City of Long Beach successfully engages citizens with compelling data experiences

As a top digital city, Long Beach is focused on using technology and proactive data sharing to demonstrate transparency, increase efficiency and engage with stakeholders. We aim to achieve high levels of citizen engagement to build a strong, open community. 

When planning its open data strategy, the City of Long Beach had three key objectives:

• We wanted to increase engagement by proactively providing data to our communities in formats that were understandable and actionable, whatever their data skills
• We wanted to demonstrate transparency and support our commitment to being a civic technology leader to benefit the community
• We wanted to ensure data processes were automated to increase efficiency, while putting in place a strong data governance framework

Following a thorough evaluation of its capabilities, Long Beach selected Huwise in 2020 to provide the technology platform for its open data portal. 

From the beginning of the project, the city has focused on ensuring that all the data provided on the portal delivers value to users, both in terms of the subjects it covers, and the way it is presented and shared. By applying comprehensive metadata, information is clearly explained and every dataset features built-in dashboards to make it easily understandable.  Example datasets include:

• Diversity data on City of Long Beach employees, showing gender, race and pay gaps as part of the city’s commitment to equity.
• Police stop data collected under the Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA).
• Elevate 28 data covering the ROI and legacy from Long Beach’s role in the forthcoming LA 2028 Olympics

Since the portal went live, our most popular dataset has covered the work of the city’s Animal Shelter team. This provides a daily update on the number and species of the animals entering the animal care facility, including trends and outcomes. While other cities provide static monthly PDF reports on their animal care activities, Long Beach provides interactive information that automatically updates on a nightly basis. Not only does this increase transparency, but it also reduces administration for staff as citizens can find relevant information via the portal, without needing to make contact.

The city is also delivering greater accountability through our Go Long Beach Service Requests dataset. This shares information on all service requests received through the city’s 311 app, covering areas such as incidents of graffiti, potholes or dumped items. Displayed via an interactive map, users can see local incidents as well as look at trends, such as time to closure, in order to highlight areas for improvement.

Alongside building the portal, the Long Beach data team has engaged internal data owners, working with them to understand their pain points and to prepare and share their data via the portal. This process is ongoing, with the team focused on identifying new potential datasets based on citizen requirements.

Increasing efficiency and effectiveness with Snowflake integration

Long Beach relies on a Snowflake data warehouse to manage and make its data available to other systems, using Snowflake Notebooks for capabilities such as data quality and mandated reporting.

Huwise delivers seamless two-way integration with Snowflake thanks to dedicated, off-the-shelf connectors. These ensure data is always up to date, and means that we benefit from an efficient, flexible, and scalable architecture that removes technology bottlenecks and provides access to data in a secure and governed way.

Thanks to the connector, we know that data coming into Huwise has already been processed, ensuring consistency, and saving time for us and for business teams. It also enables us to share data in more engaging ways – rather than static PDFs we can provide interactive visualizations and dashboards based on key information. 

After extensive market research, the City of Long Beach chose Huwise’s all-in-one data product marketplace platform, due to its powerful technical capabilities and extensive support. 

When implementing and managing its open data portal, Long Beach is benefiting from three specific Huwise features:

Comprehensive platform

The Huwise platform contains all the functionality that Long Beach needs to collect, clean, enrich and share our data in a single solution. We  particularly appreciate the range of options for sharing data, from tabular formats through data visualizations to APIs and data stories. Data can be exported in a range of formats to meet the needs of all types of user.

Wide range of connectors

As with many organizations, Long Beach needs to access and share data stored in multiple systems, from Snowflake, Salesforce for 311 data to SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint, as well as GIS data. Through its 80+ connectors Huwise can automate data flows to reduce administration time and ensure data is always up-to-date and available on the portal.

Easy to work with

Creating the Long Beach portal was straightforward thanks to the platform’s ease of use, backed by comprehensive documentation and hands-on support from Huwise. This meant that we could focus on building data pipelines from our data sources, and ensuring that information was high-quality, reliable and up-to-date.

Through its open data portal, the City of Long Beach is boosting transparency, building trust and reinforcing its digital leadership. The portal now has 14 datasets and over 750,000 records and continues to grow to meet the needs of stakeholders.

Thanks to the program we are seeing three key benefits:

Increased engagement with citizens

By focusing on making data inviting and understandable, Long Beach is seeing greater citizen engagement with its services, particularly around areas such as animal care and 311 responses. This increases transparency and builds trust with the community moving forward.

Greater efficiency and cost savings

Open data is delivering ROI in three distinct ways. Firstly, creating automated data pipelines removes the need for manual processes, especially due to the close integration between Snowflake and Huwise. Secondly, providing open data reduces the volume of incoming public information requests, allowing staff to focus on other areas. Finally, as data from systems such as the Salesforce solution behind the Go Long Beach 311 app is available via the portal, internal users can access it without needing to pay for additional Salesforce licenses.  

A single source of truth, internally and externally

The portal provides the same reliable, high-quality information to all audiences, whether staff, councilors or members of the community. This increases transparency and enables closer collaboration as everyone has access to the same single source of truth.