrounding crime data study that was shaping up. Would you be willing to send websites or any information you have about that effort?

We talked about CrimeReports.com for a bit and how Officer Knell is the primary WPD and WFD employee interacting with that software. I wonder if it would be possible in the future to schedule a face-to-face conversation with Officer Knell. That conversation might better allow both of us to understand the options that are available with the CrimeReports.com system.

Some additional thoughts

Related to crimereports.com alternatives
Chief Deveau, you mentioned that the Watertown Police Department is looking at alternative tools to CrimeReports.com. I would like to help review the tools from the perspective of a citizen software developer and ensure that the vendor is not applying highly restrictive copyright on the data they would be working with. Would you be able to share the vendors you are looking at so that I can help provide feedback?

Existing data
Chief Orangio, during our conversation you mentioned several State? level reports that are made available with the data that is provided by the Watertown Fire Department. Would you be willing to send me websites, links or any additional information about where to find those reports online?

Related to the Public Safety study this fall
From our conversation it sounded like neither of you have been privy to the events or process by which the study will be performed. I will be contacting the Town Manager and Councilors to understand how this study will be performed, what and how the data collected will be made available and what involvement the public will have during the study.

Again thanks for taking the time today.

Thanks,
Matt

Posted in Fire, FOIA, Government, Municipalities, Police, Watertown | 1 Comment

Preparing for a meeting with Watertown, MA Police and Fire department Chiefs

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Matt

Hi,

Below is an email that I sent to the Watertown, MA Police and Fire Chiefs to continue discussing how to satisfy the crime and fire incident data Freedom of Information Request that I filed nearly 3 months ago.

Hi Chief Deveau and Chief Orangio,

I’m looking forward to our meeting this morning at 9am at the police station. I’ve been spending some time preparing questions that I hope can guide our conversation and discussion to a useful place. I wanted to send them to you earlier in the week but got caught tied up at work.

I have two primary goals for this conversation:

  1. To better understand how the Police and Fire departments view and use quantitative incident data internally and a sense of the official position on the public having similar access to the data.
  2. Understand the relationship that Watertown has with crimereports.com and how to best satisfy the outstanding information requests for both Fire and Police incident data.

Some questions for our discussion:

  1. How do the Police and Fire departments currently use the quantitative crime and incident data that is collected by the computer aided dispatch systems?
  2. What thoughts and concerns do you have about the presentation and availability of that quantitative data to the public via the web/internet?
  3. In what ways do you see the public collaborating and being more involved with public safety?
  4. What are your thoughts about the upcoming 2011 public safety study? How will the public be involved?
  5. How did the relationship with CrimeReports.com come about? What are your feelings about them and their service?
  6. Capt. Rocca stated/hinted that the CrimeReports.com might be on the chopping block for future budgets. Are you going to stop use of CrimeReports.com?

Some thoughts about satisfying the two existing Freedom of Information Requests for incident level data

  1. I am making this FOIR because of the restrictive Terms of Use placed on the data by CrimeReports.com
  2. The WPD and WFD have stated that this request could be satisfied but only as 1000s of printed sheets of paper. Why can they only be made available as paper?
  3. The modification I suggested to the CrimeReports.com workflow is technically possible.
  4. The requested change could be made in such a way that there would be no ongoing staff effort.

I’ll see you both in a bit.

Thanks,
Matt

Posted in Fire, FOIA, Government, Municipalities, Police, Watertown | Leave a comment

I support our teachers – I don’t support the Teacher Contract

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Matt

Hi,

Below is an email response I recieved from Debra King the president of the Watertown Educators Association when I asked her to respond to my blog post about the meeting they are holding next week.

The concept of giving the town “flexibility” with respect to raises or step adjustments would be disastrous for the Watertown Public Schools. The concept is antithetical to having a contract at all. No school district in the Commonwealth unilaterally adjusts teacher salaries. Teachers would flee the Watertown schools for other districts exacerbating the already alarming turnover rate.

Teacher salaries in Watertown already lag behind neighboring school districts. We’ve had 40% turnover in the last three years. The school committee downplays the significance of the high teacher turnover rate, but as teachers, we know the value of instructional continuity. Familiarity with the school and community’s expectations is an asset for the district. We’re losing talented teachers to other districts. This can’t continue. What’s more, the real problem is the “flexibility” that the school committee currently has in determining how to spend its $34 million budget. The contract dispute is not about money. It’s about priorities. We argue that the school committee should invest in its most important asset: teachers. Our schools simply can’t continue to remain uncompetitive in our effort to attract and retain

My response
Hi Deb,

Thanks for the response. A few comments and questions about your statements.

Again I want to state this clearly. I support our teachers, want to see the quality teachers recognized, paid highly for their dedication, passion and the long hours they put in with our children, but I also realize that there are constraints placed on our local government that we have to operate within. These are the same constraints placed on any for-profit business or non-profit organization.

I do not support guaranteed pay increases when simple accounting shows a negative impact on the town’s ability to continue providing consistent services.

Regarding Flexibility

  1. Would you please expand on and explain how giving Watertown administrators the ability to react to external revenue/expenditure forces creates a disastrous environment for our schools?

Without the option for flexibly responding to outside economic forces the town is left with few options other than laying off employees.

Follow up questions to #1

  • How do you and the WEA propose the town government respond to the current and projected trend of town expenditures out-pacing revenues/taxes? With the state mandate that local governments provide a balanced budget the only option presented so far has been to lay off teachers and reduce staff/services in other departments. The school budget directly impacts and is impacted by other areas of revenue and expenditures in the town.
  • Would you please describe how a contract that provides the town with flexibility to respond to annual changes in revenue and expenditures is in direction opposition or antithetical to a contract? I’m proposing that changes be made to our existing contract with the WEA and that those modifications would allow for pay increases when revenues are available. Providing guaranteed increases when our revenues can not cover our costs harms the entire community. There are dozens of other pages in the teachers contract – I’m not proposing that those are modified or removed so I don’t see how my proposal is incongruous with a fair and reasonable contract.

At two public meetings this year I have asked the WEA publicly to turn down salary/step/longevity increases so that we could save teaching jobs. I was told each time by the WEA that they believed that school administrators were “holding out” or “hiding money” in technology and other program areas. I’ve reviewed the budget on my own, sat with the business manager and superintendent and I didn’t find monies.

Earlier in the spring I sat in a tiny 2nd grade chair while members of the WEA pointed out specific line items that should be looked into. They were, and the justifications provided by the administration satisfied me. Even if the administration had removed the specific items that would still would not close the deficit. The Watertown Educators Association made their intentions clear when they were willing to layoff their co-workers and fellow teachers so that other, older teachers would get their steps, raises and longevity payments. That does not sit well with me, as I would have a hard time seeing a friend and co-worker of mine have their employment terminated while I picked up a raise, no matter how insignificant.

Regarding no other districts unilaterally adjusting salaries
This is the same argument that was recently made by the Watertown Contributory Retirement Board in regards to their recommendation to increase the Cost Of Living Adjustment base. “Everyone else is doing this so we should too.” This is an unsatisfying argument – and one that I probably used as a teenager when I asked to stay out later. “But mom! … all my friends can stay out later than me!” I think we all know the standard mom/dad response to this argument.

The Massachusetts Municipal Association has stated in recent reports that most municipalities in Massachusetts are facing similar financial challenges, due mostly to poor management of retirement health care benefit (OPEB) and pension plans. The WEA argues that large numbers of educators are going to “flee” from Watertown if sustainable financial change is implemented. I believe that argument carries little weight when this same scenario is playing out in almost every city and town in Massachusetts.

Regarding Salaries
The WEA states that salaries in Watertown “lag behind neighboring school districts”.

  1. Would you please show your data that backs up this statement? Which districts are you comparing Watertown with? Is their socio-economic demographic and tax base similar? What are the deficits faced in those communities for their Pension and Other Post Employment Benefits liability? Each of those variables along with many, many others must be factored into what a “neighboring school district” looks like.

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education school district profile data shows:
2009 Watertown average $67,816
2009 Belmont average $69,479
2009 Waltham average $66,111
2009 Newton average $76,609
2009 Arlington average $59,343

The US Census American FactFinder states that in 2009 the median full-time wage earner in Watertown made just about $54,000/year. It would be great to see both the average teacher salaries and the median wage in Watertown increase.

While our average is not as high as Newton it isn’t as low as Arlington. The Department of Revenue data shows that our tax valuation isn’t nearly as high as either of those communities either. The Kennedy School of Government document that I’m reading seems to indicate that salary is only one component in a challenging mix of variables that factor into how teachers decide to work in a particular district. I haven’t yet formed a full opinion or summary of that document yet but the document is a great read.

Regarding turnover rates
You state that Watertown has had a 40% turn over in the previous three years. I agree that consistency and continuity are important in creating a healthy work environment. Some questions:

  1. How many numbers and percent of the teacher turnover is a result of teachers retiring?
  2. How many numbers and percent of the turnover is a result of maternity leave?
  3. How many numbers and percent of the turnover is a result of layoffs?
  4. How do you define a “talented teacher”?
  5. How many numbers and percent of the teachers that have left the school district were considered “talented teachers”?

Related to how the school committee spends the $34 million budget.
Anyone interested in seeing exactly how the $34 million is spent can visit the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website and realize that the bulk of the monies goes to teachers. I agree that there may be small line items that might be questionable, but at the macro level I completely disagree with your statement that town and school priorities are not focused on teaching staff.

Another item that is rarely discussed or well known, regards the true cost for departments in the town. While the $34 million dollar school appropriation figure is fairly well known, what isn’t clear is that the actual spending in the town for education is closer to 46% when health care costs are factored into the mix. Watertown is spending nearly 50 cents of every dollar on education, so I can’t agree when people argue that our community isn’t placing our primary focus on educating children. I have asked Tom Tracy to help provide the data that supports this statement – I’m still waiting on it but I do believe him, town councilors and the Town Manager when they have said it.

Regarding your statement that the contract dispute isn’t about money – that it is about priorities
I’ll bite…

  1. Would you please clearly state the specific sticking points that are causing the impasse?

Without question I agree that we need to provide an employment environment that is competitive so we can attract and retain high quality teaching staff but providing that competition MUST NOT be to the detriment to the overall financial stability of the town.

I support our teachers – I do not support this type of contract.

Thanks,
Matt

Posted in Budget, Government, Municipalities, Schools, Watertown | 1 Comment