What do you think of the County Having a Contract with Zencity and Using its Products?
A recap of our recent reporting plus occasional bonus content.
Recent County communications alluded to Washoe County using Zencity products to gage the community’s mood in terms of our libraries, following the ballot box defeat of WC-1 which would have extended automatically directing a portion of property taxes to their budget.
This made us wonder how much the County pays for Zencity services and why it’s been using their products.
The company founded in the mid 2010s by a former urban planner has headquarters in New York City and Tel Aviv, a hub for cyber surveillance companies.
Zencity provides social data mining tools to local governments, mostly summarizing and creating data visualization from public social media posts.
It creates dashboards with for example the percentage of positive and negative sentiments on such and such a topic.
In an email response, the Media and Communications Manager Bethany Drysdale wrote back to Our Town Reno indicating the county currently has a $71,000 per year contract with Zencity, with a partnership dating back to 2021.
“The contract includes both the monitoring of community sentiment broken down by district or by topic, regular insight reports on hot topics from the Zencity analysts, and a survey platform. While the contract is housed within the Manager’s Office, the platform is used to inform engagement across the county’s 24 departments. It is also available to county commissioners who want to use the tool to better connect with their constituents,” Drysdale explained.
She said the county receives weekly reports for each of the county’s five districts, as well as reports on specific topics, such as one she included as an attachment about the horse zoning topic.
Drysdale also included the results of what was called a Langue Access Plan Community survey, conducted from January to July with over three-thousand participants “to find out exactly what the needs of the community are and how the community needs/wants to connect with us in other languages.”
There have been concerns from some county commissioners and constituents elsewhere in the country that the reports obtained through data mining can feel like modern day government eavesdropping and an invasion of people’s social media, even if publicly posted, or that Zencity reports favor the views of more vocal constituents with more time spent online writing, to the detriment of others.
Many questions remain, so before we delve deeper ourselves, we were wondering what yours might be, if you have any, concerning our county’s use of Zencity products?
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