CHS:MEDIUM: Understanding Public Uses of Data and Dashboards

正如数据密集型技术在商业领域的普及一样，它们也越来越多地被公共机构部署，包括城市、州和地方政府。目前，许多公共服务机构正在通过投资基础设施、聘请数据科学家或数据工程师等合格专家，以及重组组织，将数据收集和数据分析纳入关键流程，来扩大其创建和使用数据的能力。这些努力的核心是“数据仪表板”的生产和流通。仪表板是动态的可视化组合，用于总结和整理来自多个来源的数据，它们是与利益相关者和公众交流数据工作的主要站点。仪表板使用图形化约定来简化和表示它们所表示的底层数据，提供来自不同数据流的公民活动快照。通过咨询数据、发布仪表板以及向内部和外部选区推广这项工作，公共组织希望获得更有效的决策、比其他组织更有竞争力的优势、更有效的资源分配，以及更深入地了解他们希望接触到的受众。但是，公共部门组织在许多重要方面与私营部门的同类组织不同，迄今为止的研究尚未充分探索公共机构在渴望使自己成为数据驱动型时的确切含义，以及这对公共服务和结果的影响。本项目着眼于公共服务数据工作，特别是仪表板，将其作为解释和争论的场所，作为体现有关公共利益的争论的人工制品。项目团队使用人种学方法研究公共行政人员如何将数据运用到工作中。特别是，项目团队检查了数据仪表板所扮演的角色，包括如何开发它们以及如何使用它们与公众进行沟通。本研究主要关注四个相关问题：1)如何将仪表板和可视化整合到审议、沟通和决策的组织过程中？2)仪表板如何在具有公共服务使命的组织内部和组织之间流通？3)领域专家如何与指示板互动，以告知他们的工作？4)公众如何与用来解释组织活动的仪表板互动？该项目将通过关注仪表板产生的条件和地点，数据专业人员和其他设计、编码和实现它们的人，使它们成为可能的平台，以及遇到并与完成的可视化交互的受众，来深入了解仪表板的构建。该项目使用了两个重要的公共工作场所：市政府和公共教育。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Just as data-intensive technologies have spread in the business sector, so too have they increasingly been deployed by public institutions, including city, state, and local governments. Many public-serving institutions are currently expanding their capacity to create and use data by investing in infrastructure, hiring qualified experts such as data scientists or data engineers, and retooling their organizations to incorporate data gathering and data analysis into key processes. Central to these efforts are the production and circulation of "data dashboards". Dashboards are dynamic visual composites that summarize and collate data from multiple sources, and they serve as a primary site of the communication of data work to stakeholders and the public. Dashboards use graphical conventions to simplify and present the underlying data they represent, providing snapshots of civic activity derived from diverse data streams. By consulting data, publishing dashboards, and promoting this work to internal and external constituencies, public organizations hope to achieve more effective decision-making, competitive advantage over other organizations, more efficient allocation of resources, and greater understanding of the audiences they wish to reach. But public sector organizations differ from their private sector analogues in many vital ways and research to date has yet to fully explore exactly what public institutions mean when they aspire to make themselves data-driven, and the effects this has on public services and outcomes.This project looks at public-serving data work in general and dashboards in particular as sites of interpretation and contestation, as artefacts that embody arguments about the public interest. The project team uses ethnographic approaches to study how people in public administration put data to work. In particular, the project team examines the role played by data dashboards, including how they are developed and how they are used to communicate with the public. This research focuses on four related questions: 1) How are dashboards and visualizations incorporated into organizational processes of deliberation, communication, and decision-making? 2) How do dashboards circulate within and amongst organizations with a public service mission? 3) How do domain experts interact with dashboards meant to inform their work? 4) How does the public interact with dashboards meant to explain organizational activity? This project will give insight into the construction of dashboards by focusing on the conditions and sites where they are produced, on the the data professionals and other who design, code, and implement them, on the platforms that make them possible, and on the audiences who encounter and interact with finished visualizations. This project uses two sites of important public work: city government and public education.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.