Open-source tools for action on the SDGs
Status
ongoing
City
Los Angeles
Main actors
City Government, Private Sector, NGO / Philanthropy, Research Institutes / Universities
Project area
Whole City/Administrative Region
Duration
Ongoing since 2017
Advancing the SDGs by measuring local progress and building new partnerships for action.
The implementation of the SDGs in Los Angeles is a multi-phase multilateral project aimed at adopting and adapting the Goals across the city. Over the past four years, the City has developed a program to embrace the use of a common language with other cities, while sharing data, methodology, and lessons learned. The principals that guide the work being conducted are (1) to use the SDGs to improve the lives of residents and (2) to develop and share tools in a transparent way. Two open-source tools have been developed for SDG action at the sub-national level: the SDG Data Reporting Platform (Open SDG) and the SDG Activities Index. While Open SDG has been developed for national statistics, Los Angeles is the first city to adapt it for sub-national reporting. The SDG Activities Index is a living, crowd-sourced encyclopedia of organizations advancing the SDGs in the city. It is searchable, exportable, and allows residents to build shared capacity and learn about the SDGs.
Sustainable Development Goals
In 2017, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti committed the City of Los Angeles to implementing the SDGs, with an understanding that local governments are critical for achieving the 2030 Agenda. The SDGs are now integrated in the City’s sustainability plan, L.A.’s Green New Deal, as well as departmental strategic documents. In 2019, the City published its first Voluntary Local Review, containing a comprehensive mapping of City initiatives to the SDGs.
The City of Los Angeles believes that cities are hubs for the innovative action that will be required to achieve the Goals by 2030. The approach to this work is by three avenues: measure, mobilize, and connect. The open-source tools are enablers for all of these: measuring ourselves to identify opportunities to mobilize new initiatives and connecting with partners and practitioners to build the partnerships needed to so - both locally and within the global SDG community of practice. These tools overcome a common challenge of local governments in implementing the SDGs and shows the value added in engaging local issues in a global shared language.
The aims of the initiative are:
- demonstrate the City’s commitment to measuring progress toward the SDGs,
- disaggregating this measurement to identify where members of our community may be being left behind as progress is achieved for the City as a whole.
- utilize these tools to create new partnerships, initiatives, and action toward the SDGs.
Open SDG is an initiative to collect and analyze data on the City’s progress on the implementation of the SDGs. We are reporting on over 150 indicators with local data. Over 30 of the indicators are disaggregated by various demographic characteristics including gender, race, and age. The Activities Index currently has 153 different projects and organizations across all 17 goals. We also track the number of users of the Open SDG platform (250 monthly) and the SDG Activities Index (350 monthly).
Cloud hosting is maintained by the City’s Information Technology Agency. Maintenance and innovation of the platform is facilitated by a full-time team in the Office of the Mayor with support from the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles. All work is recorded and maintained in a live Wiki via Github.
The initiative focuses on the City of Los Angeles but in some cases, we report data at larger jurisdictional levels including the County of Los Angeles and the State of California, especially for policy-linked, non-statistical indicators, and for those functions that reside outside the City’s immediate authorities, including Public Health and primary/secondary Education.
The next step in SDG monitoring and mobilization is to use the data to identify gaps to 2030. We are currently innovating in this space and developing new analysis and visualization tools that will help us and other cities to do so. In our data platform, Open SDG, we are prototyping a trend analysis tool that will help us project the quantitative data to 2030 to help us identify indicators and targets that need accelerated action.
The Open SDG platform was developed with the support of a multi-sector partnership. The stakeholders are residents, partners, researchers who can access the data sources reported on the SDG platform and want to support the city in this work. Students from local universities have been instrumental in the implementation of the platform as well. While our primarily stakeholders are focused on Los Angeles, our users span the globe.
The initiative is the product of multi-sector partnerships between government, philanthropy, nonprofits, private sector, and academia. The program is funded jointly by the City of Los Angeles and a grant from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, administered by the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles. The Amazon cloud hosting is supported by the City of L.A.s Information Technology Agency. Five university partners, Occidental College, Arizona State University, University of Southern California, and University of California, Los Angeles, have also supported their students to work with the City in developing these tools. Both tools are free and entirely open source to other cities.
Open SDG and the Activities Index are powerful tools for action on the SDGs. The Activities Index has been developed to aggregate community-based activities on SDG mobilization, which was also built in open source and shared on GitHub. Though Open SDG was developed for and by national governments for national-level reporting, it is flexible for other use cases including local government reporting. Other cities have already approached Los Angeles for support in their own development of their local platforms. All the modifications that have been made to the platform have been recorded and published in an open Wiki that other cities can follow. The project team continuously participates in webinars and learning sessions to showcase both tools and share lessons learned. As interest and focus on localization of the SDGs grows, it is important that cities continue to innovate tools and methodologies for and by cities.
Some major challenges include ensuring that SDG target and indicator language include local governments, finding data sources that adhere to the international standards or can serve as proxy measures, and marketing the SDG Activities Index to ensure its continued growth and usefulness.
These challenges have been overcome by developing a methodology to revise the SDG target and indicator language for our own reporting, working through our Open Data Portal and GeoHub and with partners to identify proxy data sources, and engaging with the City’s neighborhood councils, non-profit council, and community-based organizations to ensure awareness of the Activities Index.
Building these measuring and reporting tools provided the foundation from which to identify where and who is being left behind and partners that the City can work with. However, new initiatives and the capacity to build and sustain them are required to work further towards achieving the Goals. Cities like Los Angeles. are helping to define a new role for sub-national governments in an international development agenda, while using the shared language of the SDGs to bring the community into the work of this global movement.
The City of Los Angeles has a population of approximately 4 million people, however, this initiative is relevant to the 10 million residents of Los Angeles County and the 19 million residents of the region. Furthermore, at least 13 cities in the UK and 1 city in South Africa are in the process of adapting this platform for their use and for the benefit of their millions of citizens
- Guangzhou Award application form
External links / documents
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