The Aurora City Council has approved a deal with Zencity Technologies to add to a contract it already has to provide four quick online surveys.
The addition approved last Tuesday will cost $45,000, and will give the city at least four pulse surveys – short-term surveys that take only about five to eight weeks for results – which city officials use to find out what people think about certain city issues.
The city has used Zencity since 2019, “to enhance city efforts to help collect, organize and handle potential resident requests being shared on social media,” according to a city memo on the issue.
“With the use of advanced AI algorithms, we analyze data from social media, city hotlines and other relevant sources, and provide local government stakeholders with detailed, real-time insights about how their citizens view and use the city,” the memo said. “The analysis can be accessed through a web-based interface on desktop and mobile devices.”
Some questioned whether Zencity would use the contract to harvest information from Aurora residents, but the company spokesman said the surveys “have nothing to do with data scraping.” And he said the company guarantees representative samples by continuing surveys, even at company cost.
City officials have said the surveys are strictly a tool used to survey the community on certain issues. Officials also have said information in the surveys will be publicly available on the city’s website.
slord@tribpub.com
