Community Indicators for Your Community

Real, lasting community change is built around knowing where you are, where you want to be, and whether your efforts are making a difference. Indicators are a necessary ingredient for sustainable change. And the process of selecting community indicators -- who chooses, how they choose, what they choose -- is as important as the data you select.

This is an archive of thoughts I had about indicators and the community indicators movement. Some of the thinking is outdated, and many of the links may have broken over time.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Linkages, Visualizations, and Definitions

I've been playing with a new (to me) online tool called Visuwords. It's an online dictionary that hints at the power we could be unleashing with computers. You have to see it.

Enter in a term, like "education" or "housing" or "poverty" and it gives you the term, linked to related terms. Move the terms around (it's fun!), mouse-over any term for a definition, double-click a term to find its linkages, and just keep going.

The possibilities are amazing. From the community indicators world, think of the same software tool used to provide possible measures for terms, links to related issues, and measures for those issues. Think about how this could be used to organize metadata, or display the interconnectedness of issues measured in an indicators project. Think of how fun, intuitive, and user-friendly we could make our indicator projects.

Than keep playing with the site. How cool is that?

1 comment:

  1. Looks to me like a little piece of James Burke's Knowledge Web. (See Burke's description here: http://www.k-web.org/ )

    Fascinating stuff!

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