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 Some of the thinking is outdated, and many of the links may have broken over time.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, April 17, 2010

NAPC Conference, Day One: CI-PM Integration

I'm at the NAPC Conference in Alexandria, Virginia. Our opening pre-conference session features Allen Lomax from the Community Indicators Consortium talking about their project to integrate community indicators and government performance measures. I'll be participating with a NAPC Forward project to increase the use of social media among community planning agencies, so you'll see more if you follow @N_A_P_C on Twitter (you can follow me, too, at @BenWarner.) You'll see more about the conference also on the NAPC blog and the NAPC YouTube channel.

Allen's presentation is now online at www.communityplanning.org -- excellent examples of communities  trying to engage the community and government around data and the policy implications of using good, shared information. The Community Indicators Consortium is about to put out a call for more Real Stories -- case studies of integration efforts, successful or not -- so watch for that.

The conversation got really interesting, as multiple folk shared their initiatives in their local communities -- the topic appeared to strongly resonate with NAPC members who have been trying to bring community indicators together with performance measures and have important lessons to share. This is a critical connection for this conversation, and I hope more NAPC members get involved in helping this project along.

In other news, you can follow live tweeting of the conference through the #NAPC10 hashtag.

Enjoy!

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