Urban governance is vital for efficiently managing cities, promoting sustainable development, and improving quality of life for residents. In the realm of urban governance, the San Antonio Research Partnership Portal stands as a groundbreaking initiative, fostering collaboration between diverse city entities and leveraging innovative smart applications. In this paper, we will focus on its ability to facilitate strategic alignment among city departments, public feedback integration, and streamlined collaboration with academic institutions. Through technical insights and real-world case studies, this paper underscores the portal’s role in enhancing municipal responsiveness, improving decision-making processes, and exemplifying the potential of smart applications utilizing artificial intelligence for fostering effective city management and community engagement.
In the era of data-driven decision making, cities and communities are increasingly seeking ways to effectively gather insights from public feedback and comments to shape their research and development initiatives. Town hall community meetings serve as a valuable platform for citizens to express their opinions, concerns, and ideas about various aspects of city life. In this study, we aim to explore the effectiveness of different keyword extraction tools and similarity matching algorithms in matching town hall community comments with city strategic plans and current research opportunities. We employ KPMiner, TopicRank, MultipartiteRank, and KeyBERT for keyword extraction, and evaluate the performance of cosine similarity, word embedding similarity, and BERT-based similarity for matching the extracted keywords. By combining these techniques, we aim to bridge the gap between community feedback and research initiatives, enabling data-driven decision-making in urban development. Our findings will provide valuable insights for more inclusive and informed strategies, ensuring that citizen opinions and concerns are effectively incorporated into city planning and development efforts.
Research collaboration between academic researchers from universities, organizations and government local city departments can be tremendously useful to all institutions, but these collaborations involve a wide range of skill sets, making them difficult to establish and manage. For many local government city departments, finding research professionals and collaborators to solve community problems remains a big challenge. The information of research opportunities is either posted on the individual city department website or researchers are approached through a personal relationship with city department officials. As a result, a researcher interested in working with the city department would have to either navigate various websites or try to build a personal contact with city department officials. In this paper, we will look at the relevance of community research partnerships as well as the barriers that prevent them. We will also demonstrate the development of, Research Partnership Portal, a collaborative platform for academic researchers, organizations, and government city departments in San Antonio. This portal will assist academic researchers and organizations in collaborating with government city departments and using current administrative data to produce effective answers to community concerns.