Did you know U.S. Census Bureau innovations led to the IBM Corporation, statistical sampling, the first commercial electronic computer, and geographic information systems? Last December, the innovation program led by the Census Bureau celebrated its seventh anniversary by expanding its focus to Puerto Rico.
The Opportunity Project (TOP) is led by the Census Open Innovation Labs at the Census Bureau. TOP is one of the government’s biggest accelerators and engages government, technologists, and communities to co-create digital products that serve the public good using federal open data.
“Transforming Local Addressing Systems in Puerto Rico” was one of the problem statements addressed during the 14-week tech development sprints. In 2022, TOP summer tech development sprints ran from July/August-October/to November.
After the devastation of Hurricane Irma and María in Puerto Rico, a local organization committed to helping communities overcome the problems of “data invisibility” by evaluating and improving their civic directions.
The Initiative for Civic Address Systems Assessment in Puerto Rico, iCasaPR, began the project to tackle the challenges of addressing infrastructure in Puerto Rico and its effect on disadvantaged communities.
The Puerto Rico Civic Address Vulnerability Evaluation, PRCAVE, was the first systematic evaluation of address infrastructure in Puerto Rico. PRCAVE was backed by a generous donation from the non-profit organization Filantropía Puerto Rico.
Raúl Ríos-Díaz, president of iCasaPR, who served as manager of the Address Management Office for the U.S. Postal Service, was a key figure in creating uniformity in the addresses of almost one million homes on the island.
“In Puerto Rico, there are still deficiencies in the addresses for a large percentage of the dwellings, especially in rural areas,” he said in a press release. “The problem of civic addresses on the island makes a large part of our population invisible in statewide data systems and the federal space.”
Puerto Rico has struggled for decades with deficiencies in its address infrastructure. In some municipalities, over 60% of the population resides in structures that lack a valid civic address, which can be used by emergency services to locate residents in a timely manner or accurately locate an address on a map using geospatial technology.
Hurricanes Irma and María exposed the tragic consequences during the management of emergency operations by the inability to secure funds for individuals and communities and the failures of federal, state, and local entities to implement the necessary responses in a timely and effective manner.
According to Ríos-Díaz, “The deficiency in civic addresses in Puerto Rico hinders emergency services in its efforts to locate the population, limits the ability of federal programs to effectively account for structures and equitably distribute aid for the reconstruction of the Island, and also impacts our economic development, since it affects several aspects of our daily life, from the delivery of packages from giants such as Amazon to the ability to use geo-location tools and map applications from Google, Apple or Microsoft. As they say in the industry, if you are not on a map, you do not exist. ”
The project produces tools that seek to catalyze new ways of thinking about data invisibility in Puerto Rico and foster alliances between communities, nonprofit organizations, and federal, state, and local agencies.
A team of leading experts from Puerto Rico and the states in the PRCAVE project use base data from the United States Postal Service, the Census Bureau, FEMA, and other local municipal and state sources.
In addition, the initiative included a direct mail campaign to the population that lacks localizable addresses to create a vulnerability index to support the next steps of the process. The iCasaPR team worked on completing this effort before the next hurricane season.
iCasaPR was one of five winners awarded first prize by the Census-sponsored Opportunity Project in the category of “Resilient People and Places” for its project to help municipalities and communities in Puerto Rico improve their address infrastructure to foster a stronger and more resilient future.
Apart from local address challenges, other 2022 sprints in TOP Puerto Rico focused on renewable energy, promoting youth resilience, parental engagement opportunities in Puerto Rico schools, and workforce development in Puerto Rico. FEMA worked with Puerto Rico Land Grid and Loveland Technologies to assess the occupancy, condition, land use, and needs of all 1.5 million properties in Puerto Rico.
TOP sprints have resulted in nearly 175 new open data tools, including apps, websites, mapping tools, data visualizations, games, and more.
Each year, the TOP team convenes leaders from federal agencies, local governments, and non-governmental organizations to propose problem statements representing challenges facing the communities they serve.
Five to 10 of these problem statements are selected, and the agencies and groups that proposed them collaborate with the TOP team to facilitate sprints, which bring together a diverse set of stakeholders.
“The TOP University sprint allows the students to practice their skills in real-life, problem-solving projects,” Diane Wei, a UX manager at Google, said in a press release.
Wei mentored several university teams during the 2022 sprints. “The sprint also provides professionals in tech companies with a way to connect with young talents and foster a culture of inclusion, equality, and belonging,” she added.
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