Case Study Library

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a component of the United States’ Federal Government, has fully reimagined its DisasterAssistance.gov website to make applying for disaster assistance faster than ever. This change will reduce time burdens for survivors post-disaster, when they are in greatest need and the most overwhelmed. This effort has been built on decades of feedback from disaster survivors and is expected to reduce the registration time by more than 15%.

In the U.S. government, community members have experimented with designing the government services they will use. Their lived experience improves service outcomes, builds better relations with the government, and creates greater ownership over the service. This is new; normal participatory design of government services just includes community members for certain activities at certain points, never throughout, and never allowing the community to lead and frame the project or choose methodologies.

The City of Austin launched Data Impact Visuals & Exploration (DIVE) to address low data literacy, limited accessibility, and lack of decision support tools. This project aims to empower diverse users with data skills, tools, and resources to make informed decisions. DIVE benefits community members, City staff, universities and funders. Innovative features include user-centric design, multiple components, a community-based approach and a long-term sustainability plan.

The City of Austin has piloted an anticipatory governance tool named the Civic Research Agenda (CRA) to help the City become future-ready in the face of complex civic challenges. The CRA leverages a strategic foresight methodology to proactively plan for plausible future scenarios and identify implications for decision-making today, thus moving the City away from reactionary and short-sighted policy making and enable it to “look around the corner” to future challenges and opportunities.

Governments must judge hundreds of new programmatic budget proposals each fiscal year with little objective information about whether they will achieve the results claimed. Evidence of program effectiveness is a critical data point that is used when making budget and policy decisions, as programs with greater evidentiary support are generally more likely to deliver a high return on investment of public funds. The The Policy Lab at Brown University leveraged existing public clearinghouses of peer…

Tertius has resulted in massive productivity gains for the building industry in DC, enabling developers & property owners to book (at a nominal cost) certified third party agency inspections. Outcome: Far more efficient matching of demand & supply for permit inspections, substantially reducing turnaround times. Tertius has driven revenue to the taxpayers, increased regulatory oversight, increased safety in the building community, saving property owners and developers thousands of dollars.

The City of Seattle spends over $720 million every year. With the surge of COVID-19, small businesses were left in a highly vulnerable position, forcing many to shut down. This is especially true for women and minority-owned small businesses (WMBEs). We worked with the City to launch its e-commerce government marketplace, providing a platform for government buyers to seamlessly find local WMBEs, access their products and services, obtain quotes, and check out with a few clicks.

The hard-fought gains of democratization have come under attack in many countries. To reverse this trend, policymakers and civil society need new tools to navigate sophisticated forms of democratic erosion. We combine recent advances in machine learning with massive webscraping to produce high-frequency data and forecasts predicting where democratic backsliding will occur and the specific forms it will take. We equip pro-democracy forces with advanced warning to guide more strategic responses.

Since 2020, the City of Austin (COA) and the University of Texas (UT) have collaborated on over twenty diverse research projects under the legal and administrative framework of a five-year, ten million dollar master interlocal agreement (ILA). Among a very few of its kind in the USA, this ILA is an "innovation enabling innovation" that bridges the barriers between two large, extremely complex organizations and fast-tracks the launch of research and innovation projects by four to five times.

During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, relief organizations and government agencies lacked data about events on the ground and struggled to mount an effective response. New methods of event detection were urgently needed. A research team comprised of country experts and computational social scientists created a Twitter-based event detection system that provides geo-located event data on humanitarian needs, displaced persons, human rights abuses and civilian resistance in near real-time.