Making Policies with Data: The Legacy of the PoliVisu Project

The PoliVisu project has the goal to investigate the potential of data use and visualisation in urban policy making. The project has explored how data supported policy making is adopted by public administrations and what we can learn from their experience. This is done by enrolling pilot cases with different and specific policy problems. From the experience of the PoliVisu pilots the influence and added value of data in the policy making process is assessed. Considering the recent “shake” in data production and use, PoliVisu has adopted four driving questions, as follow: what are the new roles data can play in the policy making process?, What is the added value of data for policy making? How can innovative visualisations contribute to improve the use of data in policy making processes? To what extent can an increased adoption of data affect the policy making process? How is the data shake affecting the involvement of non-institutional actors in the policy making process? This paper explores these questions, by presenting the experiences and the lessons learnt, also focussing on specific pilots’ initiatives and results.