“Waste Alerts,” our first project, is an opt-in texting service that sends reminders for regularly scheduled pickup. 

During our February residency in Lexington, we saw that the most common and recurring 311 calls relate to missed trash pickup. Our city partners and the LFUCG IT department similarly expressed a need to better communicate trash schedules to Lexingtonians. Given the perceived need and the available access to waste collection data, we determined trash notifications to be a compelling project area to begin experimenting with. 

Problem Statement 

There is general confusion and forgetfulness surrounding waste collection schedules for Lexingtonians who receive the city service. 

Additionally, citizens are not aware of the variety of waste-related services offered by the City, such as hazardous waste disposal, electronic recycling, free mulch giveaways, etc. The Division of Waste Management makes a great effort to get this information to citizens via mailed newsletters, social media, and traditional press releases. Another effective communication option is text notifications.

Strategy 

In order to better communicate waste-related updates to citizens and ultimately to reinforce trust in city services, we outlined the “aim for the stars” product components that a notification service could provide:

• Notify citizens about regularly scheduled pickup times
• Notify citizens about schedule changes
• Notify citizens when their trash has been skipped and provide means to reschedule pickup
• Notify citizens about special drop-offs, events, and other waste-related news

We built an MVP (minimum viable product) with the intention of creating a proof-of-concept to present to potential users and collect feedback on the value of the project’s potential features. The MVP version sends text notifications to remind users of their regularly scheduled pickup time. It includes an admin side where an administrator can send out messages to users based on their pickup days. This is particularly useful in the case of schedule changes. 

Next Steps

On our first trip back to Lexington, we set up user interviews and demoed the project with potential users. Among our 8-person user group, we saw a unanimous disinterest in receiving waste-related notifications. The interviewees expressed a high level of satisfaction with current services and wouldn’t opt-in to the service if it was available. 

“Nope, I wouldn’t use the service. Trash is great here and schedule is my own problem.”
– user interview participant

We investigated the city's waste management software in order to see if we could send out a notification to a household with a missed pickup. We hypothesized that missed pickup notifications would be of higher value than regular schedule reminders. At this time, the waste management software is not nuanced enough to consistently register the correct household for a missed pickup.

Due to the higher priority of a neighborhood indicators dashboard, we have put this project on hold for further development. We have begun speaking with Nextdoor, a private neighborhood social media platform, which may be an excellent venue through which LFUCG can send waste notifications to residents.

The Park Search tool allows users to search for Lexington parks based on desired amenity.

When asked what makes a strong neighborhood, an overwhelming number of our user interview participants in Lexington responded that public spaces were extremely important. During our subsequent visits, we continued to hear a strong enthusiasm for the outdoor events and park activities that the city offers.

When we brought the idea to the Parks and Recreation Department, there was an equal amount of enthusiasm for a comprehensive parks map. It quickly became clear that the project would be a quick win for both the department and Lexingtonians who want to take advantage of the city’s park services.

Problem Statement 

There is currently no park search tool to easily find Lexington parks via a comprehensive list of amenities.

Strategy 

The Parks & Recreation Department has been amazingly collaborative on this project, sharing with us a spreadsheet of the city’s parks and amenities present in each park.

Using the available spreadsheet data, we built a search tool that allows users to discover parks by filtering by multiple amenities or by park name. The search tool includes a map which displays the park search results.

“The library does an amazing job at sharing their schedule of activities. I’d love the same ability to find events and activities in our parks.”
– user interview participant

Next Steps

During our June trip to Lexington, we showed the project to the Parks & Recreation department to get feedback on what they believe would be a valuable and sustainable tool. Going forward, we will continue to build an interface that provides rich information to users while also creating an easy process for city staff to update the information.

The feedback informed the following user stories for next steps of the project:

• As a Lexingtonian, I would like to see pictures of each park so I can know what to expect.
• As a Lexingtonian, I would like to see a details page with a full description and links to additional resources for each park. 
• As a Lexingtonian, I would like to see events that will take place at the parks I search for.
• As an administrator, I would like park detail updates to be reflected automatically from my spreadsheet so I don’t have to create updates in more than one location.

Our primary focus will be to create an easy and automated data pipeline for the administrator to update the site with. With this pipeline, we aim to minimize the process change on the admin’s end and ensure long-term sustainability for the project. By automating the information flow from the spreadsheet to the application while utilizing open data standards, we can set a reusable foundation for future applications of parks data.

Through interviews with community members, we found that Lexingtonians would like to know more about events in public spaces. Various city divisions facilitate events of this nature, which gives us the opportunity to unify information sources and create a centralized public events calendar.

This project neatly aligns with our guiding principles. Given that the city staff track much of their event workflow in spreadsheets, our tools are able to continually synchronize event information from many staff members to a single centralized calendar. The end result is more proactive outward communication from LFUCG and better cross-department coordination all while minimizing staff process changes.

Problem Statement 

People in Lexington would like better access to information about free or inexpensive events that take place in the city.

Strategy

• Identify user need: 
  See problem statement.
• Identify digital service: 
  We found a well-tested and maintained calendar application that is re-deployable and well-suited for customized functionality and design for Lexington.
• Standardize the data: 
  A standard calendar format feeds any number of digital services such as a Lexington city events calendar.
• Systematize data flow: 
  The event staff in the Mayor’s office and Parks Department track much of their planning process in spreadsheets that are good candidates to be connected to a standard Outlook or Google calendar.
• Minimize process change: 
  Much of the staff event workflow is already in spreadsheets. We will write tools that connect these spreadsheets to a centralized calendar, requiring very little change on the part of staff.

“...something to get people to explore other neighborhoods than usual. Especially if it knows your check-ins and that you haven’t been to some cool thing.”
– user interviewee on next features

Next Steps

• Deploy the tools that synchronize Lori Houlihan’s (Mayor’s Office) events spreadsheet with a google calendar.
• Incorporate her feedback.
• Deploy the spreadsheet to event planners in the Parks Department.
• Deploy a Lexington-branded calendar application that consumes the city’s events feed

In our collaborative sessions with the Mayor’s Office and Planning Division, we identified a host of interesting and useful data that has the potential to shape the way the city delivers services. The missing piece is a visualization tool that creates actionable narratives around the data.

Problem Statement 

It is difficult to understand quality of life trends in Lexington neighborhoods.

Strategy

• Identify the data that will give staff and community members the most useful insight into neighborhood social, physical, economic, and environmental trends.
• Transform this data to standard formats to enable the most visualization flexibility and reusability by community developers.
• Leverage existing visualization frameworks to create compelling narratives quickly.

Next Steps

• Work with LFUCG officials to collect and standardize high-value datasets.
• Demo our “datasets of the week” that we have piped into the dashboard system.
• Create sustainable data pipelines so that data remains valid and current with minimal staff overhead.