Articles by Mark Sussman, CEO and Co-founder of OurStreets

About Mark Sussman, CEO and Co-founder of OurStreets

Mark is an entrepreneur with 15 years of experience in data science and analytics. A life-long street safety and bicycle advocate, Mark co-founded OurStreets to give advocates and cities the hard numbers to support their work in making cities safer. Mark previously served as a Systems Lead at Mathematica Policy Research, building data analytics frameworks for Medicare evaluation programs.

Encouraging Civic Engagement with What Matters Most to Residents

Encouraging Civic Engagement with What Matters Most to Residents

by | Jul 6, 2020 | Governance, Technology | 1 Comment

OurStreets origins are rooted in capturing latent sentiment on social media and converting it to standardized data. It all started in July 2018, when OurStreets co-founder, Daniel Schep, was inspired by the #bikeDC community tweeting photos of cars blocking bike lanes, and built the @HowsMyDrivingDC Twitter bot. The bot used license plate info to produce a screenshot of the vehicle’s outstanding citations from the DC DMV website.

Fast forward to March 2020, and D.C. Department of Public Works asking if we could repurpose OurStreets to crowdsource the availability of essential supplies during the COVID-19 crisis. Knowing how quickly we needed to move in order to be effective, we set out to make a new OurStreets functionality viable nationwide.