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 Some of the thinking is outdated, and many of the links may have broken over time.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Citizen Engagement in Community Indicators Conference

I briefly mentioned the Strasbourg conference that I had to miss because I was getting married that weekend. I remembered to get married, but I forgot to share with you the results of conference.

You can see here the format and many of the presentations of the Seminar on ‘Involving citizens and communities in measuring and fostering well-being and progress’ hosted by the Council of Europe, in partnership with the Autonomous Province of Trento (Italy) and the OECD.

The description of the conference follows:

The aim of the seminar was to develop new approaches and tools for measuring how societies are changing by using high quality, reliable statistics to assess progress in a range of areas affecting citizens’ quality of life. Citizen participation in this process and the strengthening of their capacity to understand the social and economic context in which they live is important for improving policy making, democracy and citizen well-being.

The event provided the opportunity for an exchange of good practices from various Council of Europe member states as well as non-member states such as Australia, Canada, Colombia and Japan and sought to promote international co-operation at governmental and non-governmental level.

Participants had the opportunity to attend two round tables and six separate workshops addressing the following issues:

  • Well-being and well-being for all: what differences and which indicators?
  • Determining the objective and the political aim of involving citizens in developing indicators; identifying responsibilities and clarifying the institutional aspects of the approach
  • Links between traditional systems of indicators and those developed with citizens/communities: antagonisms, alternatives or complementarities?
  • Working with citizens /communities to develop indicators of well-being/progress
  • Assessing needs in conjunction with citizens, collecting data establishing a link with conventional statistical data
  • How can the question of goods for well being be taken into account in the work to develop indicators with citizens/communities?

See more here.

1 comment:

  1. This is completely awesome! I need to read it again to keep trying to fully make sense of it, but it's awesome! Thanks so much for explaining.

    citizen engagement

    ReplyDelete