Being Chief Data Officer (CDO) for a large city is decidedly different from the typical CDO position. Sam Edelstein, CDO for the City of Syracuse, New York, proves to be atypical not just in his current position, but also in the career path he took to get there.

Before earning a master’s degree in information management, Edelstein worked as a newspaper reporter, an English teacher in Korea and as a social media manager in Washington, D.C. After earning his master’s degree, Edelstein went to work for the Office of Innovation (funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies) in the Syracuse Mayor’s Office as a analytics coordinator.

Edelstein talked with Paul Gillin (@pgillin) and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at MIT CDOIQ Symposium 2016 in Cambridge, MA.

Data and the city’s infrastructure

Infrastructure generates many points of data. For example, there is a record of every water leak, pothole and sewer failure in the City. These events live in silos as data. Edelstein remarked these haven’t always been combined, but more recently he has been looking for overlap.

How it works: Say a road needs to be repaved. Before going forward with the construction, he would look at any record of water leaks on that road in the past five years. This way, Edelstein is able to avoid finishing road work only to need to repair it because of a recurrent issue.

The value of open data

Edelstein spoke about the usefulness of federal and state data that has been opened up. The New State Portal is searchable and records things like traffic. This data can be helpful when making city planning calls, among other things.

“I’d love it if they’d do that research in our city,” commented Edelstein. The CDO remarked that when this data is released, it should be done in a “data-driven way” with “key datasets” being released first.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the MIT CDOIQ Symposium.

Photo by SiliconANGLE