2025/05/27 by Angie Zhang, Zhang, Angie, Madison Liao +13 · 1 citation
Engineering · Social Sciences · #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #E-Government and Public Services #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) #Information Systems Theories and Implementation #Smart Cities and Technologies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.21682
openalex publication_date 2025/05/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.