The city of Long Beach, which has seen development rise in recent years, will soon debut an online tool forged in private sector collaboration to change how those streams of data are viewed.
The teaming with Boston-based Tolemi, a specialist in mapping and spatial analytics, came through Long Beach’s participation this winter in the Startup in Residence (STiR) program. STiR, which is managed by San Francisco-based nonprofit City Innovate, helps create public-private collaborations to find technological solutions for governmental issues. In Long Beach’s case, it needed a modern, more transparent way to show City Hall staff, developers and residents alike the major development projects underway. Among the takeaways:
• Transparency is a key goal for the Southern California port city, which has seen a huge development boom during the past two years, particularly in its downtown and midtown areas. Residents sense that the city is changing, Ryan Kurtzman, management assistant in the city manager’s office, said during a telephone call with other STiR participants previewing the announcement Thursday of new tech solutions from the group's fifth cohort. The city's new website, launching this month, is a way to educate residents, builders and even internal staff and leadership on what’s going up.
• This isn’t Long Beach’s only new online offering. The new website created in STiR will debut in conjunction with a new website for the department of Development Services — with the hope, Kurtzman said, of building on momentum from the latter’s arrival to “allow folks to see the map that might not see it otherwise.”
• The potential to scale is a key advantage for the city, one of 22 governments that joined this year’s STiR cohort. The new website will spotlight 70 to 75 “major development projects” initially, Kurtzman said, in what he described as a “very user-friendly, easy-to-navigate map.” Officials hope to ramp that up in roughly a year.
“We think there is potential to show not just our major development projects, but minor ones like additions or renovations, building permits, entitlements — really, the whole development world as it pertains to the city of Long Beach,” Kurtzman said.
• Long Beach's project goals were in the sweet spot for Tolemi, one of 39 startups taking on 43 projects in this STiR group. The company’s “core capability” is aggregating public-sector data from systems that may be siloed or legacy, cleaning and standardizing it and displaying it in a user-friendly map, said Andrew Kieve, company co-founder and CEO. He described Long Beach as “transparency first.”
“They were relentlessly focused from the outset on making sure this information was as consumable as possible by the general public. And so their attention to detail, their attention to design, their understanding of how their constituents would consume this information actually helped us considerably in terms of refining the front end design of the application,” Kieve said.
“When it comes to buying software in government today, you’re often just looking at a big PDF document and evaluating folks based on the proposal, not on the solution," said Jay Nath, executive director of City Innovate. "And we really should be striving towards what is the best solution for these problems, and I think this is a great testament of this collaboration.”
