Brendan Babb, Chief Innovation Officer Gives mRelief the Inside Scoop
Our team at mRelief met Brendan Babb in 2015 after participating in a national hackathon. Before we developed SNAP pre-screeners in 44 states built partly on eligibility data on data.gov, we approached scale by sharing a template of our text messaging screeners on GitHub with civic technology leaders across the US. The hope was that they would find it useful to serve families in their communities who struggled to access the internet.
Five states engaged us to replicate our solution, but one submission stood out: Brendan Babb’s of Code for Anchorage in Alaska. After mRelief made many updates to our text messaging tools, we ultimately decided to provide these services at scale and have worked with the city of Anchorage since 2016. We were not the only ones to notice Brendan’s work of collaborating to use data for good, the City of Anchorage saw this, too and hired him to serve as the first Chief Innovation Officer. We asked Brendan to share more about datasets that excite him, advice on being data-driven, and what he does for fun.
- On Exciting Datasets: “Surprisingly the Property Appraisal data we have at data.muni.org. We spent a lot of time cleaning and organizing the data and now it is paying dividends. There is information on where ADUs are popping up, what type of heating houses have, what year they were built. We partnered with the museum and design forum and they made great visualizations for an exhibit and forum at the museum on housing.”
- On Being Data-Driven: “Don’t just ask for data, go talk to departments and partners and see what Excel spreadsheets they have and use all the time. They often don’t consider that data, but in my experience, it has been the richest source of data. And also put in the time to clean, standardize and automate data. It isn’t glamorous but will allow you to reuse fresh data for projects you haven’t even thought of yet.”
- On Fun: “I really enjoy DJing as a hobby and especially in unusual places like in a snow-covered park as dog mushers cruise by at the Iditarod ceremonial start or on a frozen lagoon while families are skating. I’m DJing a Climate Action Fair next week in Town Square to celebrate our Climate Action Plan and new solar panels.”
