Boston seeks to express performance in single number

Just as advanced statistics have taken over sports like baseball, Boston City Hall is developing a way to calculate a score that will give Mayor Martin Walsh a snapshot of how the city is performing.

The CityScore initiative will take some of the key data points collected by the city and its corresponding targets, from EMS response times to the percentage of streetlights repaired on time, and turn it into a single number that indicates whether the city is meeting its goals.

“Basically it’s how you’re trending to a target,” said Daniel Arrigg Koh, Walsh’s chief of staff. “Anything scoring over 1 is doing well, anything below 1 needs improvement.”

Koh announced CityScore during a talk in October at TEDxCambridge. Since then, the city has pushed out a beta version with 18 metrics onto the data dashboards in the mayor’s office, testing the algorithm that calculates the number. Koh said city officials hope to have 30 metrics included in the algorithm by the end of the year as they continue working to refine it.

“This was designed with a very busy executive in mind,” Koh said. “Ideally, the mayor would be able to go through 30 metrics every day and tease out the issues. With this, he’ll be able to see the score and say, ‘We’re down today, let’s take a look at what’s going on.’”

While the goal is that single, indicative score, the plan is also to give Walsh the top five categories where the city is exceeding its targets and goals, and the bottom five categories where the city is lagging behind its targets, Koh said. The mayor will also be able to see a breakdown of how the score is being calculated, allowing data analysts to dive deeper into the data when issues are identified.

The initial focus is on metrics that change frequently, like streetlight repairs, to calculate a daily CityScore. Eventually, more advanced metrics like the overall condition of roadways, Boston Public School standardized test scores, and even resident sentiment on Twitter will be incorporated into monthly and quarterly scores as well.

Other communities may lack the resources available to Boston, but Koh said they could still calculate their own city or town score by using the metrics available and important to them, such as housing starts, homeless population, Part I (violent) crimes, or other data sets.

“We welcome other cities that want to do this, and we want to collaborate with other cities to make it even better,” he said. “We really welcome feedback on this. We know this is the beginning and not the end.”