Data and Technology for Equitable Public Administration: Understanding City Government Employees' Challenges and Needs

2025-05-27

AI Summary

U.S. municipal governments face equity risks when adopting emerging technologies, yet the practical challenges confronting frontline public servants remain underexamined. Method: Drawing on qualitative methods—including semi-structured interviews with 36 cross-departmental municipal staff, thematic coding, and context-sensitive needs analysis—the study identifies three interrelated implementation barriers to equitable technology use: institutional constraints, capacity gaps, and data limitations. Contribution/Results: The research introduces the “equity-ready” design principle, embedding equity operationalization directly into technical specifications. It further proposes differentiated support pathways for cities both with and without dedicated equity offices. Notably, the study does not involve algorithm development; instead, it bridges the gap between local governance realities and ethical AI deployment by centering frontline practitioner perspectives—thereby advancing substantively equitable public-sector technology adoption.

Technology Category

• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Bias, Fairness & Equity
• Humans and AI: AI for Accessibility
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics of web technologies
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

Abstract

City governments in the United States are increasingly pressured to adopt emerging technologies. Yet, these systems often risk biased and disparate outcomes. Scholars studying public sector technology design have converged on the need to ground these systems in the goals and organizational contexts of employees using them. We expand our understanding of employees' contexts by focusing on the equity practices of city government employees to surface important equity considerations around public sector data and technology use. Through semi-structured interviews with thirty-six employees from ten departments of a U.S. city government, our findings reveal challenges employees face when operationalizing equity, perspectives on data needs for advancing equity goals, and the design space for acceptable government technology. We discuss what it looks like to foreground equity in data use and technology design, and considerations for how to support city government employees in operationalizing equity with and without official equity offices.

Problem

• Addressing biased outcomes in city government technology adoption
• Understanding employee challenges in operationalizing equity practices
• Designing equitable data systems for public sector needs

Innovation

• Focus on equity practices in city governments
• Semi-structured interviews with employees
• Design space for acceptable government technology