Citizens and Performance: Benchmarking Livability

Jonathan Walters, in this month's Governing magazine, tackles the question of community indicators and government benchmarks, and shows how it's possible to bring the two together.

http://governing.com/manage/pm/perf0408.htm

From the article:

There's nothing new about aspiring to improve community well-being by trying to measure it. One of the first recognized attempts goes back to 1913. That's when the U.S. Department of Labor published its "Handbook of Federal Statistics on Children." The handbook brought scattered information on child welfare together into one place, in hopes that it would inform federal policy. Tracking broad measures of economic well-being became popular after the Great Depression. The 1960s, meanwhile, witnessed a surge of interest in data on general social and environmental health.

Check out the discussion and the examples in the article. Readers of this blog will recognize quite a few people and organizations mentioned.

Then drop me a line -- how has your community successfully integrated community indicators and performance measures?