Here on Data-Smart, Sean Thornton wrote about Chicago’s use of green infrastructure paired with sensors and cloud computing to manage stormwater runoff. In order to mitigate the pollution, flooding, and erosion caused by rainwater, Chicago has installed green infrastructure—structures that use natural features to manage stormwater—including permeable paved roads, green roofs, rain gardens, and bioswales. Moreover, the city has integrated sensors into these assets in an effort to measure their effectiveness, as well as gather data on precipitation amounts, humidity levels, soil moisture measurements, air pressure levels, and chemical absorption rates.

Also on Data-Smart, Eric Bosco examined Washington D.C.’s success in reforming its once struggling education system. After gaining mayoral control over education, Mayor Adrian Fenty worked to improve government support for schools, ensuring that teachers and administrators could focus on the classroom while other departments completed logistical tasks like organizing IT services or assigning security officers their duties. Perhaps more important were his negotiations with the District’s teachers union, which generated a merit-based system that would incentivize quality education—raising the base salary for D.C. teachers to a national high of $52,000—and filter out underperforming teachers.

Next City highlighted an initiative by Common Cause New York to use technology to help protect public assets from private takeovers. The state chapter of the national civic engagement and government accountability organization has developed a set of digital organizing tools, including an online map and database of all public assets that present a development opportunity. Common Cause hopes that these tools will bring attention to public properties and unite protectors of shared spaces.

GCN wrote about a new predictive model that uses wind and soil moisture data to predict where electrical outages are likely to occur during major storms. Fallen or broken trees are the primary causes of power outages, and trees are much more likely to be blown over in moist soil or break under dry conditions. Using data from NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite, a team of scientists predicted power outages from Hurricane Matthew with 91 percent accuracy, enabling better-targeted intervention.

GCN also discussed the Environmental Protection Agency’s Smart City Challenge, a competition that invites participants to develop environmental sensor projects and funds installation for the winning ideas. The winners of this year’s $40,000 in funding include air quality sensor projects in Baltimore and Lafayette, LA, which succeeded in large part due to their plans for installing the sensors, managing the resulting data, and maintaining transparency. Baltimore plans to install 50 sensors for testing by May. Lafayette, while yet to formally announce a plan, expects to install 250 sensors in six months once a plan is in place.

On the topic of environmental innovation, according to CityLab, MIT has developed a mapping website that details the density of tree canopy in 10 global cities, including New York, Paris, and London. The tool, called Treepedia, uses information from Google Street View to create a Green View Index, a rating of how green a street looks according to the number of trees it contains. The goal of the project is to make urban and environmental planning more accessible to non-professionals.

GovTech profiled Seattle’s Let It Snow Hackathon, which brought together local officials, web designers, developers, and residents to examine how to better use technology to address winter weather events. For the occasion, Seattle made 22 data streams accessible, including locations of traffic cameras and road temperature stations, as well as listings of blocked streets, lanes, sidewalks, and intersections that are updated when snow sticks. Proposed ideas included crowdsourcing locally owned drones to deliver road salt and resources; offering a web signal that could be customized to show individual transportation routes; and creating a “Find It, Fix It” area for snow removal, allowing residents to suggest snow removal in areas that would not normally be plowed.

GovTech also reported that last year, the city of Chicago paid out $670,122 in 27 cases to plaintiffs alleging the city violated the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a state law requiring access to government records. This amount greatly exceeds previous payments—the previous eight years saw only $134,599 in seven cases total—which experts attribute to high-profile cases like the Laquan McDonald shooting that brought broader awareness of the public’s right to records. According to the city, many of the 27 cases were claims of incomplete record searches and incorrectly applied exemptions. In a statement, the city said, “There is always room for improvement, and during the past year, the city has dedicated additional resources and provided employees with additional training to ensure compliance and provide transparency to the public.”