--- According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, transportation accounts for 28% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. For short trips, flying is much more carbon-intensive than rail or bus travel. At Johns Hopkins, faculty members travel the most of all affiliate types, producing more than double the emissions of administrative employees and staff. --- The Johns Hopkins University Office of Climate and Sustainability, through its Campus as a Living Lab initiative - a program that supports...
Jul 01, 2025•32 min
--- The GovExperts is a Data Points mini-series spotlighting the brilliant minds at GovEx who are shaping the future of public sector data work. Today we’re talking to Vidushani Jayalal, who works with cities in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. She talks about the importance of thinking not just about how data works, but about how people work together and solve problems using data as a shared language. --- Learn more about GovEx --- Fill out our listener survey!...
Jun 02, 2025•16 min
--- The GovExperts is a Data Points mini-series spotlighting the brilliant minds at GovEx who are shaping the future of public sector data work. Today we’re talking to Dr. Bertran de Lis, GovEx’s Director of Research and Analytics, about her path from astrophysics to data science, what it means for cities to adopt a “Data-Driven Culture,” and her groundbreaking work on the Coronavirus Resource Center and the new City Data Explorer. --- Learn more about GovEx --- Fill out our listener survey!...
Apr 11, 2025•24 min
--- How well do cities communicate with data? What opportunities are they missing? --- GovEx Senior Research Manager Dr. Jacquie Greiff and Senior Researcher Chance Carter address these questions and more in their recent analysis of 2023 State of the City speeches. Their key finding: While mayors often illustrate progress by referencing data, they rarely offer the kind of context and analysis most likely to resonate with residents. Jacquie and Chance review how mayors can move beyond reference s...
Mar 28, 2025•31 min
--- The GovExperts is a Data Points mini-series spotlighting the brilliant minds at GovEx who are shaping the future of public sector data work. Today we’re chatting with Dr. Jessica Arenda, GovEx’s Instructional Designer. She helps us understand what makes adult learning experiences engaging and effective, how to connect with city leaders, and how COVID re-shaped the world of instructional design. --- Click to learn more about us and our work! --- Fill out our listener survey!...
Mar 17, 2025•14 min
--- Outgoing GovEx Executive Director Amy Edwards Holmes reflects on a momentous year for cities and data --- While the characters in Dr. Strangelove, referenced in the title of this episode, grappled with the invention of the atomic bomb, cities in recent years have only tentatively explored the potential of artificial intelligence to benefit residents. As outgoing GovEx Executive Director Amy Edwards Holmes discusses in this episode, many cities pivoted in 2024 - with GovEx support - to develo...
Feb 21, 2025•19 min
--- In this episode of Data Points, GovEx’s Meg Burke sits down with Tessa Cushman, the Food Access and Systems Coordinator in Adams County, Colorado and a Bloomberg American Health Initiative Fellow, to discuss Cushman’s experience putting the Food System Resilience Planning Guide, which GovEx created in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future in 2022, into action. --- Burke and Cushman review the importance of authentic engagement with local communities and the need to l...
Nov 06, 2024•36 min
--- In partnership with Results for America, GovEx helps empower communities to solve problems. --- In the latest episode of Data Points, we get an overview of the Opportunity Accelerator, a recently completed program in support of place-based initiatives focused on economic mobility with the goal of specific, population-level outcomes. Place-based initiatives aim to improve quality of life and access to opportunity, particularly for people of color and families with low incomes who live in neig...
Oct 16, 2024•47 min
--- The GovExperts is the new mini-series from GovEx Data Points spotlighting some of the top minds in public sector data. In our inaugural episode we discuss what generative AI is good at, how cities are interacting with it, and what it means for the workforce. --- We’re chatting with Andrew Nicklin, Senior Research Data Manager at GovEx. Andrew takes us from his early days at the NYC parks department to his pivotal role in launching the NYC Open Data platform, and how this experience led him t...
Sep 25, 2024•20 min
Iowa City and GovEx collaborate to solve a problem: How do you gather ridership data without fares? --- In the latest episode of the Data Points podcast, GovEx and Iowa City staff about collaborative efforts to track bus ridership for a free-fare program aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Iowa City is a participant of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative Data Track, a program aimed at connecting cities with coaches and data practitioners to build data skills and techniques to tackle...
Aug 16, 2024•34 min
--- GovEx Executive Director Amy Holmes introduces highlights from the organization’s recent event marking the DATA Act’s 10th anniversary --- In the latest episode of GovEx Data Points from the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence, GovEx Executive Director Amy Holmes, a key figure in the passage and implementation of the 2014 DATA Act, reflects on the organization’s recent event marking the law’s 10th anniversary at the new Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, DC. The DATA Act, the nat...
May 16, 2024•50 min
--- The Data Track at Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative helps leaders to the see the people behind city-level data. --- Today, we’re throwing a spotlight on the Data track of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, a collaboration between Bloomberg Philanthropies, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Business School, and GovEx. Launched in 2017, the Initiative has worked with 539 mayors and 2500+ senior city officials in 560 cities worldwide, and has also advanced research and de...
Apr 15, 2024•43 min
--- In this episode, we celebrate Women’s History Month by talking to some of the women who made history by leading the development of the Coronavirus Resource Center, or “CRC.” Launched in January 2020, the CRC became the indispensable source for data about COVID-19 for government officials, academics, journalists, and the public, surpassing 2.5 billion website views before winding down last year. --- Our history-making guests include: Dr. Lauren Gardner, Alton and Sandra Cleveland Professor in...
Mar 22, 2024•45 min
--- In this episode, we discuss City AI Connect, a global learning community and digital platform for cities to trial and advance the usage of generative artificial intelligence to improve public services. --- Generative AI, powered by advanced machine learning algorithms, has the potential to analyze vast amounts of data to predict trends, helping cities improve emergency response, mitigate severe weather events, and target resources for infrastructure enhancements. The technologies might also ...
Feb 01, 2024•28 min
In the latest Data Points Podcast from the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University (“GovEx”), GovEx Chief of Staff Dr. Rudy de Leon Dinglas talks to Amy Edwards Holmes, who recently completed her first year as the center’s Executive Director. Amy came to GovEx with years of public service experience in both the non-profit and government sector. In this podcast, Amy explains the origin of her passion for helping cities use data to improve people’s lives. She and Rud...
Oct 19, 2023•24 min
In the latest Data Points podcast from the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University (GovEx), GovEx Research Manager Jacquie Greif talks to Justin Elszasz, Chief Data Officer for Baltimore City. Elszasz describes the city’s long-standing partnership with GovEx, including the collaborative development of the ground-breaking Baltimore Data Academy, which is providing city staff in every department with the opportunity to learn about data and use it to improve their wor...
Jul 10, 2023•27 min
Among the lessons many cities learned from the COVID-19 pandemic was that local governments need to be better prepared for disruptions to the food system caused by public health crises and other natural and man-made disasters. To help local leaders address this need, the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence (GovEx) and Johns Hopkins’ Center for a Livable Future (CLF) developed a new tool, Food System Resilience: A Planning Guide for Local Governments , in collaboration with five cities: Au...
Feb 20, 2023•36 min
The past several years have revealed a major shift in the way we relate to our jobs, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing political and civil unrest. Increasingly, the roles of social and emotional wellbeing in the workplace have taken center stage as we negotiate our return to the office. This changing paradigm about our relationship to our work has prompted employers to re-evaluate the workplaces they create for their workforces, and cities are no exception to this phenomenon. Toda...
Nov 09, 2022•35 min
Place-based partnerships can serve a major role in supporting governments’ commitment to serving and improving the lives of residents. But partnerships on a city-wide scale rely on good data governance practices in order to be successful, data-driven, and self-sustaining. In particular, collaboration between government and non-government organizations (NGO’s) poses an extra layer of complexity, and successful service delivery through these partnerships demands robust data governance and open com...
Sep 01, 2022•30 min
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how unprepared our public data reporting practices were to handle such an event. Incomplete, poorly-formatted, or irregularly-released datasets were a norm, and drawing useful insights from these data presented a major challenge for governments seeking to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. While working on the Coronavirus Resource Center, GovEx analysts took note of the many data governance problems they encountered. These thoughts were given voice through the P...
Jul 01, 2022•26 min
