SEATTLE (December 11, 2019) – The City of Seattle launched “Performance Seattle,” a new centralized dashboard where Seattle residents can see what their City is doing to make their lives better. Performance Seattle tracks the City’s performance on seven key priority areas including basic City services and provides an in-depth look at City performance data through a variety of data visualizations, including maps, charts, graphs, and infographics.
“Performance Seattle represents our City’s commitment to building the city of the future. Understanding and leveraging the data that cities like Seattle generate everyday is a vital challenge – it will enable us to be accountable, improve services, and generate better outcomes for everyone,” said Mayor Jenny A. Durkan. “We are showing how we are improving access to frequent transit, building affordable housing, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, meeting targets in our delivery of basic City services, and increasing people’s access to critical services and supports. My commitment is to share with Seattle’s residents where we are meeting our goals and where we need to lean in and innovate.”
Performance Seattle was built using three guiding principles:
- Resident-Focused: Be accountable to residents for basic City services
- Collaborative: Work together to improve government use of citywide data shared across departments
- Innovative: Automate data to make it as real-time, accurate, and useful as possible
Performance Seattle provides both residents and City of Seattle project managers, directors, and employees the opportunity to track the progress of some of our City’s most important initiatives. Each of these seven dashboards tracks a different priority area and provides residents with a deeper understanding of how well the City of Seattle is meeting key ongoing service targets and multi-year goals. These priority areas include:
- Basic City Services
- Safe and Healthy Communities
- Affordability and Livability
- Homelessness Response
- Capital Projects
- Environment and Climate Change
- Future of Work
The Performance Seattle dashboard tracks the City’s success meeting aggressive performance metrics, helping departments meet critical service delivery goals – like SDOT’s commitment to repair 80% of potholes within 30 days, Seattle Police Department’s goal of responding to 100% of Priority 1 calls within seven minutes, or Seattle Fire Department’s commitment to having a first responder on the scene within four minutes, 90% of the time.
While all of this information has existed throughout the City in different places, the Performance Seattle dashboard represents the first time that this information has been brought together in one place. By bringing it together on a single site, residents can see the citywide expectations for each department.
Seattle’s leadership is committed to governing with data and evidence. Seattle has received technical assistance from What Works Cities and Results for America to improve data-informed practices and in 2018 Seattle was recognized for work to accelerate the use of data and evidence in city government.
Performance Seattle is a product of months of work by the Seattle Innovation & Performance team, and was developed in collaboration with over 150 City staff. Each of the seven priority areas parallels seven cross-departmental working groups comprised of members of the Mayor’s cabinet and the Mayor’s Office that collaborate on citywide initiatives.
For the first several months, the Performance Seattle site will be in a “soft launch” state to ensure that the data is correctly updating on a monthly basis. During this time, the Innovation & Performance team will be gathering feedback on the site. Please send any feedback you might have to performance@seattle.gov.