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The 311 Podcast
The 311 Podcast, hosted by Paul Bellows, is dedicated to exploring and sharing stories of the people behind digital transformation and organizational change management in Public Service organizations.
The 311 Podcast
S2:E9 Trust and Data: Open By Default With Stephanie Deitrick
Today, my guest is Stephanie Deitrick, who is the Enterprise GIS [Geographic Information System] and Open Data Program Manager for the city of Tempe, Arizona.
She's also a program director for the Master's of Advanced Study in GIS program at Arizona State University. Stephanie has her PhD in geography from Arizona State and has spent her career building the next generation of data experts with a focus on GIS, but a broader lens on public data.
As someone who consults with municipalities on digital strategy, I spend much of my time trying to paint a narrative of what mature digital practice around data and public service looks like. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled on the city of Tempe, Arizona and their open data portal and service performance dashboard. It was everything I'd been imagining for my clients and more. So I had to find out who was behind this category leading work. That's how I came across Stephanie, her team, and their work.
Tempe is a model city for these values and what can happen when great leadership and great teams come together. Tempe has launched not just a best of breed open data portal, but a performance dashboard featuring KPIs powered by real-time data that openly publishes their compliance with the various service levels and outcomes that they have committed to on behalf of their citizens.
This courageous approach is a model for how local government can rebuild, trust and engage with their community. I think you'll learn a lot from Stephanie's mindset, and even if you're not in government, it's helpful to understand the internal workings of government entities and how with the right alignment and leadership, organizations can find new ways to prove their value and serve their communities.
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Guest information:
Dr. Stephanie Deitrick LinkedIn
Open Tempe "The City of Tempe is committed to transparency and to providing accurate and easy to access data about our community. Below are the tools you can use to get information about our community’s finances, strategic priorities and more."
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What Paul and Stephanie talk about:
- Tempe's approach to open data, including their "open by default" policy.
- The importance of courageous leadership in driving digital transformation and open data initiatives.
- Tempe's performance management program and its integration with budgeting.
- The city's work with opioid emergency calls for service and wastewater testing for opioids and COVID.
- The process of data classification and balancing public access with privacy protection.
- The impact of AI on data privacy and the need for continuous reassessment of data masking strategies.
- The importance of cross-functional teams, understanding subject matter, and building trust and communication with business units.
- The role of trust and communication in enabling the City of Tempe to achieve transformative outcomes in public service.
Resources Referenced in the Interview
Simon Sinek, The Golden Circle.
Recorded in May 2025.
This is a show about the people that make digital public service work. If you'd like to find out more, visit northern.co/311-podcast/
We're going to keep having conversations like this. If you've got ideas of guests we should speak to, send us an email to the311@northern.co.
This is the 3 1 1 podcast. I'm your host, Paul Bellows. This is a show about the people that make digital government work for the public service. If you'd like to find out more, visit northern.co. Today, my guest is Stephanie Deitrick, who is the Enterprise GIS[Geographic Information System] and Open Data Program Manager for the city of Tempe, Arizona. She's also a program director for the Master's of Advanced Study in GIS program at Arizona State University. Stephanie has her PhD in geography from Arizona State and has spent her career building the next generation of data experts with a focus on GIS, but a broader lens on public data. As someone who consults with municipalities on digital strategy, I spend much of my time trying to paint a narrative of what mature digital practice around data and public service looks like. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled on the city of Tempe, Arizona and their open data portal and service performance dashboard. It was everything I'd been imagining for my clients and more. So I had to find out who was behind this category leading work. That's how I came across Stephanie, her team, and their work. Government is under fire these days for a perceived lack of efficiency and or effectiveness. While there are valid critiques of government like there are of any industry, the solution often seems to be cut deep and quickly, but the public service is a profession. And like any profession, the path to success likely has more to do with continuous improvement, measurement, and effective leadership. Tempe is a model city for these values and what can happen when great leadership and great teams come together. Tempe has launched not just a best of breed open data portal, but a performance dashboard featuring KPIs powered by real-time data that openly publishes their compliance with the various service levels and outcomes that they have committed to on behalf of their citizens. This courageous approach is a model for how local government can rebuild, trust and engage with their community. I think you'll learn a lot from Stephanie's mindset, and even if you're not in government, it's helpful to understand the internal workings of government entities and how with the right alignment and leadership, organizations can find new ways to prove their value and serve their communities. Here's my conversation with Stephanie Deitrick.
Stephanie Deitrick:I'm Stephanie Deitrick. I'm the Chief Data and Analytics Officer in the city of Tempe. My role is pretty broad, but it's all things data. So if it's something that would be considered like a data centered program, initiative technology, anything community outreach related that has data involved in it, all those types of things normally either fall under my umbrella or we are intricately involved in.
Paul Bellows:Amazing. So Stephanie thanks for being on the 3 1 1 with us today. The first thing I want to note is as you and I have talked leading up to this conversation, just exploring what you've been doing, I've been really pleasantly surprised to find that, when I talk to my clients in a consulting role and say, here's what you might look like on the other side of digital transformation, what I've secretly been describing without knowing it is your role and how Tempe is operating. And it's been a really delightful surprise to see all the amazing things you've accomplished there. Having this Chief Data Officer role that this leadership in the data space is, is a little bit unique still in 2025. We don't necessarily see that a lot. Can you tell me a little bit about your career path and how you ended up in this this wonderful but but somewhat novel role within the city?
Stephanie Deitrick:Sure. I did not intend to go into work in local government. I thought I was sticking in academia. I was graduated with my PhD. I was looking at tenure track jobs, and the CIO at the time for the city reached out and asked if I would review where the city was at with GIS and come up with a plan for how they could implement a centralized GIS group. I was cautious at first'cause I'm like, I don't know that I really am the background to do this, but I was like, sure, I do research. This will be great. I can talk to people. And I spent probably a year talking to anybody who would talk to me and some people who didn't wanna talk to me. And that includes hanging out with the City Manager and asking him all types of questions about, what he wanted and his vision with GIS and with data more broadly and just with how the city runs and what the engagement with the community looked like. How much they thought that they should share public facing, what collaboration internally looked like. And I got a really strong understanding of the direction the city was going and their willingness to start doing something that was drastically different from what they were doing at that time. And so since I wasn't thinking I was gonna be involved in it, I wasn't thinking necessarily how would they implement it. And I wrote a plan and a vision for a group that they would put in place that would start with GIS but, had this grand vision of this group being the piece that started to tie everything together because, I don't wanna say all data are spatial, but most data are spatial things happen someplace. Whether or not you use it is beside the point. And so I really saw this group as a centralized element that was kind of at the center of collaboration and integration across departments, public facing elements for communication and helping the community with data and engage with the city and city decisions in a meaningful way. And so I put this together and wrote job descriptions for these roles that I thought they would need. And I was super jazzed about it. I was like, this is gonna be great. And I gave it to him. We talked about it. And he asked if I was gonna apply for the job. So I applied for the job not thinking I was gonna get it, which was a little silly since I wrote the plan and I knew the lay of the land. I. So when they offered me the job, I had to have a real serious talk with myself about do I want to completely change the trajectory of my career? And my dissertation looked at public policy and GIS and how to support policy decisions being made under uncertainty. And it was just too hard to pass something up that just fit what I was already interested in. And so now it's a long way to explain how I got there. My whole career at Tempe has been figuring out the direction that we should be going and then figuring out how to get that implemented and then doing that work. And so it's been really exciting because, I take cues from what the organization is wanting to do and what they're doing now, and pulling together all the things that you hear from different people and saying, what should we be? What should we be doing? What are we doing now and where should we immediately head? But long term, what's the goal? When I'm thinking of my vision of what this could all look like, where is that? And how do I nudge us in that direction? For the first two years we were there I spent, again, a lot of time talking to people and you know, we're trying to fix the infrastructure in the background, but I'm just looking for like one person who would be willing let us help them with something. Just, I just needed like one success and when I finally found that person, it was like a two and a half hour process he would have to go through to publish something online. And we worked with him and figured some stuff out. And so we brought him to our office to show him the process and he did his normal workflow and drug a file into a folder, click, save and it was done. And it took him probably seven minutes with having to figure out some of the stuff we were showing him. And he looks and he is like, okay, how do I get it published online? What are the next steps? And I'm like, that's it. And he goes, but how do I get it online? And we kept going back and forth and I'm like, I need you to hear me. I'm like, let's pull it up, look and it's already there. I'll admit that first person gave us a real big boost of, we can do this. And we started having employees come to us with ideas, the boots on the ground, the people that were working In the field who had ideas and came to us that were brilliant. And so we started to be able to do some of that with them. And really in seeing that innovation and transformation can come from anywhere, any level of the organization, all different types of the fields of work that they were doing. One of my drum beats since I've been at the city is that I want everybody to have at least a basic understanding of what we do, because you don't know where that next transformative idea is gonna come from. And we've worked with a ton of people, it's not just managers and stuff coming to us, it's the people who are doing the work who are we have a gap. We need some help. Let's create a solution. So my entire 11 years of the city has been like that I think is the place where we really start to be able to evolve was when we engaged with What works Cities and decided to take the leap to open data. And as part of those engagements we were a little bit crazy. Normally cities do one or two things and we were like, we are all in. So we built our open data policy, created a data portal, put in place a performance program. And then also did results driven contracting, all at the same time. All the data work, including with the performance management program and all the public facing content and all of that was on me and my team, which were me plus two other people. And so we had no platform to put things on. We had no data standards in place. We had no process in place. I didn't have a policy and I'd never written one before. and I hadn't really worked with the people who are creating the performance program. And so it was like, okay, we can do this. I'm like, deep breath, we can do this. And I threw myself into policy writing. And you know, again, it's one of those things of I'm successful because of where work and I wrote a policy that kind of goes with everything else I am, which is go big or go home. And at the time it was unusual because the policy I wrote was basically everything is open by default. You're not opting in. You have to justify why you should be excluded from the policy. And so stuff for federal regulations, HIPPA let's say, that should not be
Paul Bellows:Yep.
Stephanie Deitrick:published, but even with that, you can't just say none of it goes out. You say, at this level of detail or with these fields, it can't go out. And then we negotiate, okay, what could we release? How aggregated does it need to be? What do we have to remove? What do we have to make sure we don't publish someplace else so that our de-identification allows for goes back to re-identify somebody, because we've put out three data sets that people can combine together. I said, i'm gonna go big with what I want and then I can negotiate down from there. I gave it to the directors and talked to'em about it. We gave it to council and they looked at it and then had to go to council for approval. Little weird things that I didn't think would be an issue and we had to negotiate, I worked out. But the big ones where I was like. Holding my breath going, let's see if everyone will buy into this everybody agreed to. Everybody was enthusiastic about it, like leadership was on board. They liked the fact that we were being bold and really laying the standard of what our data work was gonna look like. That open data policy, our data are open by default, is a mantra that has worked its way into all conversations where data are actively being discussed or collected. And it took some years for people to realize it wasn't going away. And I have to say that a lot of our success on the public elements of what we do were founded by having that open data policy in place and having leadership, our now City Manager, who was a director at the time, Rosa Inchausti, the fact that they were all in. They were all in on support and they were all in on letting me identify direction and that I wasn't going to do anything that was so radical or maybe Ill-conceived that it was gonna get us into a bad place that we couldn't get out of. And so allowing me the latitude to really look at what I thought we should be doing and try to move that forward.
Paul Bellows:It's so impressive how the whole of organization came together. In days of climate change it's less cute to talk about not boiling the ocean.'Cause I think we're all worried that we may be, but,you know, the old joke you don't want to boil the ocean project. And yet what if we need to boil the ocean? Like how do we change everything? And I think just hearing you talk about this, there's two real themes that come out. You know, one is vision, which I'm gonna just give you the credit for because you clearly, you saw an outcome. You saw, we often say digital transformation. We don't know what we're changing into and you had a clear vision of what that might look like. The other theme that goes, I think, to the organization of Tempe. You've called it some names and roles, but I just wanted to maybe dive like courage. This was a courageous thing to do, to say that's an exciting future. We will actually commit, and we know that there will be hard conversations and we know that there'll be change management, and we know that we're gonna touch people's day-to-day workflow and what they do. We know we're gonna be dealing with sensitive data. We're gonna have to learn new skills. All of this will be true. We will be a slightly different organization than the other side of that. And change with humans is hard, but courage just seems to be an enormous theme of what occurred at Tempe. Where did that courage come from, do you think? How does an organization build that courage to move in this kind of a direction?
Stephanie Deitrick:I say this all the time when I talk about working at the city and I feel like I'm a bit of a broken record, or maybe I need a shirt that just says it. Leadership is so important. If I could get a shirt with Rose's picture on it that just says something super positive about her, I would 100% wear that. Having leadership with vision who are willing to listen to what you're saying. And who are willing to listen to your explanation of why the direction you want to go is important and how it will support their vision and what they're trying to do. She was putting a performance management program in place that was also going to shake up the city and be radical and the success of the open data program directly fed into the success of the performance program and vice versa. But you have to have courageous leadership, and I think courageous is the right word. You have to have leadership that are willing to actually. put themselves behind the efforts that when they say they wanna be transparent, it can't be, we wanna be transparent, unless it makes us uncomfortable. It can't be we want the community to see our data, unless it might make us look bad, or unless as long as we're sure that we're gonna hit our performance targets. The entire time I've worked here, the city has never gone down that path. Even with our performance program the way we approach that is look, at some point someone's not gonna be meeting their goal, or they're gonna meet their goal, and then they're gonna fall back. And the goal of the performance program isn't to come in then with the, the stick and be like, naughty, naughty. You're in trouble. It's to have people rally around to say, the idea of it takes a village, bring people together to have the conversation about what happened. Is it temporary? Is it systemic? And what do we do to help you? You either transition how you're doing things, do we reassess what the goal is?'Cause you know, maybe something's changed with the program and the indicator that we're using doesn't make sense anymore. And to have that supportive piece. And like even with all of that, again, it takes courage to be willing to say,'cause all of that is public facing. And it takes a lot of courage to say, Hey community, we're saying these things are important, that we're what we're trying to do and we are okay with you seeing that we are not hitting the mark on everything, but we're doing our best to be able to get there and this is what we're doing. And so I think the first thing beyond the performance management project that we did, and we have like 104 performance meASUres and they're actively monitored. They're actively worked on, we touch in some way every performance measure every single year, and so these aren't 104 measures that are just out there. And then people forget that they exist. These performance measures are built into our budgeting process. When council shares what they think should be important for the upcoming year, they're directly engaging with the performance measures. Everything budget related, if you're asking for supplemental money, you have to identify a performance measure that the supplemental that you're requesting will help advance. And you have to explain how. You can't just say it's gonna advance this thing. It has nothing to do with it, but it'll be fine. And so I think that not only does that require courage, but it helps make people feel more courageous, I think, when they see that other people are doing okay. They see leadership stepping forward that if there is something that goes wrong, that leadership does what they say. They're not throwing people under the bus. They're not coming in and wagging a finger and saying, you're not doing a good job. It's more fine. Let's all come together. We're gonna create these task force. And yes, that can be a little hard to be like, they're coming in and saying, we have to help you figure this out. But they're there. And so on the data side, I think like that first place where we really took a leap with our Opioid e mergency calls for service with our fire department. Rosa and I were at a conference in DC and we saw something, I think it was Cincinnati, put out about their overdose or probable overdose calls and the data that they put out. And it was some really good summary data and we both looked at each other and were like, we should do that. We had a city council member who was just deeply involved with opioid work happening at the state. It was a focus of the city. During that time, she was in the middle of the session texting the council member to be like, Hey, we should talk about this when we get back. We got back, and we jumped into the conversations and my stance is, as disaggregated as possible, with whatever edits need to happen to make sure that we are aligning with our principles and any regulations. When you're talking about data related to healthcare, that's tricky. Going where things happen is tricky, but if you aggregate data too much, you lose some of that information. And so right now we're going back to say we have many years worth of data. Aggregation is gonna be helpful to look for patterns. So we're tweaking things, but that disaggregated data, so that data about individual incidents is important. again, there was concerns about the regulatory components and making sure that we weren't violating privacy, but long as they trusted us to identify a way to mask these things enough. Mm-hmm. be able to put them, put them out. And so we worked with them to come up with like this randomized way to offset the location. We generalized some things. We made categories for some things, and we put out a dashboard that provided really detailed information about the number of calls we had related to opioids and information about like the time, day, age of the person, gender. And I think we had something else, but I can't remember what it is. So, we put that out and the thing that we had to get ahead of was cities would be really uncomfortable highlighting the fact they potentially had an opioid problem. Everywhere had an opioid problem, but a city doesn't wanna highlight it. And the stance was, it's important to show this. It's an educational tool to get people to realize that everyone has this vision of, of what someone who is misusing drugs might look like. And the it was like the education to say, I think it can take as little as four days for someone to become addicted to opioids. You have college, you have high school students who get injured, injured during sports and get put on opioids. Like, it's, it's absolutely insane. And so we looked at the benefit of putting it out and really framing that education about it and making people aware as well as creating something that decision makers could actively use when they were looking at what was going on. It was an easy decision to move forward. We did an opioid town hall with the community to let them know what we were doing ahead of time, so we didn't just drop the bomb of like, here's all these data. People engaged, people showed up there. They had some of the same thoughts that we did. You know, I talked about the data. We had this whole setup in the back where I'm lugging my whole computer down there and a bunch of monitors and we're like, don't know why I didn't have a laptop at that point, but, you know, and so they came, we showed it, and I think because we talked about it a lot before we did it, and we had a lot of context around it, there wasn't a big backlash. It wasn't like anyone freaked out about what they were seeing. It was just Tempe doing this. This is why they're doing it, and people looked at it. We did the same thing when we started our wastewater program testing for opioids about four years before the pandemic. We brought people together so they understood what wastewater testing meant and that their privacy was gonna be maintained because all those data. Part of our agreement with ASU[Arizona State University], that we were collaborating with, as part of their research project, all that data was public facing. We have a policy it's public information. You're using public resources for part of this. And so even with that, it was an easy jump on our side to say, the data will be public. We're gonna tell the community we're doing this, we're gonna wrap it in all sorts of context and education and the data are gonna be out. And it 100% only happens because our leadership is courageous and they are passionate about making sure that the community is informed and the community understands what we're doing and that we're providing them with information about, here are the things we're doing, here's why we're doing it. Here's data, here's what those data mean. I would not been able to do a lot of what I've been able to do if there wasn't that foundation of courage underlying our leadership. And that's even with a transition of Mayor and a significant transition in our city council. We attract people who are willing to take the risk.
Paul Bellows:Tempe is clearly a city of innovators. You spoke to this, but just to really put punctuation behind it, this data is paid for with public dollars, which are tax dollars. This data belongs to the public, and at the same time. People's identity and their privacy also belongs to them. And so walking that fine line along this spectrum, this continuum of data should be open. And I love that open by default, these are principles kinda coming outta the UK gov organization, the idea that yeah, we wanna work in the open. Open by default. These are good values for government, and yet also this deep need to protect privacy and identify what data sets cannot by any means be released. And we must maintain privacy because we have this obligation to protect our citizens as well. To me, that sort of speaks to data classification, this ability to identify and manage. So this kinda gets into your team and how you operate. I'd love to get a little bit more like under the hood of how are you working, how are you making decisions? Saying, well, we wanna release information around opioids, again, not to trivialize the tragedy that's happening here, but you did not waste a crisis. You used it as an opportunity to help, to improve, to make the situation better and to advance open data policies. How do you have the conversations? I'm just interested in what's happening under the hood, a little bit around how you're making this happen and protecting the right things and releasing the right things.
Stephanie Deitrick:I have a really good team. I've built up a really good team over time. And so, obviously everyone has their kind of area of expertise, but when we are working on projects, we have to become knowledgeable about the area that we're working with and understand it's not just here, the data set with zero context and we don't understand how it's collected and we don't understand how it's generated and we don't understand what the fields mean. We are in the weeds because it's helpful for us to understand like, where does this come from and what does it represent? And then have them explain to us what the restrictions are to things. I do a lot of the project scoping and kind of the development of these things and helping to identify, okay, what is it that we're trying to do? What data are there? What do we need? I'll have an idea of stuff that's like, okay, we can't do this, but we would wanna do this, we have to exclude this. And then I have a data architect who has evolved into a data architect. He basically was my first GIS developer, the first person I hired when I started. Who then will work with people from our programming group who manage the enterprise data sets that are tied to the program, which are different than what we have, which is a data warehouse where data that are gonna be used to do something are placed. Instead of just having the stuff that's in the software. And so he will also talk to those departments depending on what the data are security will come in to play, once the data are in the data warehouse. The views are all classified and restricted. You have to be placed into a proper group to have access. Anything that's public facing is, again, it's a separate view. You have to intentionally place it somewhere that it could be made available, whether that's external to the department, but internal to the city, or public facing, because open data isn't just about the community. It's talking about that openness outside the department. Right? So is it something that we can share outside the department, but it still shouldn't be public facing. Outside the department still requires negotiation and evaluation to make sure that you're not sharing something that you shouldn't share. So it's like there's many layers of going in and classifying those elements. I will say when Chat GPT burst onto the scene and everyone took a step back and was like, oh my God, generative AI, and then suddenly it seemed like it was everywhere. The thing that I really keep emphasizing to people at the city now is that every decision that I have made, everything I've supported or encouraged us to do, the opioid probable calls for service, putting out randomly offset locations, so it's not at the exact location, but it's close enough that you know, you're not gonna totally throw the analysis off and all that, all those decisions, as AI evolves, we are gonna have to go back and evaluate every one, every one of those choices. Every one of those choices. I know we are not at the point yet where AI can take something that's random and figure it out because random is random, right? Right now. AI cannot back out of random. some point though, is it gonna be that if you dump enough data in to whatever AI tool it is? And you put this de-identified data into it, can it figure out, can it re-identify somebody? Can it get information that it can't get at now? It's like how are the things we're doing now to mask data and to try to protect privacy? Gonna be sufficient a year from now, two years from now, because the technology is improving so fast and it's evolving so fast, don't know. And so that's part of what I keep telling people is we have to make the best decision based on what we know today. But that stuff cannot hang out there by itself and be ignored from here on forward. If it's anything that its foundation is either. Regulated, restricted, sensitive, any of that. It's like we have to, it just has to be at the back of our minds of, and this is stuff that, not to be melodramatic, but this type of stuff keeps me up at night because we are putting this out there. We are saying that we've done due diligence to protect our community. Like that's my role. Like no one, anyone who works in the city is there to serve the community. We are supposed to be doing things for the public good, and I do not wanna be the person that sticks something out there. That's fine when we put it out and then ignores it for so long that we suddenly find out that what we put in place that worked two years ago isn't gonna work now. And so it's, I think that. I think that privacy and de-identification and all of that was so much easier if you look back a couple years ago, and I think now, I think people need to start looking at this as goalposts that are just perpetually going to be moving and I don't know that that's ever gonna change at this point. I think this is gonna be our new normal, where you have to constantly go back and reassess all those decisions you made when it comes to stuff like that. Mm-hmm.
Paul Bellows:I agree that Pandora's Box is open with AI. We did it fast. I know people in the AI space that were furious at kind of how fast certain, I won't name any organizations, but I think we all know where it came from. It was this feels irresponsible. We are not ready. We don't understand the implications. And this is where some of it lands You said something I wanna come back to here of like, how do we do this work of understanding. One of my favorite movie quotes, I'm old, so the Princess Bride is part of my cultural lexicon, and there's a wonderful line where one of the protagonists says"Life is pain and anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something." I will co-op that and modify a little, say, life is complex and anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something. And one of the things that is true of what complexity is, no one person can solve for complexity on their own. We need cross-functional teams. We need multiple perspectives. We need safe spaces to explore things we don't understand about each other. We need to be engaged in dialogue. We need to enable this. And it really seems to be that in terms of the way your data team works, and where I want to bring this back is; you talked about how do we classify, we get to know the subject matter. We get to get understanding, technology for technology's sake that will only ever tell us how to do something, not what we're doing or why we're doing it. And you talked about getting to that why, the Simon Sinek Golden Circle. Why is this happening? It's in the public interest. And so I wanna kinda come back to as you're confronting this AI now can see our data. Maybe it can see patterns that the average human doesn't have the capacity to see. Maybe it can de-identify things that we were sure we had protected. It brings this additional rigor to our open data policy, to the these wonderful ideals that work in the open. How does your team work with business? What does a day look like a business unit brings you something you wanna understand? How, how are you working with them at a day-to-day level with these business units that bring you data sets that they're now mandated to publish.
Stephanie Deitrick:So, a lot of times some of the more complicated things we do requires some iterative development. A lot of times we're either building the tools to collect the data for their operational purposes. With the idea that also that's gonna go public facing to address a current issue that the community just wants to know more about what's happening. So with our Homeless Solutions Outreach team, we were having a lot of encampments and again, I don't think there's any cities who aren't experiencing these same things. There were these encampments and people were trying to figure out where to report them, and then there was no place for them to go to be like, what are you doing? Like city, what are you doing? It doesn't look like you're doing anything. And we have a really robust outreach program. They're the hope team and they are out there every single day, directly engaging with people every day. worked with them to create a tool where they could track all of that. So where were they when they did the engagement and then these other key demographic information and other information about like, we offered these services, they decided to take these services and those types of things. And since we had success with that, when the encampment piece came up, the city manager called us in and she basically said. You know, we need a tool so that people could report when they see an encampment. Because doing it through 3 1 1 wasn't making any sense, and they're calling the police department. They're going to 3 1 1. They're calling the city manager. They're talking to city council, and so we spent, between creating the tool for people to do the reporting and then developing the public facing content and going through iterations of that, we probably spent a year from start to finish. We got the tool out pretty quick and we got the public facing dashboards out a bit after that. But its that idea of iterating. And engaging with the department on a regular basis, until it works. Until it's where it needs to be. Sometimes you find that out through direct engagement to talk to people and sometimes you find that out because the emails to council start to get reduced. The 3 1 1 calls start to be reduced. Our City Manager's getting less calls from people saying what the heck is going on? And so we had to learn everything about their process and what was going wrong now, and how are they addressing these things and how are they responding? Who is talking to who and what do we have to do to make sure that it's gonna make sense for us to filter people to this app, including internal, like people go to the app, put the dot on, type in the information we want. So the only reason that was successful is because we worked with the department. We show up, we have the conversations, we listen to where they're having issues or challenges with what we created and what the backend workflow looks like. Making sure that we're reflecting what they're collecting. And again, talking about unsheltered people also have rights to privacy where they're at, maybe where they are living. Do we release that as open data? We have it out on a dashboard right now, but it's been like two years and we're still, like okay, how do we put this out in a way that provides as much data as we can, but protects that location information without protecting the location information so much that it's so aggregated that it isn't helpful. And that's kind of how these things go. Even for smaller projects, we 100% of the time will always meet with someone, whether it's a half hour, an hour, or several times over a month period or over a year, to make sure we understand what they're doing and what their goals are and what they want, so that when we advise them on what we think they should do, we're doing it with some comprehension of the intricacies of their jobs. Can I go do a job of someone on our homeless outreach team? No. Do I understand it enough to explain it to somebody? I do, because I've been in those conversations and I think that is one of the reasons that this is helpful. The other reason that being that engaged with people and really understanding the intricacies of their data and how they do their work is because people don't know what they don't know. like we have a level of expertise that fits what we do. There is zero reason for anyone else in the city to understand our jobs as much as we do. Just like I don't need to understand how to be a paramedic. They don't need to understand everything that's possible with us and all the technical, stuff that nobody, nobody busts up but us or other technical nerds would be excited in. And so sometimes they don't know what to ask for. So they'll come to us with a problem and some end goals and objectives, and we help'em figure it out. Again, you can't help'em figure it out if you don't understand what they're doing. You have to understand what they're doing. If you're going to give recommendations to create something for them that they're gonna use as part of their job. I don't want to recommend to people, you need to change what you're doing just to make it easier for me. Unless what they're doing, we have a better way that they could do it. Or if they have a goal and the way to achieve that goal and as streamlined a way as possible is gonna require them to make a change. My team is very much invested in really understanding what people need and having those conversations. As you build that trust out with the stakeholders that you're working with, it makes'em more willing to work with you. It makes them trust you, lot more. It makes them more willing to tell you when something's wrong for the most part. We have some people though, who are happy when we give them things they refuse to tell us when something is not working really well, and we'll find out later. And it's like, why did you not just tell us, we would've changed this for you. It's like, I appreciate you're happy, but you could be happier if you would've just talked to us a little bit.
Paul Bellows:You brought up two themes, you brought up trust and communication I think it would be hard for anyone on any point of any political spectrum to argue we're at a low point in terms of trust capital in government. Probably local government has the highest still of all orders of government.'Cause we're closest to people. We're closest to their day to day. We still pick up their garbage. The streets are still paved. The water still comes to my taps. Where it's working its working. But just that idea of trust capital and that asset of trust is what allows us to work and do our jobs where we have low trust, there are enormous barriers to getting our work done where we have high trust we're able to move quickly, efficiently, and effectively. But then trust is connected to communication. Communication is the way we refill the bank account of trust that we have with people and communication comes from listening and communicating, that two-way street. You've been talking about this and I think for anyone who's listening to this, who hasn't been to performance.tempe.gov and to see the powerful KPIs and the working in the open and the public, it is a really transformational outcome here. Stephanie, can you talk just for a minute about what that trust has allowed you to do and just how that cart and horse of communication and trust and listening and communicating back, communicating in data, communicating one-to-one and in one to many, what has that allowed Tempe to do that maybe another city that hasn't made some of those investments and hasn't acted with that kind of courage? What have you been able to do in Tempe that may not have been possible in other places?
Stephanie Deitrick:You know, I think that the idea of that trust and communication when you first, either when we first start working with someone and they don't know us at all, or you've worked with someone before, but now there is something that's more sensitive or maybe a little bit more scary or makes them feel a little bit more vulnerable, comes up, we have to understand that we are asking them to take a leap. Sometimes it's a bit of a blind leap of faith because I could be telling them, look, we're not gonna do anything that you're not aware of. We're here to support you. We're gonna give you our advice, there's lots of eyes on this. You're gonna get support. From whoever you need support from. I could say that to anybody over and over again. You still have to trust me. You could trust but verify. You could trust, but be cautious. But you have to trust me. You have to buy into what I'm saying, even if you're not a hundred percent sure you believe me. I try to genuinely take that as the gift that it is that you see stuff now just with, you're right, with trust in government and just how things are and seeing another level of the government where someone is really marked as the person that's identified as a problem and they don't have someone there to support them or to make it a conversation. And so they have risk. When I'm asking them to trust me, there is risk involved that I could be totally crazy, and nobody is identifying that yet. So I think it's that first interaction or that interaction where you help them do something that's just really uncomfortable, that helps to build the trust internally that allows us to be successful. I think the idea of really emphasizing to people that we understand the importance of context and that you just don't dump data out there with nothing because we want people to look at it and if people are gonna look at it, we wanna make sure that they understand it. And so I think we've done a good job at having that narrative out there. We're actively working now to really put a lot of emphasis on if it's an important data set that's sitting on the open data portal, there needs to be something that we've created visualization or dashboard wise, so that if someone is interested in the data, but they're not someone who's really computer savvy, that instead of saying, well, you can download and look at the Excel spreadsheet and then figure it out yourself. If you're gonna visualize something, we can say, okay, if you're interested and you really wanna learn to engage with the data, we're going to give you this thing. And here's this thing that you can use to visualize it and explore it. And then if you get really into it and you wanna do something more complicated, then maybe they'll be more confident to do so, and so that importance of providing context when we put those dashboards out, there's narratives that go that go with them. We tell people like, here's how you use it. Here's what these data mean. Here's the limitations of you know, what you should and shouldn't do with it. Which again. Helps build trust internally because we're not trying to just haphazardly release things with zero information. And on the community side, our approach, and I'm very vocal about this, is that what we are giving you, my goal is to make sure it's usable and useful, easier data sets where it's like someone could easily take the Excel spreadsheet and make it easy chart or just look at it and it's not really complicated. We put context out with that. We're not building like individual tools for everything, but things that are more complicated. I think the community's grown to trust that we will provide them with that information and try to provide them with that background of what it is--and how they use it. Again, even if it makes us uncomfortable. It's amazing how transformative it can be with the community. So our wastewater data, when Covid happened and we were able to very quickly pivot, like in the first three months to testing for Covid, we made sure people knew that we were doing that and that we were basing our decisions, in part, on those wastewater results, and we had the data out in a dashboard on a hub page where there was information about like, what is wastewater testing? What is this testing for? There's uncertainty in those data. It doesn't say, here's your result, that means that X number of people would've tested positive. It's just saying that we're seeing this level of presence of the genome in the water. I dunno what that means. Nobody else knows what that means, right? I just know more is bad, less good. And so it's like trying to communicate to people don't hyperfocus on the number. Look at the trends. Are we going up or are we going down? And if we are going up, is the spike is it a steep change? Because wastewater testing for covid is a leading indicator, not,a lagging indicator. So we would see that numbers go up before we saw the positive Covid case numbers for that area. And again, people would call if those numbers weren't updated when they thought they would be, people wanted to know where the data are. As we've grown our bio intel program, we have a very significant wastewater testing program at the city and we actively use it and it's all public facing and people want to know. We know people are looking at it.'cause if we are not updating on time, we will get asked about what the delay is and for us as a city to be comfortable enough, to put out data about the presence of disease in the city. Flu, influenza A and B, RSV. We have to believe that our community is going to trust us. That when we put this out, we have to trust the community that they are going to read the things that we put out with it to understand what we're doing. It's a two-way street between us and internal people and us and external people. And it feels like a big, warm, fuzzy trust circle. And I'm not saying that bad things don't happen, but we have to start with the, the belief that we can get there. People still get upset. People wonder why we're not publishing some things, and we have to, we have to address it, but. I mean, for me and my goal and the goal of my team, 100%. I need to build that safe space for people to know that I'm there to support them. I think trust is important. Communication with the community when you put this stuff out, they have to have something that is in user-friendly language that is easy for them to understand and isn't so painfully dry that like you read three sentences and you have to walk away'cause it's like, oh my God, I didn't know what that means. Or, that's really, that's really bland. You know, performance measures. They have to be in language that anybody can understand, and we have to explain why the measure matters. Why are we doing this? Why should anybody care? How does this benefit them? For all 104 performance measures, they have to explain that. And it has to be clear, and my team is really a stickler for that. We go back to people a lot to be like, Hey. I don't know what half of this means. Maybe we can, let's try to smooth this out a little bit, but I think that that communication internally with us really listening to people and then public facing the city as a whole, making sure that we are sharing enough for people to meaningfully engage with the data, I think are absolutely critical. I don't think that anybody can be successful without cultivating those things with a lot of intentionality of really focusing on that.
Paul Bellows:As you were talking through this section, the quote that was echoing through my head is the scariest words are, I'm here from the government, I'm here to help. And what if we're actually here from the government? What if we are actually and genuinely here to help, and what if people are genuinely scared? How would we behave? What would we do? What would our recipes be for confronting that reality, which I think is a reality. Stephanie, what I love is you've given us, not the entire operating system, but sort of a peak inside of the operating system at Tempe, of how you are actually confronting that reality. And it's hopeful because on the other side of this hard grinding work and the negotiations and the change management and the courageous actions of senior leaders on the other side of this is the potential that we can be effective in government. We can produce wonderful community outcomes. We can help those who are genuinely in need. We can raise all boats for our communities. You know, all these things can happen. But it's not about snapping in the latest AI technology. Technology is not the way, technology is the highway we're on, but it's not actually how we travel down that highway. I'm so grateful that you gave us some time today to our audience, to unpack how Tempe is confronting these deep challenges for our local governments of people are afraid, and yet we still wanna help.
Stephanie Deitrick:I appreciate having the conversation. I definitely think that having that be the center of what you do, that idea that we are, I'm paid by tax dollars. The work that's being done in the city is being done for the community. The data that's being generated is being generated by work that's being done with the community. It's being paid for by money coming from the community and being community centered on what we're doing and having like community centered language about our data. Trying to have tools that go beyond here's this static thing. That's separated from everything else, and that's the only way you're gonna be able to look at the content versus providing that plus something a little more complicated. I think that if we all started there with that idea that our goal 100% is just to make people's lives better and to make our community someplace that people would want. To come and work in, live in travel to do activities here. I really think framing what you're doing that way really sets a mindset that makes you realize that trust is super important and communication is key, and I think it helps people be a little more courageous because you're doing stuff to help people. You know you're willing to go out on a limb if the end result is that are helping someone who's homeless and the work that you're doing can help them help their lives be better with whatever it is that they need. And so I definitely can say if people are trying to do this work, and I know it's data and tech, and a lot of times when people hear that I'm a data person or I'm in IT they prepare for the overly technical IT speak or all the data talk that's not gonna be relevant to people. And I will say that all of my team, all seven of them, have really good, soft skills. Because it's not, it is 100% not about the tech. It's about the purpose and why we're there, and really embracing that and convincing people that that's where we're coming from, of always keeping the work we're doing community centered. You have to, or it's like, what's the point?
Paul Bellows:Stephanie Deitrick, thank you for your service and thanks for joining us on the podcast today. This was inspiring and enlightening.
Stephanie Deitrick:It's good to talk.
Paul Bellows:Thanks so much for joining us for this conversation. Stephanie, her team and the City of Tempe should be known everywhere as leaders in digital government and service effectiveness. By working in the open, breaking down organizational silos and taking the courageous step to set measurable targets, Tempe has created trust and alignment with their citizens. Some of the themes I noted included open by default is a powerful position to take. By encoding this principle in actual policy and organizational structures, Tempe has created what they need to ensure that everyone plays along and to force the hard conversations and negotiations around publishing data. Data belongs to citizens, but privacy is also a major factor for local government. It requires deep subject matter expertise from both the line of business and the data team. Data problems are business problems more than they are technology problems. These projects require strong, supportive leadership or they will fail. There are too many reasons for an organization to not step into working in the open and measuring their success publicly. It requires courage and alignment to get to end of job. Technologists need soft skills and the ability to work with others to ensure success. Technology work is always also design work, and we need to work collaboratively and iteratively to reach the best outcomes. Finally, using AI in government requires a bedrock of good data management. There are too many privacy and reputation risks, and AI technology still isn't sufficiently transparent to provide us the assurance we need, that we're not exposing citizens to unacceptable risks. A strong data management practice is the best first step if an organization wants to step deeper into AI. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. Please do subscribe and follow us for more. I'd like to thank my colleagues who work with me on this podcast. Kathy Watton is our show producer and editor. Frederick Brummer and Ahmed Khalil created our theme music and intro. We're gonna keep having conversations like this. Thanks for tuning in. If you've got ideas for guests, we should speak to, send us an email to the311@northern.co. The public service is about all of us, and when it's done right, digital can be a key ingredient for a better world. This has been The 311 Podcast and I'm your host, Paul Bellows.