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 Some of the thinking is outdated, and many of the links may have broken over time.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, July 28, 2007

Worldometers

I ran across an interesting website today, called Worldometers. The site provides a series of measures which it purports to update in real time (much in the same way sites like the National Debt Clock [get your own here] or the Census' Population Clock do.)

What's interesting is that the measures include a range of interesting information, including deaths caused by smoking, oil consumption, food production, lightning strikes, and a series of other indicators.

It struck me that this could me an interesting tool to use with community indicators, as we look at different data display techniques to tell more compelling stories with data. The numbers are, of course, projections based on current trendlines, but these projections could conceivably be used for a number of different community measures to point out the costs of inaction or the scale of the issue the community faces.

Has anyone had experience adapting these kinds of clocks to local indicators?

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