Community Indicators

Cross-posted: Instant Atlas Blog

2011-06-28T10:38:00.000-04:00

Here's a piece I wrote for the Instant Atlas blog -- thought I'd cross-post it for those of you following along here.

Jacksonville Community Council Inc. (JCCI) began using Instant Atlas to display its Quality of Life Progress Report community indicators in September of 2009. For the first 18 months, we used the Single Map Template to show approximately 125 indicators, many of them stretching back over 25 years, in a way that was revolutionary for our community. People throughout our community, from policy-makers to grant writers to community advocates, appreciated the ease and clarity with which they could get the data they needed. On our part, we appreciated the freedom from the constraints of the printed report, allowing us to update information as soon as it was released (often beating the local newspaper to the publication of new data.)

Beginning last month, we decided to see how our community would react to seeing some of the other tools Instant Atlas has to offer. When we used the Double Map Template and began playing with the scatterplot tools, we started to see interesting (and sometimes unexpected) correlations that we could verify over time. In fact, the use of this template helped provide a definitive answer if one of our indicators truly was still a significant and useful measure today. (It was, much more than anticipated.)

If the scatterplot tool, allowing comparisons between two indicators, revealed such interesting information, we wondered what the Bubble Plot Template might show? Once we began examining relationships among four indicators at the same time, we began to see targeted opportunities for additional research and policy direction. For example, when examining high school graduation rates, we found school districts that were overperforming in relation to the social and economic conditions within the district, and other districts that were underperforming – including districts with a reputation for excellence. Suddenly, we were able to bring together useful information in a compelling visual display with the ability to reshape community conversations around priorities and policies – and the data is available for anyone in our community to check for themselves.

You can see how we’re using Instant Atlas at www.jcci.org.

SA 2020 Update

2011-06-14T14:04:00.002-04:00

On March 19, we completed the first phase of the SA 2020 process with a public release and written report (available here.) It was an amazing experience as the people of San Antonio came together to reach a shared vision for the future, develop metrics (community indicators) to measure their progress, and commit to action to reach their goals. (Pictured is the December forum where the groups determined their key indicators they would like to see measured in each of the themes of the report.)

The SA 2020 initiative focused on what San Antonio could look like in the year 2020, and enjoyed both wide community participation and widespread support. Of particular interest to those who might be considering similar initiatives in their communities, Mayor Julián Castro focused on the SA 2020 initiative as a key feature of his first term in office, and was re-elected with 82 percent of the vote.

The work on implementing SA 2020 continues. This week, Mayor Castro briefed the White House on SA2020 and its goals, adding: SA 2020 "produced specific marks for the community to meet," Castro said. “That has value as other communities look to develop plans.”

I'm reminded of what Becky Morgan, of the Morgan Family Foundation, said while introducing an indicator report they supported:

In a time when our neighbors listen to elected officials or other established leaders and wonder who to believe, indicator reports serve as a civic-based tool to re-build this country’s social capital … our trust in each other, our willingness to find common vision and values, our engagement in collaborative civic work to solve problems that confront us. But most of all, they help to build a commitment to stewardship, to pass along to our children and grandchildren a country of many regions that are much improved over those left to us. Such commitment to progress is also a commitment to measure our progress … honestly and with open hearts and minds. This is the promise of the regional indicator movement in our state and our country.

Press Release: Open Indicators Consortium

2011-06-14T10:48:00.002-04:00

Here's the press release from the Open Indicators Consortium:

June 14, 2011

From across the nation, local, regional and state data partners have collaborated with a team of 20 faculty and graduate students at one of the world’s top data visualization labs in the Open Indicators Consortium to create Weave (Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment), a high performance web-based open source software platform. Weave allows users to explore, analyze, visualize and disseminate data online from any location at any time.

The Open Indicator Consortium’s goal is to transform publicly available data into visually compelling and actionable indicators to inform public policy and community-based decision makers. Since 2008, the Open Indicators Consortium (OIC) has brought together technical and academic experts, data providers and data users. With its technical lead and partner the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Institute for Visualization and Perception Research, the OIC is soft-launching Weave 1.0 BETA in preparation for the official release of Weave 1.0 in the mid-fall.

The Weave core code is being released under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3), and the Weave API under the Mozilla Public License (MPL v 1.1).

Full documentation is available through http://www.oicweave.org. The code is available for download now at http://ivpr.github.com/Weave/. These releases provide all that is needed to implement Weave.

More information can be found here.

Community Indicators and the Visioning Process

2010-11-29T11:35:00.000-05:00

I've been busy with the SA2020 community visioning exercise for San Antonio, Texas and we just moved into the part of the process where the community is engaged in developing indicators to measure progress towards reaching their community vision.

Two of the youth participants at the last forum.
The shirts say, "My voice was heard. SA2020"

I received a good comment back from the exercise, and thought I might share the answer I provided with you for your comment and discussion.

I was glad to participate in my third SA2020 event. This time I found that the process was ahead of where it should be. We were instructed to develop measures for determine how visions were being realized. Since visions are not concrete, I found this difficult. There should be a step of designing strategies for bringing visions into reality. These strategies can and should be measured. I love participating in the very worthy SA2020 process. Thank you for considering my opinion.

Here's my response: This is a good comment, and there’s a critically important reason why community indicators need to be used at this point in the process, prior to the development of strategies.

Indicators operationalize the vision statements; they take the abstract notions of community well-being and clarify them with specific measures of the intended/desired outcomes. These outcome measures then serve as a framework within which strategies can be constructed. This allows the strategies to proceed with the end in mind and focus those efforts on important aspects of the quality of life. The measures also allow for an upper-level evaluation of the effectiveness of the strategies in influencing the vision statements.

With the indicators in place, strategies can be developed – and when strategies are developed, they should be accompanied with specific process and performance metrics. The use of measures at this stage of the process does not remove the need for measurements for each of the action steps, which [the commenter] is right to observe. However, we have often seen communities that focus entirely on performance measures for specific strategies to determine whether the action was completed as desired without taking the next step to see if the outcomes of that strategy accomplished the overall purpose of moving the community closer to its desired vision. For example, No Child Left Behind was created with concerns about all students receiving a quality education. One strategy to advance the purpose of quality education was to implement at the state level a set of standardized tests, and additional actions were built around those test outcomes. Because many of the states focused directly on one strategic initiative (standardized testing) and the metrics embedded within it, too often the larger picture (quality education) was forgotten as curricula, school year start times, retention policies, and other initiatives were developed in response to the strategy (instead of focusing on the overall goal).

So [the commenter] is right – we need specific metrics tied to strategies. But we also need, to balance out the picture and keep us focused on why we selected those strategies in the first place, a constellation of measures tied directly to the vision statements themselves. In this fashion, we preserve both accountability and focus.

How would you have answered that question?

Engaging Dialogue about Community Indicators

2010-10-07T14:51:00.001-04:00

We had a great session talking about community indicators at the Community Matters '10 Conference in Denver yesterday. Delia Clark facilitated a panel discussion with Rhonda Phillips, Shanna Ratner, and me as we talked about why community indicators were important and how to use them in creating sustainable community change. While we were talking, highlights of the panel discussion were captured on flipcharts as shown below:

The fun part was that we asked the group for their questions before we started speaking, and filled two flip chart pages with questions. After the short (15 minutes each) presentations we provided, we encouraged the session participants to form small groups and talk with each other about community indicators. They reported out their comments and questions, and we turned the session into open dialogue around indicators. At the end, the panelists each got five minutes to respond to any questions that remained unanswered from the opening list.

All in all, it was a good example of using a civic engagement process to discuss the importance of using community indicators in civic engagement processes. Looking forward to using similar processes in other conference sessions. Special thanks to Delia Clark for the facilitation that made it all happen.

Visioning, Indicators, and Mariachi Bands

2010-10-01T09:21:00.000-04:00

One of the breakout groups for SA2020

I was reflecting this week on the world of community indicators and how widely they're being used now. This past weekend I was in San Antonio to help launch their community visioning effort. A thousand people came together to talk about what challenges the community is facing, what is good about the community that needs to be preserved or maintained, and what the opportunities are for improvement or change in the next 10 years. From that vision, we will draw indicators, set targets, and move into community action. One of the more exciting aspects of the SA2020 process has been the integration of social and online media into the conversation, with live web-streaming of the launch event, over 2200 web-based comments during the live feed, and strong online comment captures, including on the website (SA2020.org), Facebook page, and Twitter feed.

This month also provides the opportunity to celebrate World Statistics Day on 20/10/2010 (that's October 20, 2010, for those of us who put the month first in our dating system.)

Next week I get to join Rhonda Phillips and Shanna Ratner in a discussion of community indicators and measuring progress as part of the CommunityMatters '10 Conference in Denver, Colorado.

And we have just celebrated the 35th anniversary of my organization, JCCI (Jacksonville Community Council Inc.), along with the 25th anniversary of our Quality of Life Progress Report, 10th anniversary of JCCI Forward, and 5th anniversary of our Race Relations Progress Report.

This has been a week to think about how communities can transform through the action of good people working together on a shared concern, and how data, properly used, can bring those people together in a common understanding of the issues at hand. And as our local government (along with many, many others) has struggled with questions of how to prioritize spending in an era of increasing demand and shrinking resources, it's sobering to reflect on where we might be without community indicators to help make the really hard decisions.

I hope to have good notes to share with you from the Community Matters conference (I'll let you know when I know the hashtag for the event -- CM10 is being used right now for the Chicago marathon, which I am not participating in this year.) And keep an eye out on the #SA2020 conversations -- the work is just beginning to create community-defined indicators.

And yes, the SA2020 launch event included both a marching band to welcome people into the facility and a youth mariachi band to serenade them once inside. Tremendous experiences, wonderful energy levels, and an astounding city.

Community Indicators Growing Up

2010-09-15T11:40:00.000-04:00

This January we released our 25th annual edition of our signature community indicators project. We've launched an interactive indicators portal allowing us to update indicators as quickly as the data become available. We also celebrated the fifth anniversary of our annual community indicators report focused on racial and ethnic disparities.

At the same time, we got assistance from a talented graphics designer to transform our model for community change into something hopefully more understandable (and more friendly!) And we began using twitter as a way of communicating news and updates about community indicators, rather than blog posts (you can read the news feeds and the twitter feeds on the right-hand column of this blog.)

This past summer has felt like a summer of transformation in the community indicators world -- a sense that the movement is growing up. You can see what I'm talking about at the new website for the Community Indicators Consortium. You can follow along on the Facebook pages for The State of the USA project. You can see the exciting developments in graphic design, data sharing, mapping technologies, and all of the other amazing tools exploding onto the data-sharing scene.

So as we work with communities now on creating and sustaining community indicators projects today, the conversations are different than they used to be. The concern is not about whether communities need good data to make responsible decisions (of course they do.) The questions are not about where to find good, reliable data (we're choking in it!) The conversations don't even focus as much on how data can be displayed or used effectively (hundreds of excellent examples are a Google search away.)

We're circling around to conversations about community engagement, re-invigorating local democracy, and making public participation in community visioning both meaningful and effective.

We're having conversations about measuring the effectiveness of your community indicators project, and knowing whether or not your community indicators project is making a difference.

Those are, I think, important conversations to have. And with these thoughts, the focus of this blog will shift slightly -- from updating you on community indicators news, conferences, job openings, events, and report releases (you'll get more of that on the Community Indicators Consortium and on Twitter) to conversations and articles about the field.

And I'm interested in your input as well into what we need to be talking about as the movement proceeds.

Thanks for your time and attention and for being a loyal reader of this blog for the past three years!

Call for Proposals: Integrating Community Indicators and Performance Measures

2010-05-20T09:04:00.000-04:00

The Community Indicators Consortium (CIC), as part of a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is seeking proposals to write "Real Stories" of communities, organizations, and/or jurisdictions that have tried, successfully and not so successfully, to integrate community indicators and organizational performance measures.

The Real Stories project is intended to provide real life examples of the advantages and challenges to both community indicator and organizational performance measurement projects as a result of integrating or linking these two types of efforts. The published Real Stories, from 5-20 pages in length, will be used to advance the knowledge of community indicators-organizational performance measures integration and for training and other outreach material to community leaders as a way to improve or inform decision-making and create measurable, positive change in communities.

We are looking for proposals from individuals and groups who are directly involved in these efforts as well as individuals and organizations that work with community indicator and performance measurement projects. A stipend of $2,000 will be awarded for each Real Stories published.Three-to-five Real Stories will be selected for publication in 2010.

The deadline for submitting proposals for the 2010 Call for Real Stories is June 22, 2010. Notification of selected proposals and guidelines for development will be sent on July 15th. The deadline for the written first draft is September 15, 2010.

Visit the CIC web site for more information about the Real Stories project and the call for proposals. You can also download the Real Stories Proposal submittal form for more details, or contact the Project Steering committee at CIPM@communityindicators.net

Sincerely,

Allen Lomax and Cheryle Broom
Integrating Community Indicators and Performance Measures Co-Chairs

Indicators, Civic Engagement, and a Bright Future in Apucarana

2010-05-12T14:34:00.000-04:00

This morning I shared JCCI's 35 years of experience with community engagement, studies, and indicators with a group of business, civic, and political leaders in Apucurana, Brazil. That's located in the state of Parana in the south of Brazil, and is part of the same north Parana region as Londrina.

They're using indicators and community-based studies and civic engagement in tangible ways in the region. I got to meet a number of people representing organizations doing some very good work.

One of the groups that shared their work was the Social Observatory of Maringa. In order for the country as a whole to develop properly, they argued, they really only needed two things: resources, and the correct application of those resources. Unfortunately, according to their data, 32 percent of taxes collected in Brazil are lost to corruption. The people of Maringa organized and took action. Their Social Observatory goes carefully through the local government budget and finances, looking for cost reductions in what is spent, ensuring the money is spent for the public good, and checking to make sure the government received what it paid for. They have saved millions by ensuring that the costs for goods and services paid by the government are in line with the local market, that purchases are made only for what is really needed, and that what is delivered meets contract specifications. In one instance, they made sure every school had a scale they could use to measure the amounts of goods purchased, since some vendors had been significantly shorting the school system. Just by being there, they've increased the sense of risk for would-be defrauders of the government. And by catching problems up front, they save real money, since the government's approach to catching fraud seldom results in full recovery even if there's a conviction. The key to the program is 3,000 volunteer hours a year to create real transparency in government. Pretty amazing stuff.

CODEM Maringa is another civic organization focused on local development. They want to connect government and the community together to work for the common good. They use indicators to measure progress and studies to find solutions to economic development. Their challenge, like many others, is how you define "community" -- participation in these efforts appears restricted to the usual community suspects, and adding new voices to the table is difficult.

We heard from a couple of others, including the Forum Desenvolve Londrina (who intentionally patterned themselves after JCCI seven years ago and is making great progress), and then I shared some case studies around the JCCI Model for Community Improvement.

By the time we headed out for the local churrascaria, we had seen a number of examples that showed us:

1. The future of a community is too important to let happen by chance or at the whims of the few. Community involvement is critical to both design and create/implement your desired future.
2. Community indicators are critical tools for measuring progress, creating shared community priorities, engaging institutions in solutions, and evaluating the results of changes made.
3. Civic-minded people are the same the world over, no matter what language they speak.

Community Indicators in Londrina, Brazil

2010-05-10T17:20:00.000-04:00

I'm spending thisweek in Londrina, Brazil as a follow-up to earlier conversations and visits about effective community indicators. When I return, I'll share something of the dialogue and exciting work happening in this area.

What's really interesting to me is the continued validation of the efficacy of community indicator systems in created desired community change. There's something about the process that transcends culture and geography (though some of the discussions we've had about different perspectives on community governance and civic engagement in different countries show that location/culture/history does matter in the design/implementation of the indicators system and the model of change built around it.)

As the GAO continues its efforts to document the state of indicators systems in the United States and to support the development of a Key National Indicators system, this message of the universal importance of broadly-available community-informed public data systems for decision-making and action is an important one to recognize.

Anyway, those are the kinds of things I'm thinking about right now. A full report comes later.

GDP v GNH: The Economist Debates

2010-04-28T10:58:00.000-04:00

There's an interesting debate over at The Economist over replacing GDP as a measure of progress with something else, such as a Gross National Happiness index.

You may be interested in watching the debate, seeing the arguments, or voting on the outcome.

Click here for more information.

Gapminder Updates Web Site

2010-04-20T09:22:00.000-04:00

Here's a quick update from Gapminder.org:

We have given Gapminder's web site a major overhaul. In the process we added many new, helpful functions to make it easier to use Gapminder.

The news include better navigation, Hans Rosling's twitter, an easier way to find and download data and a new page especially for teachers.

The biggest improvement is the new Gapminder World. We have made it easier to find interesting stories in the vast amount of data. To use, simply click the “Open graph menu” and choose from the list of stories.

And yes, everything now looks much better!

Gapminder is a non-profit foundation based in Stockholm, Sweden. We are promoting sustainable global development and the achieve- ment of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view.

NAPC Conference, Day Two

2010-04-17T11:29:00.001-04:00

Last night at the NAPC conference we had a nice reception where Irv Katz, from the National Human Services Assembly, addressed us on some of the critical issues they're addressing -- you can see what's on their policy agenda here: National Assembly

After a series of participant introductions this morning (fascinating work being done around the country and Canada by members), the focus turned to where we are now economically. Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute addressed us.

Heidi -- "The Recession is Over -- but over for whom?"

In past recessions, quick bounce-back in employment after the recession -- until the last two recessions. In early 1990s, "jobless recovery" term was coined. In early 2000s, recession ended with a 'job-loss recovery." That's what we're facing now -- jobless (or perhaps job-loss) recovery. So the key benchmark isn't GDP growth but unemployment rate -- now 9.7 nationally, will likely continue to rise through the end of thisyear and will reach its peak then --we're not going to feel like a recovery util next year.

Now we're in the calm after the storm, looking at the damage in the labor market. We've lost over 8 million jobs, but population rising -- so we need to add on the order of 100,000 jobs a month just to keep unemployment stable. Overall, we're really down 11 million jobs (job losses + labor market growth) to get to pre-recession unemployment levels.

Layoffs are now down to pre-recession levels -- that's good. But hiring has not picked up -- that's bad. In fact, the peak of the business cycle in 2007 is still worse than the pre-recession late 1990s -- we hit this current recession in the worst shape with the least cushion of any prior recession (post-Depression).

After recession of the 1990s was over, had year and a half of increasing unemployment before it started to improve. The same thing in the early 2000s. We're seeing the same thing now. (And that's not counting the discouraged workers!)

In fact, when we add in the unemployed, involuntary part-time, and marginally employed workers, we're up to 17 percent underemployment -- up from around 7 in 2000. Largest increase isn't in discouraged workers (which is still a big increase) but in involuntary part-timers. "The huge involuntary part-time is a threat to reducing unemployment." Employers who cut hours, not workers, to cut costs, means that employers can increase production by adding hours, not workers, further delaying any new hiring. And when jobs do pick up, 3 million more people will enter into the labor market if the labor market participation returns to normal -- meaning job growth won't move the dial on unemployment rate for a while.

The overall unemployment rate masks other issues. Men have been harder hit than women in the recession. Racial and ethnic minorities hit harder than whites. People with less education getting hit harder too. Young workers hit much harder -- nearly 20 percent of 16 to 24 unemployed. Older workers, on the other hand, have been slammed on the wealth front (housing value, retirement funds), while younger workers are slammed in the labor market.

In labor market, the chart seems to show that best case scenario is older white college-educated woman -- hardest hit is young black male without high school education.

This summer people leaving school now face the worst labor market in 70 years. (Sucks to be born in the 80's, and not just because of the music and hair!) We're also looking at a 8-10 year swath of long-term unemployment for younger people. Without summer jobs, what are young people going to do with their time? School enrollment going up, but not matching the growth in non-labor market participation. Growth in Nene's -- not enrolled, not employed.

Seeing increased labor market participation among older workers -- because of attack on wealth, people not retiring. Stock market improvement might help unemployment rate.

Long-term unemployment recession -- shattering every record for length of unemployment. We haven't reached the peak of unemployment in the 80s recession, but the length of unemployment is unprecedented. Number of job seekers per job opening is huge -- 5.5 people per job. So extending unemployment insurance doesn't keep people from taking jobs -- there aren't jobs for them to take.

"The worst recession since the Great Depression? Absolutely."

The recession started out super-mild, until Lehman Brothers -- the collapse of the financial market accelerated the recession to unbelievable levels -- at one point losing 700,000 jobs a month. Also twice as many people in the country now since the Great Depression -- principle of large numbers say the impacts in places with the large numbers affected has an exponential effect.

What's in store? We do not have to settle for permanently high unemployment. But the short and medium term are going to be ugly. Recovery will take a long time. To fill the 11 million jobs gap, we would need 1 million new jobs a month to fill it in 1 year. To fill in 5 years, we would need nearly 300,000 jobs a month (every month!) The latest "really good news" had 167,000 new jobs in a month. Projections: 10.1 unemployment averaged this year, 9.5 next year, 8 in 2012, 2013 6.3 percent unemployment -- still worse than the worst year of the early 2000s recession.

Again, communities are facing long-term ugly unemployment and it could take much longer to fill the jobs gap. Projections still based on people behaving the same way they did before the recession -- but people aren't behaving the same way, and not retiring when projected because they can't afford to. And social security is in trouble.

Clear relationship between unemployment rates and family income. Real family middle income has been hammered. The 2000s recovery never got family income back to pre-recession levels, and now with this recession even in 2015 the typical family income will not get back to where it was at the low point of the early 2000s recession, let alone as high as it was in the pre-2000s recession time. There's no upward pressure on wage growth, and won't be for a while.

Overall poverty rate around 15 percent -- not dropping down to turn-of-the century rates by 2015. And for kids it's worse, and for racial and ethnic minorities worse -- about 1/3 black poverty rate now, perhaps down to 24 percent in 2015.

So what should be done? Communities are going to be suffering a lot for at least the next five years -- things will get better over time. National level answer? Heidi says it's more stimulus dollars, and much more. Real, measurable GDP change with the Recovery Act -- estimated 2.5 million more job losses without it, is on track to reach 3-4 million jobs, just wasn't on the right scope of this crisis. Really need something on the scope of $1.5 trillion.

Can we afford it? What about the deficit? 2 time horizons: short-term and long-term. A key way to bring the deficit down is to deficit-spend to create jobs. What has added to the deficit? Increases in the deficit: Bank bailout: $184 billion (TARP) about 15 percent increase in deficit. 15 percent ($181 billion) is stimulus. $841 billion is the recession -- high unemployment, low income, business loss, resulting in fewer taxes paid. So deficit-spend to create taxpayers is the long-term solution to deal with the deficit, according to Heidi Shierholz.

We need to bail out state and local governments. The most job bang for the buck is state fiscal relief. Because states must balance the budget, they have to either raise taxes or cut services, and both of them drain the economy. National stimulus packages would otherwise just fight against "50 Herbert Hoovers" at the state level counterbalancing economic stimulus efforts with economic drains.

"This recession, make no mistake, was the bursting of the housing bubble -- the bursting of an $8 trillion housing bubble is what creates something like this." And the roots of the problems go back through multiple political administrations.

(Then we got talking about the intersection of economics and politics, and folks got really, really depressed. I won't even go there.)

Heidi's presentation will be available at www.communityplanning.org. For those of us at the conference, the presentation challenges us to re-examine what community planning and community-based work looks like. For those who like economic indicators, check out the charts in Heidi's presentation and think about the economic indicators you might be using in your community to monitor these changes -- and how you might best tell the story of the unprecedented impacts of this recession.

ETA: Here's Heidi's presentation: click here

NAPC Conference, Day One: CI-PM Integration

2010-04-17T08:47:00.000-04:00

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!

DataMasher

2010-04-14T15:46:00.000-04:00

I'm having some fun playing with DataMasher.org, a tool that pulls state data sets (many, but not all, from Data.gov) and allows you to throw data sets together to find interesting information and stories.

Take births divided by population and you get a list of the Most Reproductive States (not surprisingly, Utah leads the pack, but Texas and Alaska are right on their heels.) Select Alcohol consumption/Binge Drinkers and multiply that by the Firearm death rate per 100,000 and you have the Boozin' & Shootin' Index -- D.C. edges out Nevada and Alaska (Utah's way at the bottom for this one!)

You can get your results in a map or a table, and you can suggest additional data sets you think might be useful.

Have some fun with the site, and think about how your own community indicators project might benefit from this kind of tool.

Hat tip: DataPoints blog via @Kidsdata

Job Openings: IPUMS

2010-04-13T13:52:00.000-04:00

Dear IPUMS Users,

I am writing to pass on information about job openings at the Minnesota Population Center.

We are recruiting a post-doctoral associate to play an important role in the improvement and expansion of IPUMS-USA data and internal U.S. Census Bureau data files, starting in fall 2010. MPC postdocs are expected to spend 25% of their effort working on their own research agenda, and the associate's access to restricted Census Bureau data will open up exciting research and publication opportunities.

The position announcement is attached and can also be found at our website (http://www.pop.umn.edu/about-mpc/employment-opportunities/research-positions ).

We will be at the upcoming PAA annual meeting (exhibit #204) to answer any questions you might have.

We also have open positions for software developers:

http://www.pop.umn.edu/about-mpc/employment-opportunities/information-technology-positions

Please redistribute this message to any researchers who might be interested.

Sincerely,

Steve Ruggles
Regents Professor
Director, Minnesota Population Center
Principal Investigator, IPUMS Projects
University of Minnesota
--

IPUMS Projects
Minnesota Population Center
University of Minnesota
ipums@pop.umn.edu

New Economic Measures

2010-04-09T14:46:00.000-04:00

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article in its April 8 edition called "New Ways to Read Economy: Experts Scour Oddball Data to Help See Trends Before Official Information Is Available." (The link will be available for non-paid subscribers for 7 days only).

I'm quoted in it, but that's not why you should read the article. The point of the piece is that, in the changing/turbulent/volatile economic times we're in, traditional economic measures might be too slow (or antiquated) to tell us what we need to know. So many of us are turning to new data sources that are quicker, localized, and more responsive.

The article begins:

When the city's top economist needs a rough prediction of sales tax revenues, he watches the number of subway passengers emerging from the Powell Street Station on Saturdays.

Ted Egan, chief economist in the San Francisco Controller's Office, said he could wait six months for California to release the detailed sales-tax data he needs for city revenue projections. But it's quicker to look at passenger tallies from the station closest to the Union Square shopping district, which generates roughly 10% of the city's sales-tax revenue. The Bay Area Rapid Transit District releases the data within three days, he said: "Why should I have to wait?"

Mr. Egan is among a growing number of economists and urban planners who scour for economic clues in unconventional urban data—oddball measures of how people are moving, spending and working.

Broadway ticket sales are a favorite indicator for the chief economist of the New York City Economic Development Corp., Francesco Brindisi. He says they are a good gauge of city tourism.

In Jacksonville, Fla., community planner Ben Warner keeps tabs on calls to the city's 2-1-1 hotline for social services. Since late 2008, he has seen spikes in calls for help with food, housing, utilities payments and suicide prevention. It is "direct, real-time monitoring of the economic and social situation," he said.

I'm a big fan of nontraditional indicators -- they force us to look at our communities through fresh eyes.

If you had been called by the reporter (her name is Cari Tuna, and I found her a delightful professional to work with!), what other examples could you have provided?

Two-Part Webinar on Supplemental Poverty Measure

2010-04-09T09:39:00.000-04:00

The U.S. Census Bureau has announced plans to develop a supplemental poverty measure based on recommendations by the National Academy of Sciences. This modern assessment of deprivation will be released initially in the fall of 2011 and will be used alongside the official poverty measure, developed half a century ago.

The webinar series is co-sponsored by the Brookings Center on Children and Families, the Half-in-Ten Campaign, the New America Foundation, the National League of Cities, and Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity.

Together, the two webinars are designed to provide a thorough review of the supplemental poverty measure. You are strongly encouraged to register for the two webinars. Both webinars are free.

________________________________________

A Supplemental Poverty Measure: What It Will and Won't Do

Learn why a new poverty measure is needed and how the supplemental poverty measure will compare to the official poverty measure. Find out how the poverty threshold for each measure will differ. Hear what role Congress will play.

When: Wednesday, April 14, 2-3 p.m. (ET)

Moderator: Michael Laracy, Annie E. Casey Foundation

Speakers: Arloc Sherman, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Indivar Dutta-Gupta, House Committee on Ways and Means,

Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support

Annette Case, Strategies to Eliminate Poverty, The Seattle Foundation

Register here for A Supplemental Poverty Measure: What It Will and Won't Do: http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5728/p/salsa/event/common/public/?event_KEY=20706 .

________________________________________

Behind the Scenes: Adopting a Supplemental Poverty Measure

Hear from the top about what the Obama Administration's key issues are and how the process will work. Find out why the supplemental poverty measure gets and deserves support across the political spectrum. Learn about state and local efforts to adopt more accurate measures of poverty.

When: Wednesday, April 21, 2-3 p.m. (ET)

Moderator: Clifford Johnson, National League of Cities

Speakers: Rebecca M. Blank, U.S. Department of Commerce

Ron Haskins, Brookings Institution

Mark Levitan, New York City Center for Economic Opportunity

Register here for Behind the Scenes: Adopting a Supplemental Poverty Measure: http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5728/p/salsa/event/common/public/?event_KEY=20707 .

Citizen DAN Proposal Intrigues Me

2010-03-11T11:47:00.000-05:00

There's an interesting proposal up for the Knight News Challenge awards this year. The proposal is for something called "Citizen DAN", with DAN standing for Public Data Appliance and Network.

You can read the proposal here, which includes external links for more information.

Here's a short description of the project:

Citizen DAN is an open source framework to leverage relevant local data for citizen journalists. It is a:

■Appliance for filtering and analyzing data specific to local community indicators

■Means to visualize local data over time or by neighborhood

■Meeting place for the public to upload and share local data and information

■Web data portal that can be individually tailored by any local community

■Node in a global network of communities across which to compare indicators of community well-being.

Good decisions and good journalism require good information. Starting with pre-loaded government data, Citizen DAN provides any citizen the framework to learn and compare local statistics and data with other similar communities. This helps to promote the grist for citizen journalism; it is also a vehicle for discovery and learning across the community.

Citizen DAN comes pre-packaged with all necessary deployment components and documentation, including local data from government sources. It includes facilities for direct upload of additional local data in formats from spreadsheets to standard databases. Many standard converters are included with the basic package.

Citizen DAN may be implemented by local governments or by community advocacy groups. When deployed, using its clear documentation, sponsors may choose whether or what portions of local data are exposed to the broader Citizen DAN network. Data exposed on the network is automatically available to any other network community for comparison and analysis purposes.

This data appliance and network (DAN) is multi-lingual. It will be tested in three cities in Canada and the US, showing its multi-lingual capabilities in English, Spanish and French.

What has me most excited is not just the project itself, but the growth in open-source solutions to data presentation/management for community indicators programs. These should lower the barriers to entry for many communities to establish/maintain a useful indicators set, and help spur increased innovation in both what we measure and how we use what we measure.

As more of these solutions move from the drawing board through testing and implementation, we'll share them here. In the meantime, I applaud the many folks out there doing good work to make my job both easier and more effective.

Community Indicator Projects and Role Challenges

2010-02-11T14:01:00.000-05:00

I had the privilege yesterday of meeting with the people behind the Arizona Indicators Project that we've talked about before. One of the topics that came up in conversation was the difficulty in managing the role relationships among being a trusted data provider, a neutral convener, and an effective advocate for change.

I've been thinking about the topic since I arrived back in Jacksonville (in the remaining moments before I head up to Beaufort, South Carolina to talk to them about their indicators work!) Let me lay out the issues and how we've navigated them, mostly successfully, in Jacksonville. Then I'd love to hear your comments about different models to manage these potential role conflicts.

First of all, the role of the trusted data provider is paramount (in my opinion) to having a successful community indicators project. People need to have confidence in the information you're providing. If they don't trust the data, or think you're manipulating it in some way to push a particular agenda, you're sunk -- your integrity has to be central to how you're perceived if your data are going to be used.

The second role, that of a neutral convener, stems from our experience in Jacksonville. We existed to bring the community together around key local issues before we began publishing community indicators reports, and so my perception of the functions of an organization are colored by that history and experience. That being said, we don't publish indicators reports just because we like looking at numbers. We do so with an intent to influence decision-making in a positive fashion, to pull people and institutions into doing better things and doing things better because they have good data to inform them. Being the trusted data source creates a good fit with being the trusted convener around the issues identified by the data. This convening function or role is critical to addressing problems that persist despite the best efforts of the current systems.

The indicators report also connects issues across traditional boundaries. A good report highlights the interrelationships among different issue areas or sectors -- how education affects economic development, and how that affects environmental sustainability, and how that affects health, etc. Because we're talking about community indicators with a broad sweep across multiple areas, the indicators organization is often well suited to bring multiple partners and perspectives together to identify solutions to the problems. And because the data are trusted, the organization is in a good position to be trusted to facilitate an even-handed, honest discussion.

The third role, that of being an effective advocate for change, creates difficulties. We do indicators because we want change -- and we know whether or not the change is happening, because that's what we're measuring. Here's where the role conflicts and different organizational models show up. Organizations can passively wait for someone else to do good things to make things happen and improve the indicators -- to the extreme, this is a publish-and-wait approach. These projects tend to spend a lot of time battling for relevancy. On the other extreme, organizations can actively push a change agenda. These organizations have to fight the perception that they are no longer neutral, and fight to maintain perceived integrity behind their data.

Clearly, the model for community improvement centered around the indicators project has to be involved enough to galvanize action for change, yet removed enough to remain a neutral convener and a trusted, independent data source. This turns out to be challenging, but by no means impossible -- what is needed is a level of intentionality and foresight in the approach to community change. The model for community change that your organization develops has to, again in my opinion, wrestle through these issues and identify how the organization is going to address each of these important functions.

In Jacksonville, we've been successful in maintaining both relevance and trust through leveraging the neutral convener role to engage citizens as advocates for change. We give them the information to be better involved in community improvement, and allow them to take the descriptive indicator information and articulate their own prescriptions for improvement. We've seen widespread community debates on the proper course of action around an issue centered on the indicators, where each side in a political debate use our same report to justify their preferred course of action.

And that, I think, is as it should be -- we want to create a community culture of data-informed decision-making processes, and when the debates are data-rich and thoughtful, we're seeing democracy at its best.

What are your thoughts?

It's Census Time!

2010-02-04T11:40:00.002-05:00

The 2010 Census is upon us, and many of us are involved in encouraging people to fill out their Census forms and send them back. At a recent Complete Count Committee meeting here in Jacksonville, a Census worker suggested that participation in the census was a more important civic engagement exercise than voting.

We had a great conversation last year at the National Association of Planning Councils' conference on Census issues, and I'd suggest you look at those speaker presentations for some interesting information. I know that we in the indicators world tend to use census information a lot, and the changes with the ACS sample size and lack of a long form survey pose challenges to data use.

At the same time, a new study has come out challenging the accuracy of the IPUMS data, especially as it relates to people over age 65. When you think about the sheer number of policy decisions that are based on Census information, you quickly see the critical need to get it right in not just the count but in the ways the numbers are statistically modified to protect privacy.

So let me ask: How are you using Census data? ACS data? How are you involved in encouraging people to fill out their Census information? And if you had a wish list, what would you do to improve the census information-gathering and reporting processes?

JCCI Releases 25th Annual Quality of Life Progress Report

2010-01-19T08:13:00.000-05:00

The Jacksonville Community Council Inc. (JCCI) releases its Silver Anniversary edition of the Quality of Life Progress Report. The 2009 report reflects a complete redesign of the 25-year-old report on trends in the quality of life in Jacksonville and Northeast Florida, along with new interactive web-based mapping technology to provide state-wide comparisons of much of the data.

The report assesses the quality of life in Jacksonville through more than one hundred individual indicators that detail trends in nine sections of the community: Achieving Educational Excellence; Growing a Vibrant Economy; Preserving the Natural Environment; Promoting Social Wellbeing & Harmony; Enjoying Arts, Culture & Recreation; Sustaining a Healthy Community; Maintaining a Responsive Government; Moving Around Efficiently; and Keeping the Community Safe.

“For 25 years the JCCI Quality of Life Progress Report has provided vital data about where we are, where we’ve been and where we need to be,” says Jacksonville Mayor John Peyton in the report: “This Silver Anniversary edition continues to guide us as a community.”

The 18-page Summary Report being released Tuesday provides a succinct assessment of our quality of life using two Key Indicators and up to 5 supporting indicators per section. A companion online Reference Document provides greater detail as well as additional indicators.

The third piece being unveiled at the release is JCCI’s Community Snapshot, a new online data display and mapping technology. “I can’t overstate the technological leap we have made with this upgrade,” said JCCI President Chris Arab. “It literally makes data come alive.” With Community Snapshot, JCCI will update indicators as soon as new data is provided. Community policy and resource decision makers will be able to assess progress and make their decisions with the latest information possible.

Newly installed Regional Chamber of Commerce Chair Kelly Madden led the 21-person review committee that rebuilt this year’s report and prioritized the indicators for each section. “We took our work seriously“, said Madden, understanding they were creating a new framework for conveying the story of Jacksonville’s quality of life. Ms. Madden will present the report to Mayor Peyton and the citizens of Jacksonville. Mayor Peyton will also speak at the event.

JCCI’s Quality of Life Report is the longest continuously running community indicators report in the nation. Created in 1985 by community volunteers, it is an internationally recognized standard. JCCI will recognize those 1985 pioneers during this Silver Anniversary event.

The data for the Quality of Life Progress Report is obtained from the records and documents of public and private organizations. An annual opinion survey provides the remaining data.

Read more in this story from The Florida Times-Union.

Seattle Information Technology Indicators Project

2010-01-12T14:24:00.001-05:00

Since this blog tends to attract people who are both technologically savvy (at least savvy enough to read a blog!) and interested in community indicators, I thought you might want to read about this new effort, the Seattle Information Technology Indicators Project.

The Seattle IT department conducted city-wide surveys and focus groups in order to understand how well they're doing in creating a "technologically healthy community." This link provides access to their goals, indicators, and reports they've created to answer the question.

I was leading a training session this morning in my community about our new web-based indicators tool and got into an interesting discussion about future indicator sets -- are we thinking now about the things we will need to measure to understand our community in the face of constant, exponential change in so many aspects of society? I don't have an answer to that question yet -- I'll be mulling it over and would love your inputs -- but what they're doing in Seattle is likely an important step in rethinking community visions and the indicators we need to be measuring.

Hat tip: Jonl via twitter

JCCI Releases 5th Annual Race Relations Progress Report

2010-01-08T09:00:00.001-05:00

The Jacksonville Community Council Inc (JCCI) released its 2009 Race Relations Progress Report during the Martin Luther King Jr. Annual Breakfast on January 8th at the Prime Osborn Convention Center. This is the fifth edition of the annual report that examines progress in addressing racial disparities and improving race relations in Jacksonville.

The 2009 report examines perceptions about race gained by annual survey and hard data that portray the realities of race and racial disparities across the Jacksonville community. Created as the result of JCCI’s 2002 citizen-led study, Beyond the Talk: Improving Race Relations (PDF), the progress report provides historical data spanning as much as 25 years across six areas: Education; Employment and Income; Housing and Neighborhoods; Health; Justice and the Legal System; and Civic Engagement and the Political System.

Jennifer Chapman of Fidelity Investments and Broderick Green of the Chamber’s Cornerstone Regional Development Partnership led the team that reviewed this year’s report and presented their findings at Friday’s Martin Luther King Jr. Annual Breakfast. “Eliminating racial disparities in our community is not only a moral imperative – it’s an economic one,” Chapman and Green stated. Among highlights in the 2009 report is the widening black-white gap in the perception of whether racism is a problem in Jacksonville. This hinders the community’s ability to come together to take action and solve the real problems that exist, according to the JCCI report.

The report reflects mixed signals in the area of education, where graduation rates improved but racial disparities widened. Of great concern were growing racial disparities in the areas of employment and income, fueled by the recession, where black minority populations were hit especially hard. Positive indicators included perceptions of neighborhood safety, heart disease death rates, declining homicide rates, voter turnout, and black felony inmate admissions, although significant racial disparities in several of these areas.

Copies of the report were distributed at the MLK Breakfast and are available in hard copy from the JCCI offices or online at www.jcci.org. For more information contact JCCI at 904-396-3052.

Data Quality Campaign Update

2009-11-24T08:24:00.000-05:00

Here's a press release updating the latest survey results from the Data Quality Campaign. I thought you might be interested and want to get involved on your state level pushing for better data quality.

Each year, the Data Quality Campaign (DQC) surveys all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to assess states’ progress toward implementing the 10 Essential Elements of a high-quality longitudinal data system. In 2005, no states reported having all 10 Elements. This year, 11 states have all 10 Elements (up from six states in 2008). Other signs of progress include:

* 31 states have eight or more Elements.

* Only two states have fewer than five Elements in place.

* All but one state collect student-level enrollment, demographic and program participation data (Element 2) and student-level graduation and dropout data (Element 8).

* All but two states have a unique student identifier that connects student data across key databases and across years (Element 1) and have the ability to match students’ test records from year to year to measure academic growth (Element 3).

ARRA has motivated states to remove barriers to data sharing, and it provides a strategic opportunity to engage a broad range of state stakeholders in a thoughtful dialogue around how data systems should be built, expanded and used to inform decisions to improve both individual and system outcomes.

In January 2010, the DQC will release its first report on the 10 State Actions to ensure the effective use of longitudinal data, which will provide greater detail on how states are changing policies and practices to promote linkages across systems, ensure appropriate access to new data and analysis, and strengthen stakeholder capacity to use the information.

Overview Documents

* 2009 DQC Annual Progress Report

The Annual Progress Report on State Data Systems is a DQC publication that reports on states’ progress in building the 10 Essential Elements in their statewide longitudinal data systems. States are making progress; however, many states lack critical Elements essential for addressing college and career readiness and the impact that teachers have on student achievement (Elements 5, 6 and 7).

* 2009 DQC Annual Survey – Combined State Profiles

All state profiles include the state’s status on the 10 Essential Elements, which key policy questions the state can answer, a national comparison across states, and a preview for the 10 State Actions. This document combines all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico state profiles.

* 2009 DQC Annual Survey State of the States

This presentation was given by Aimee Guidera, Executive Director of the Data Quality Campaign, on November 21, 2009 at the Council of Chief State School Officers’ (CCSS) Annual Policy Forum. The presentation highlights the state of the nation regarding the 10 Essential Elements, describes key ARRA opportunities, acknowledges states progress and encourages work toward the 10 State Actions.

* 2009 DQC Annual Survey Press Release

Every state is on track to have a longitudinal data system that follows student progress from preschool through college by 2011. However, many states still lack key elements that could inform critical policy discussions like college and career readiness and teacher impact, states the report, which was released during the Council of Chief State School Officers’ (CCSSO) Annual Policy Forum on November 21, 2009.

Find individual state profiles and each of the documents listed above here.

PolicyMap Releases New Widget

2009-11-10T17:06:00.000-05:00

Introducing the PolicyMap 'Widget'!

PHILADELPHIA, Nov. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- PolicyMap.com, a national online data warehouse and mapping application, now offers subscribers an exciting new tool: the ability to embed fully interactive maps on their own websites. PolicyMap provides a wealth of neighborhood data through fluid online maps, tables and reports.

This new offering -- The PolicyMap Widget -- is a customizable instance of PolicyMap that displays interactive maps on your website in just a few, simple steps. Like PolicyMap, the widgets can display data at a variety of geographies -- from an address to a block group, zip code or congressional district. PolicyMap widgets are fully interactive -- giving both the visualization of a thematic or heat map and the underlying information for any place you click.

"When Mercy Portfolio Services (MPS) partnered with the City of Chicago to design, implement and report on the City's $55M Neighborhood Stabilization Program, we created a system called Community Central. Integrating Community Central with the PolicyMap widget takes us to a new level of data capacity and presentation," said Bill Goldsmith, President of MPS. "It allows stakeholders to analyze our work more strategically. With our data and PolicyMap's, we track projects and identify trends affecting our communities. PolicyMap's data warehouse and technology is unmatched in today's marketplace."

PolicyMap uses cutting-edge technology to display sophisticated, fast, interactive maps in ordinary Web browsers. "These are not maps that give you driving directions or help you find the nearest cafe," said Maggie McCullough, PolicyMap Director. "But if you want to track unemployment or home sales in communities nationwide, this is where to go. The ability to dynamically render and customize thousands of shaded maps sets this technology apart, making it especially suited to interactive research and data analysis."

To see a widget in action, check out TRF's charter school investments.

Or embed PolicyMap’s first FREE widget: a national map of county unemployment data. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases new monthly unemployment data, your widget automatically updates.

About TRF and PolicyMap

A CNET Web100 award-winning online mapping tool that makes it quick and easy to gather and analyze geocentric information, PolicyMap is a service of The Reinvestment Fund, a not-for-profit leader in the financing of neighborhood revitalization. PolicyMap empowers decision makers with credible market and demographic data in an easy-to-use geographic information system. For information, visit www.policymap.com or call 1-866-923-MAPS.

CONTACT: Margaret Bradley, +1-267-304-5397 margaret.bradley@trfund.com

Londrina, Brazil and Using Community Indicators for Transformation

2009-11-06T08:47:00.000-05:00

Tuesday this week I met with representatives of the Fórum Desenvolve Londrina (roughly the Londrina, Brazil Development Forum). Londrina is a city of about a half-million people in the state of Paraná, Brazil.We had gone down to Paraná a few years ago to help them launch a community indicators project, and they had last come up to Jacksonville to see us in 2006.

They're doing some impressive work. Their Manual de Indicadores de Desenvolvimento Londrina 2008 (PDF) begins with a vision:

“Londrina 2034: uma comunidade ativa e articulada, construindo uma cidade humana, segura e saudável, tecnologicamente avançada, integrada com a região Norte do Paraná e globalmente conectada, com uma economia diversificada e dinâmica promovendo o equilíbrio social, cultural e ambiental.”

(Londrina 2034: an active, connected community, building a humane, safe, healthy, and technologically advanced city, integrated with the entire North Paraná region and connected globally, with a diverse and dynamic economy promoting a social, cultural and environmental balance.)

They use their indicators report to:

– Fomentar as ações comunitárias;
– Estimular a comunidade para melhoria da qualidade de vida;
– Facilitar o direcionamento de atitudes para implantação de projetos;
– Detalhar melhor a situação por área especifica;
– Intensificar a comunicação da comunidade.

Encourage community action;
Stimulate the community to improve the quality of life;
Facilitate change in attitudes towards project implementation;
Provide details of the current situation in specific areas of the community; and
Enhance community communication.

Their indicators reports are accompanied by annual studies. Last year's study was on providing opportunities for all in business development, and a task force is currently working on implementing the principal ten recommendations from that study. The new study is on human mobility -- looking at transportation systems from a broad perspective, including roadways and public transit but also including sidewalks and pedestrian traffic in an overall examination of how people get around in their community.

They've been working hard to align the business, government, and university sectors of their community to create cooperative partnerships and a shared community agenda. They're doing some pretty amazing work, and demonstrating the universality of a community change model structured around community indicators.

If you speak Portuguese, take a look at the work they're doing. Ary Sudan told me that the model is spreading to other cities across Brazil as the country moves through a remarkable transformation into a global power. If you don't speak Portuguese, now would be a good time to learn.

Richmond, Indiana Using Community Indicators for Community Discussion

2009-11-06T08:17:00.000-05:00

Check out this report from the Palladium-Item (which is one of the odder names for a local newspaper I've ever seen) about the RICHMOND INDICATORS: A Community and Economic Benchmark Report (PDF). They're hosting a televised program with interactive internet chat to discuss the implications of the indicators report for competition, struggle, and opportunity in economic development.

The report covers demographics and economic indicators, plus a social capital index, commute sheds, and an innovation index. It's an interesting report out of eastern Indiana and worth a look at what they're doing and how they're trying to engage the public around the report.

Request for Comments: Healthy People Objectives

2009-11-02T17:19:00.000-05:00

Thought you might appreciate this opportunity to give feedback --

Message from Dr. William Thompson regarding the US Department of Health and Human Services' Healthy People objectives:

Dear All,

Every 10 years, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) develops what are called Healthy People objectives. These national objectives are designed to measure important health outcomes that can be monitored over time and can be improved upon based on disease prevention and health promotion. The objectives serve as a planning guide for the nation, states, communities and other stakeholders to improve the public's health. The draft objectives by topic area for Healthy People 2020 have been published online (http://www.healthypeople.gov/hp2020/Objectives/TopicAreas.aspx). Under the heading Quality of Life and Well-Being, there is text describing the current status of this topic area. A set of objectives encompassing the areas of Health-Related Quality of Life and Well-Being have been submitted and are under consideration by the Healthy People program. The proposed objectives are listed below.

We would like to encourage interested stakeholders to provide public comments regarding the scientific data that support the reliability and validity of measuring Health-Related Quality of Life and Well-Being outcomes at the population level as well as propose potential additional objectives.

Feedback from the public, particularly those with expertise in the area, is a very important part of this process and can help with decisions regarding topics to include. The public comments can be made at http://www.healthypeople.gov/hp2020/Comments/default.asp.

Please note that all comments will be needed by December 31st, 2009.

Thanks,

William W. Thompson, PhD

Team Lead, Health-Related Quality of Life National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

E-mail: wct2@cdc.gov

Julie Dawson Weeks, Ph.D.

Chief (acting), Aging and Chronic Disease Studies Branch National Center for Health Statistics US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

E-mail: JWeeks@cdc.gov

Proposed Healthy People 2020 Health-Related Quality of Life and Well-Being Objectives:

Objective 1: Reduce the reported number of physically and mentally unhealthy days among adults in the US population.

1a. Reduce the reported number of physically unhealthy days.

1b. Reduce the reported number of mentally unhealthy days.

Objective 2: Increase the number of adults in the U.S. population who report high levels of health-related quality of life in the physical, mental, and social domains.

2a. Increase the proportion of adults who report high levels of physical health-related quality of life.

2b. Increase the proportion of adults who report high levels of mental health-related quality of life.

2c. Increase the proportion of adults who report high levels of social health-related quality of life.

Objective 3. Increase the percentage of persons in the US population who report physical, mental, and social well-being.

3a. Increase the percentage of adults who report satisfaction with life 3b. Increase the percentage of adults who report feeling positive affect 3c. Increase the percentage of adults who report receiving social and emotional support 3d. Increase the percentage of adults who report 20 or more days of vitality 3e. Increase the percentage of adults who report a sense of autonomy, competence and relatedeness

Objective 4. Reduce the proportion of adults in the U.S. population who report being unable to participate, or who report having difficulty participating, in common activities.

Follow OECD World Form LIVE

2009-10-27T16:25:00.004-04:00

The 3rd OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy will address some crucial questions that today have become more important than ever. This OECD World Forum, focuses on Charting Progress, Building Visions, Improving Life and will attract very high level participants with a mixture of politicians and policy makers, opinion leaders, Nobel laureates, statisticians, academics, journalists and representatives of civil society from all over the world. Please see the Agenda.

Webcast

If you wish to follow this exciting Forum, then view the webcast and chat online from the 3rd OECD World Forum Webcast starting live from Busan, from the 27^th to the 30^th October 2009.

World Forum Twitter Account we will be using Twitter during this event, so please follow us there with your comments and use hashtag #OECDWF when you write about the 3rd OECD World Forum

The 3rd OECD World Forum is organised by the OECD and the Government of Korea (Statistics Korea KOSTAT) in co-operation with the United Nations, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the European Commission and the World Bank, as well as other sponsors and partners.

Forum website: http://www.oecdworldforum2009.org

New U.S. Gross National Happiness Index Implemented!

2009-10-19T08:14:00.004-04:00

We've talked about Bhutan's Gross National Happiness Index before. Now we have a Gross National Happiness Index for the United States, updated on a daily basis, brought to us free ... by Facebook.

Here's how it works:

Every day, millions of people share how they feel with the people who matter the most in their lives through status updates on Facebook. These updates are tiny windows into how people are doing. They're brief, to the point and descriptive of what's going on this week, today or right now. Grouped together, these updates are indicative of how we are collectively feeling. Measuring how well-off, happy or satisfied with life the citizens of a nation are is part of the Gross National Happiness movement. When people in their status updates use more positive words--or fewer negative words--then that day as a whole is counted as happier than usual. (To protect your privacy, no one at Facebook actually reads the status updates in the process of doing this research; instead, our computers do the word counting after all personally identifiable information has been removed.)

The New York Times quotes Adam D. I. Kramer, the creator of the index, as saying: “When people in their status updates use more positive words — or fewer negative words — then that day as a whole is counted as happier than usual.”

Adam explains the methodology for the index in this Facebook blog post. Check it out and see what you think.

(Hat tip: ISQOLS)

Free PPMRN/GASB Webinar

2009-10-15T13:34:00.002-04:00

Share your comments on the Proposed GASB SEA Guidelines

Tues., Oct. 20 12:30-2:30pm (ET)The Public Performance Measurement and Reporting Network (PPMRN) will host a FREE online webinar / audio-conference featuring members of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) team who will answer questions about the Proposed Voluntary Service Efforts and Accomplishments Reporting Guidelines.

PPMRN hopes to encourage wide participation and to provide constructive feedback to GASB on the content of this proposal. Please pass this information along - participants do not have to be PPMRN members.We ask that participants read and be familiar with the entire document prior to the webinar.For more information about this webinar, including a link to the document and instructions on how to register for this free event, please visit the PPMRN website at: http://www.ppmrn.net/resources/articles/5749.

Call for Papers: Housing Data

2009-10-14T14:11:00.001-04:00

From: American Housing Survey (AHS) ListServ <ahs@huduser.org>:

Cityscape is a scholarly journal published three times per year by the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development's Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R). You can read more about it an access past issues at http://www.huduser.org/periodicals/cityscape.html . I am the editor of the Data Shop department, which publishes short (3000 word) articles on the use of data in housing and urban research. Data Shop articles are aimed at researchers in these fields and intended to alert them to new data, novel applications of existing data, and the operational difficulties of data use. The official description of the department runs:

"Data Shop, a department of Cityscape, presents short articles or notes on the uses of data in housing and urban research. Through this department, PD&R introduces readers to new and overlooked data sources and to improved techniques in using well-known data. The emphasis is on sources and methods that analysts can use in their own work. Researchers often run into knotty data problems involving data interpretation or manipulation that must be solved before a project can proceed, but they seldom get to focus in detail on the solutions to such problems."

If you are interested in contributing such a note, please send me an abstract by November 13 in order to be considered for the July 2010 issue. The timeline would be I would notify you of selection by December 1, and I would want a draft by February 1, with a final version by February 19. If you are interested in making a contribution but cannot meet these deadlines, please send me an abstract for possible publication in later issues.

Dav Vandenbroucke
Senior Economist
U.S. Dept. HUD
david.a.vandenbroucke@hud.gov
202-402-5890

(Hat tip: Glenn Brown)

Portraits of Peel

2009-10-14T07:49:00.003-04:00

I first met Srimanta Mahonty some years ago at a CIC Conference and was impressed by the work he'd been doing. He was analyzing a set of quality-of-life factors by population group within Peel, Ontario, Canada, and was demonstrating the inequities and resilience of a range of immigrant populations. His thinking helped me in the growth and development of our own Race Relations Progress Report.

His work has continued. He just sent out this note on his new, updated website:

The Portraits of Peel website provides three types of information:

Portraits of Peel Online Database (Population data from 1996, 2001 and 2006 Census at the Peel Neighbourhood level)
Available On-line at: http://www.portraitsofpeel.ca/pop.php
Target Group Profiles (for example: Seniors, Recent Immigrants, South Asian, Chinese, Blacks and other communities)
Available On-line at: http://www.portraitsofpeel.ca/tgp.php
Peel Statistics from different sources (for example: Region of Peel, Peel Police, Statistics Canada, HRDC, Health Canada, etc.)
Available On-line at: http://www.portraitsofpeel.ca/peelstatistics.php

Please forward this information to your networks as appropriate.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Srimanta Mohanty, Ph.D.
Director of Research & Administration
The Social Planning Council of Peel

Take a moment and check it out!

State Health Data Scorecard

2009-10-12T17:21:00.002-04:00

Here's an interesting site to play with -- it maps out a series of close to 40 health indicators by state in four areas: Access, Prevention & Treatment, Avoidable Hospital Use & Costs, and Healthy Lives. It then adds one more category, Equity, and measures indicators of equity across income, insurance coverage, and race & ethnicity.

So take a look at the Commonwealth Find's State Scorecard 2009 for some interesting indicators, trends, and state rankings. The indicator set is an intriguing one to consider as we think about health indicators on a local level, and the set should make us think a little bit about the federal and state context within which we measure local health indicators.

(Hat tip: kuri)

Call for Chapters: Best Practices in Community QOL Indicators

2009-10-12T14:50:00.002-04:00

Call for Chapters
Special Volume on
Community Quality-of-Life Indicators: Best Practices V
Published by Springer in the new
Best Practices in Quality-of-Life Research Book Series

Volume Focus: This volume will publish best practices of community quality-of-life indicators projects. The first volume was published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2004 (edited by M. Joseph Sirgy, Don Rahtz, and Dong-Jin Lee). The second volume was published by Springer in 2006 (edited by M. Joseph Sirgy, Don Rahtz, and David Swain). The third and fourth volumes were published by Springer (visit www.springer.com and type “Community Quality-of-Life Indicators” in the Search window) and the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (both edited by M. Joseph Sirgy, Rhonda Phillips, and Don Rahtz).

For the fifth volume, we are seeking excellent case studies that can be used by community planners, policy makers and others as good examples or “prototypes” of community quality-of-life indicator projects. Papers dealing with theoretical issues in planning, developing, and using community quality-of-life indicators are not suitable for this volume. Instead, they should be sent for review and possible publication in Social Indicators Research (SIR) or Applied Research in Quality-of-Life (ARQOL). The fifth volume will be published in the new book series, Best Practices in Quality-of-Life Research. The book series editor is Dr. Dave Webb of the University of Western Australia.

Volume Editors: M. Joseph Sirgy (Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, USA), Rhonda Phillips (Arizona State University, USA), and Don Rahtz (College of William and Mary, USA)

Submission Deadline: December 31st, 2009

Submit to: M. Joseph Sirgy, Department of Marketing, Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061-0236, USA. Tel: 540.231.5110. Fax: 540.231.3076. E-mail: sirgy@vt.edu

Submission Guidelines:

The paper should be typed in either Arial or Times Roman, font size 10-12 with a margin of 1 inch on all sides.
The paper should be typed either 1½ or double-spaced.
Paper length should not exceed 30 pages in total including references, tables, and figures.
Reference style: American Psychological Association (APA) style is preferred.
E-mail attachment is the preferred mode of submission. Submit paper electronically to sirgy@vt.edu.
All submissions should be original and not previously published. The submitted paper should not be submitted simultaneously to other publication outlets.

Guidelines for Paper Selection and Final Manuscript Preparation:

Each paper will be subjected to a review by 2-3 referees who are experts in the field.
The editors in consultation with the referees will make the final decision concerning acceptance or rejection.
Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent out by the end of January 2010.
It is very likely that the editors will request changes to the accepted papers based on the reviewers’ suggestions. We will forward a production schedule once all papers are reviewed.

CIC Conference, Part Three: Another Perspective

2009-10-08T09:25:00.003-04:00

Here's a real treat for you. Glenn Brown, of the Children's Board of Hillsborough County, took notes at the Community Indicators Consortium 2009 Conference in Seattle, “Community Indicators as Tools for Social Change: Tracking Change and Increasing Accountability.” He went to different sessions than I did, with some overlap, so his notes provide a new perspective and greater detail on the conference. Thank you, Glenn, for allowing me to share these notes with this blog audience. (If anyone else has notes to share, please let me know!)

Part One of my conference notes is here.
Part Two of my conference notes is here.

Click the link below to read Glenn's conference session notes.

DAY 1 10/1/2009
Opening Plenary
Richard Conlin, City Councilman and President and Co-Founder of Sustainable Seattle
With the growth and development of Seattle rose a consciousness that this progress should be planned – and so rose the organization of Sustainable Seattle – and in so doing, there was a realization that the process requires measures. Early on there was a feeling that there were challenges between what could easily be measured and what they actually wanted to accomplish. After numerous public meetings with thousands of Seattle residents, it was decided that the indicator to be used as a major measure of their overall accomplishment was (and is) “wild salmon returning to spawn.” It is measure that encompasses many elements which touch on the four key values of economics, environment, social justice and community; and it carries a great deal of symbolic value for the residents of Seattle. It is also as challenging a measure as it is important.

This has led to a lot of learning and thinking about the context of measures. He spoke of some examples they have been working on in Seattle. He presented a story about solid waste disposal in Seattle and how this led to efforts toward recycling. He went on to report that the dialogue around this grew and it was concluded that, recycling is not an end unto itself, but a means to reducing waste. In the case of affordable housing in Seattle, he reported that they don’t know if policies are actually accomplishing the goal of affordable housing (something considered to be an end) because the policies don’t have actual measures tied to them. And finally he spoke of Seattle’s efforts to address climate change on the local level. The City adopted the Kyoto protocol (even though the Federal Government has not), and have been able to set policies and measures in place which indicate that they will meet the Kyoto standards sometime in 2010.

There was a question regarding community engagement – he reported that the city charged local communities with developing their own plans and gave them the money to hire local people to carry this process out. All and all, 35 communities were involved and over 20,000 residents participated.

First session:
Integrating Community Indicators and performance measures. The presenters in this session were Allan Lomax (consultant, formerly with the GAO); Cheryle Broom (Auditor for King County, WA); and Karen Hruby (from Truckee Meadows Tomorrow, NV). Presented a matrix in development that is being put together in partnership with the Sloan Foundation which maps out the development of projects in regard to their integration of performance measures and community indicators. The Sloan Foundation with CIC will be publishing “Four Real Stories,” regarding various efforts around the country on an annual basis. Much of the presentation focused upon the development of the matrix, included discussion of it being altered into more of a lattice type structure and the possibility that perhaps a 3rd dimension is needed to capture a better description of these sorts of projects.

Second Session:
Also Integrating Community Indicators and Performance Measures – presenters: Julia Joh Elligers (Senior Analyst, National Association of County & City Health Officials); Erica van Roosmalen (sociologist for the Halton Catholic District School Board); and Rhonda Phillips (professor, Arizona State University).

Julia started and presented the Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships (MAPP) process used by health departments across the country as an effort to improve public health. The method is viewed as a community-wide strategic planning tool and a method for communities to prioritize public health issues as well as identify resources for addressing and taking action upon them. There are six map phases: 1) organizing and developing partnerships; 2) visioning; 3) Four assessments, a. community themes and strengths (community indicators), b. community health status (community indicators), c. local public health system (performance standards and measures), d. forces of change; 4) Identify strategic issues; 5) formulate goals and strategies; 6) Action Cycle. The six phases are iterative. The entire process tends to move from qualitative to quantitative data.

Erica presented on Halton Our Kids Network project (Canada). Project originally began with an assessment of the community building blocks, ranging from parent and caregiver skills and supports, economic security, to health and safety. This included an array of partners in the public, private, and government sectors. The evolution of the network led to the inclusion the Search Institute’s 40 developmental assets with agreement that the information would be collected from all 21 neighborhoods of Halton. They grounded these assets in the ecological model of Bronfrenbrenner and agreed that Results Based Accountability would be the method of choice to show how service integration is critical for collective action. They choose seven population results and four performance results and began to work toward turning the curve. Ultimately the intent is to show how much will be done, how well they did it, and answering the question as to whether or not anyone is better off.

Rhonda has been looking at economic indicators and stressed that traditional economic indicators are not measures of quality as they tend to focus on the measure of consumption: purchase of local goods by individuals; purchase of local goods by government; purchase of local goods by businesses; and purchases of goods by others outside the local area. This is why the current crisis was not anticipated. What is needed are more comprehensive indicators, we need to think outside of growth, and we need to focus better, not bigger, development. Growth as we have known it may not ever return. We need to look beyond economics for understanding quality of life. Looking at consumption, we can look at revitalizing downtowns and neighborhoods (with measures such as retail v.s. green space – Burlington VT has done this in their Legacy Project); for investment, we can look at businesses buying local goods and services as opposed to those outside (this is also a sustainability issue, and again, Burlington VT is an example); for government, this too includes an examination of buying local goods and services v.s. outside goods and service, and can include looking at organizations combining purchasing power (another sustainability issue); and finally, addressing exports, indicators include the type and volume of products outside the home, the market area should be a venue for sustainability (for a good quality of life) wherein companies that practice sustainable business practices should be targeted and supported. Indicators from Burlington include the number of full time workers earning above the livable wage (looking not just at job creation but the quality of the jobs). Housing and jobs ratio as a way to check the sustainability of the workforce; and civic investment should include things like the economic diversity of arts and cultural based businesses and organizations.

During lunch there was a presentation by Dr. Stephen Bezruchka (from the Departments of Health Services and Global Health, School of Public Health, University of Washington), “You Get What You Measure.” He began by speaking about the notion that people focus attention to things they feel are important, and that we as a nation focus on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – up to the second using the stock market – and raised the point that the GDP, a measure of consumption, is not a measure of well-being. If it were, then because continuous growth is desirable, cancer would be considered a good thing. He made the provocative statement that in the big picture, individual behaviors are relatively unimportant (he gave the example of the average life span of a Japanese citizen compared to a US citizen, noting that the Japanese live longer – however, there is far more smoking among Japanese people than US citizens). He stated that it is in the trends that we infer causality and the trends imply that inequity kills. More egalitarian societies have better health. He showed numerous slides comparing various countries to other countries. He concluded that changing the way wealth is shared has the largest impact on health. He also reminded us all that healthcare is different than actual health and made the political statement that government needs to work for people rather than banks.

Session 4 was a session on community engagement and mobilization, with presentations from Tad Long (New Cities Institute), and Mary-Louise Vanderlee (Brock University, Canada) with Sandra Noel (Niagara Region Public Health). Tad presented an Evaluation of the NewCity Project, in Kentucky (ppt. on website, http://www.newcities.org/) . They wanted very specific indicators to measure civic engagement. To engage the community, they set up local initiative committees and charged these groups with collecting the data and being accountable. The importance was the community “moving the needle” not the facilitators. This required less traditional data collection, ranging from going to local soccer games and speaking with parents on the sidelines, to going to farmers’ markets and BBQs. To get the community engaged, they had to engage the community. Also shared Morehead State University website as location for many tools: http://www.kysi.org/ .

Sandra and Mary-Louise presented a project done in Niagara Canada, using service as a catalyst for community mobilization. The process has taken a year longer than anticipated as working groups for the report have ebbed and flowed. They based their engagement model on the work of Peter Block – specifically finding his book, Community Conversations to be most helpful. This strategy entailed identifying a continuum with a core group, a target group and then scale up to the entire community. They used Results Based Accountability to generate their report and are looking forward to bring it back to participants and stakeholders.

The last session of the day was on data visualization. Presentations were given by Scott Gilkeson (from The State of the USA, http://www.stateoftheusa.org/ourwork/website.asp ), Alex Bourden (Graduate Assistant at University of Massachusetts), and John Bartholomew (GeoWise Limited – Instant Atlas, Scotland).

Scott presented on two very useful, free applications for data visualization that can be found on the web: Many Eyes (http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/ ) and Google Docs (http://docs.google.com/templates?hl=en ). In both cases, these applications allow not only for the upload and visualization of data, but also allow the user to copy the code for the visualization thereby enabling the user to transfer the visualization into one’s own web page. Of the two, Many Eyes is more dynamic.

Alex presented on an open source application that under development by the Open Indicators Consortium (http://weblab.cs.uml.edu/ivpr/micoviz/ ) and is funded by the Boston Foundation. It combines tables and graphs with a mapping application. The map also links to Google maps and Wikipedia for more information on any specific area. This software is free for individuals, non-profits, and government agencies.

John presented the commercial application, InstantAtlas ( www.instantatlas.com/cis) . It also creates a data dashboard to go with a map. It comes with ready to use templates that can be customized for use and there is a minimal amount of technical knowledge needed to use the application. Reports are stand-alone web pages so they don’t need to be installed on a server to be used.

DAY 2 10/2/2009
Morning Plenary: If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It: People, Progress and Persuasion. Jon Hall, OECD, Head of the Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies (http://www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/en/index.htm ). He began by speaking about his work on the Stiglitz Report presented in September this year in France. He stated that what we measure reflects and determines our values. Unfortunately, GDP has been the primary measure used – a measure of growth; we should be measuring our welfare. He stated that the world is presently in a “mid-life” crisis – we have stuff, and yet we are not happy. We have to redefine development and progress and the Stiglitz report set out to establish this new definition with the creation of new sets of indicators. This ended up being more complicated than expected as it quickly became clear that the issue of defining what progress means is culturally relative. This leads to questions, what does measuring quality of life mean for policy; how do we turn evidence into change; and how do we do this with meaning as it is progress, not simple outputs? Frameworks take on great importance. He used the example of a study on the happiness of nuns and the impact of whether they were happy or unhappy – the study found that unhappy nuns live an average of 10 years less than happy nuns. www.oecd.org/progress

The next session I attended was titled: The Power of Neighborhood Indicators. Presentations were done by Kathy Pettit (The Urban Institute), Tom Kingsley (The Urban Institute), and Charlotte Kahn (Boston Foundation).

Kathy began the presentation/discussion speaking about the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, founded in 1995 to assemble common indicators from local partners with the intend to allow analysis across sites to draw lessons for nation policy. At that time, this was not a feasible thing to do. Since then there have been advances in the nation’s data, an increase in local partners, and expansions of neighborhood level data holdings.

Charlotte elaborated upon this, speaking of what she felt was once a divide between neighborhood level and community level indicators, feeling that the difference in scale and the issue of causality often used to be an impediment to an integrated framework. Most recently work has been done regarding the topical framework of community indicators and cross cuts, that it now seems that the integration of neighborhood and community indicators are more logical.

Tom pulled this together reporting that the Census Bureau has become a partner with NNIP as it is moving more toward using the American Community Survey and phasing out the decennial census. The Census is working to integrate neighborhood indicators. The challenge of looking at indicators across cities requires some structure as definitions require continuity, and metropolitan context has an influence on how these indicators are defined. All NNIP members can map indicators. This allows for a visualization of trends that allow for policy nuances among areas – teen pregnancy or sub-prime lending can have very different specifics on the neighborhood level that is missed when examined on a broader scale.

The second session of the day was also in the Neighborhood Partners Track, with Linn Gould (from a non-profit called Just Health Action) and Cynthia Updegrave (University of Washington); they presented a service learning project done jointly among Just Health Action, University of Washington and Ritsumeikan University in Japan examining the connection between racism and the environment. The course is from an evolving discipline called Environmental Justice and has its foundations in the work of Robert Bullard. The project brought students followed an industrialized river basin to a community that abuts it and looked at the environmental issues that residents there deal with on a daily basis. They used a version of the E.P.A. toolkit for this process, which moves from qualitative data collection to quantitative data use.

The final session was a round table on the use of social media in indicators projects led by Karen Hruby (Truckee Meadows Tomorrow) and Allen Lomax (consultant, formerly from the GAO). The discussion was based on the questions of how to use new media in indicators projects, and can community indicators improve the use of social media for better communities. Conversations spanned a broad range of issues and ideas: real-time qualitative data; social use vs. professional use; how to integrate performance measures and indicators; making and bridging connections; greater sharing of stories. Rutgers was recommended as a resource with their Public Performance Measurement Reporting Network.

The Conference ended with a discussion of future directions of the CIC and a session on building regional and affiliation networks.

Vehicle CO2 Emissions in Japan

2009-10-07T12:05:00.003-04:00

This is interesting -- it's a map of vehicle CO2 emissions by municipality in Japan.

Here's how they calculate the data:

The CO2 vehicle emissions shown on the map use estimated emissions figures by municipalities nationwide, calculated using an estimation method by NIES based on the Origin-Destination Survey data of 1999 and 2005 road traffic censuses. Clicking on the map for "emissions per person" reveals figures for calculated annual emission volumes from passenger cars, freight vehicles, and the total number of vehicles. The same information is shown for "total emissions."

More information can be found here:

http://www-gis5.nies.go.jp/carco2/co2_main.php (Available in Japanese only)

The National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) official website
http://www.nies.go.jp/index.html

Economic Stress Index

2009-10-06T17:15:00.002-04:00

Take a moment to play with the Economic Stress Index put together by the AP. It measures unemployment rates, foreclosures, and bankruptcy filings and combines them into an index using this formula:

[1 - [(1 - unemployment rate) x (1 - foreclosure rate) x (1 - bankruptcy rate)]] x 100

The data are available for every county in the United States with a nice mouseover function on a color-coded map.

Take a look, and think about (1) how the data might be useful in your local community indicators project and (2) how the visualization might be a nice kind of tool for you to use.

Tom Paper at CIC Conference: Battling For Our Minds

2009-10-05T15:24:00.003-04:00

Here is Tom Paper's presentation to the Community Indicators Consortium conference.

The Decline Of News

View more presentations from tompaper.

For more information about Tom, see his project website at Data 360, which he describes as "a Wiki for data."

CIC Conference 2009, Part Two

2009-10-03T06:00:00.005-04:00

(Part One of my conference notes is here.)

The conference has lived up to my expectations. If you weren't here, you're missing something important.

Friday began with a presentation by Jon Hall, who leads the Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies at OECD. I found this presentation (PDF) online, which is quite similar to the one he gave, so until I can get the actual presentation, this should give you a flavor of what we talked about.

Read more by clicking the link below. NEW: I have now added in my own comments from the last panel session.

Their philosophy is straight-forward: How to measure is a technical issue, and we are developing best practices. What to measure is a political issue. We can advise on how to set up a process that is legitimate and reflects the shared values of a society. But the choice belongs to the society.

Four questions for the 3rd World Forum in Korea:

How is the world progressing?
What do these new paradigms for progress mean for policy makers?
How can evidence promote social change?
What institutions does the world need to take this forward?

A new handbook on measuring progress will be launched at the Korea conference. They are also developing a framework on a Taxonomy for Progress, identifying quality frameworks for indicator sets, and collectingand sharing lessons about successful sets of indicators.

Several themes emerged as they developed the Global Project Framework:

Be clear about your objectives and how you expect to achieve them
Be realistic about what an indicator set can achieve
Never underestimate the importance of the process
Think long-term; be persistent and flexible

The first breakout session of the morning that I attended was on The Power of Neighborhood Indicator Systems. Kathy Pettit and Tom Kingsley from the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership and Charlotte Kahn from the Boston Foundation were the presenters.

Kathy began by describing NNIP's work. She promised that her presentation would be up on the NNIP website shortly -- I'll link to it as soon as it is.

NNIP has 33 partners. Each partner has their own network of partners – so each partner is really a contact point that links local networks together with other local networks. They are also working with LISC and MacArthur on the Sustainable Communities Initiative.

Charlotte spoke about the idea of a shared indicator system. It's been a dream since NNIP began in 1995, but at the time it wasn't feasible. Each of the 32 partners has its own community statistical system – which is different from indicators. This is a new opportunity to think harder about these same sets of measures and have deeper conversations among ourselves and across cities and understand patterns and draw conclusions that will be of great interest to policy makers, especially in context of preparing for the 2010 Census. Have a working topical framework – 10 areas and four cross-cutting topics.

Tom asked, How do we operationalize the system? Chris Walker from Sustainable Communities is helping drive this partnership. Have a draft plan, need to raise funds, goal to combine with 2010 Census. ACS at neighborhood-level is only 5-year averages and won't help us get the information we need to understand how distressed neighborhoods are reacting to the current crisis.

Charlotte pointed out that their are some language/definition barriers between community statistical systems and community indicator systems: indicators are not the same as data variables, but are closely related. Data variables provide information for indicators. For example, the percent of the population receiving TANF assistance is a variable, but it is also data that supports an indicator of family poverty/economic hardship.

Building a shared/common neighborhood-level indicator set across metro areas raises questions. How do you define "neighborhood"? The partnership will likely use census tracts as common framework, but each partner would then define their own neighborhoods. A key component is to have no rankings and no labels for neighborhoods, but instead to use the data to tell good stories about distressed neighborhoods. The challenge is that administrative data is often deficit-oriented, when sometimes what we need are indicators of neighborhood assets. The Urban Institute has also been sponsoring an effort to create a framework for developing art and culture indicators -- very different kinds of indicators from property-lvel data systems.

A challenge is to develop a robust set of national data policies that address the timeliness, accessibility, and compaarability of data from very local through national levels. The Annie E. Casey foundations has developed a white paper on data availability for legislative/adminstrative advocacy – for example, great strides in data could be available if we could double the sample size of the American Community Survey. We need a joint NNIP/CIC federal advocacy group, addressing data immediacy, availability, and standardization (for example, high school graduation rates, and data availability by student residence instead of school attended.)

I then attended an odd session on Measuring the business value of corporate community initiatives. Jane Coen, from Underwriters Laboratory, Maureen Hart, from Sustainable Measures, and Vesela Veleva, from the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship explained a new project of the Center for Corporate Citizenship. The project is completed and will be launched in March or April 2010. The Center has been around for 25 years, and works with companies (350 right now, including 50% of the Fortune 100 companies) and they provide corporate seminars, executive education training, and whatnot for them.

They wanted to develop a practical framework, guidelines, and tools to assist companies in measuring the business value of Community Involvement initiatives. The purpose is to be able to show the business impact of involvement (why it pays to support community causes through employee volunteer time or corporate sponsorship), even in tough times.

Right now companies are measuring inputs and outputs, and not the impacts. Many companies measure “employee involvement” in CI programs but not actual “employee engagement” (there is confusion about what that means).

Why participants want to measure business impact:

facilitates benchmarking
enhances CI decision-making
demonstrates CI's ROI
helps gain support and funding or CI initiatives
helps integrate CI strategy with core business strategy
shows CI's contribution to strategic business objective achievement
increases power of CI communications-internally and externally
shows correlation between well aligned CI investments and
reputation/standing within the community
name and brand recognition
employee engagement (recruitment, retention, satisfaction, productivity)
customer loyalty

Why companies aren't measuring business impact:

lack of valid and credible tools
measuring outputs not impact
need guidance on measuring impact

A survey of studies on the business case shows general support for the belief that CI adds value to the firm by enhancing:

the corporate license or freedom to operate
customer relations and attraction/marketing
human resources
innovation in market and product development
reputational capital
financial performance
social investments

“It has been very difficult to establish a clear causal relationship between CI and business benefits, and it is challenging to set a dollar value for the intangible assets that CI often creates.”

Draft framework:

Growth/Return on capital: new markets, innovation/new products/services, new consumers/customers
External relations/reputations: corporate reputation, differentiation/customer loyalty, license to operate, investor interest/confidence/stock performance
Workforce capacity: productivity, morale, job satisfaction, retention, recruitment,teamwork, managerial/leadership skills/employee development

For more information, see:

www.bcccc.net/index.cfm?pageId=2025#impact

www.bcccc.net

Questions from the audience included: GRI has 79 performance measurements, but this one will only look at business impact of CI initiatives. At this point not looking at the environment. Easier to measure business impact of environmental initiatives.

How are you recommending that businesses identify their CI initiatives? Are you building into the framework guidance on how to select programs that are strategic to corporate mission? (No, companies will choose their initiatives on their own.)

What is the real connection between community indicator projects in trying to improve the community and what the other actors (in this case, the companies operating within the communities) are trying to do in getting involved in the community? (For this project, not a whole lot, except to show that Measuring Things is Hard. The framework they're developing will not result in increased data for community indicators projects or increased corporate support for community indicators projects, but it will help companies see how much money they make off of community involvement activities as stealth marketing and reputation-enhancement exercises. I told you the session felt a little odd. Somebody else who was there help me out with the conclusions I was drawing -- what did I miss?)

Andrea Whitsett, from Arizona State University, moderated a session on measuring the impact of indicator systems. On the panel were Jon Hall, from OECD; Viki Sonntag, from Sustainable Seattle; Dan Duncan, from United Way in Tuscon and Southern Arizona; and Ben Warner (that's me!), from the Jacksonville Community Council Inc. (JCCI). Because these are my notes, I didn't speak and write at the same time, so my comments are missing. I will fill them in shortly when I think of witty things I should have said. ETA: Added my notes in now of what I meant to say. I didn't add the stories in -- that will have to wait for a different opportunity.

Andrea began by explaining her work at the Arizona Indicators Project, which began in 2007, from the office of the president of the university. Because the project grew so quickly and so organically, there weren't a lot of things in place to measure the impact of the indicators project.

The panelists identified themselves, then Andrea asked us all to define how we measured impact.

Dan: The national organization set national goals around education, income, and health, and put out the call to local organizations to align with these goals and to see how we could work together collectively. We began a process to re-engineer our impacts using the results-based accountability model and focus on turning the curves. We brought together a large committee, trained them in results-based accountability and asset-based community development, and charged them to be purposeful in identifying what citizens could do, what citizens could do with help, and what only institutions could do. We identified key trends we wanted to work on, including the high school graduation rate and early learning as measured by third-grade learning scores. Around income, we're looking at having more families having more than 200% of the poverty level. Around health, we have a lot of seniors, and we want to keep them healthy and independent, and are measuring nursing home population growth compared to the growth in the overall population.

Viki started from a historical context and the expected impacts they wanted to see. Sustainable Seattle was one of the early citizen groups who wanted to develop community indicators. Our intent was to engage a cross-section of the community in determining the indicators. A result we expectedwas increased citizen involvement in understanding and using the indicattors, and increased responsibility in institutions and policy makers in addressing the indicators we had identified. The assumptions of what indicators could do led to a change in the organization – indicators themselves don't drive change, so we instead began doing neighborhood-level work. Measures of success was how engaged the community was in that process and what actions they took as a result of being involved. We are also interested in data democracy, which means we may be looking at capacity building in obtaining and using information. Our focus is very grass-roots, very community-based social change efforts. How we arrive at that is probably in a discussion with the community to discover if what we provide is serving the community – it's more of an informal process right now.

Jon explained that the global project began because there was a great deal of work occurring but no one to take the lead and support the effort. We're looking at working with leadership and policy makers, and of growing a network of networks. Trying to change how democracies work and change how decisions are made so that people talk about the evidence.

Ben: We measure impact of our indicators by first identifying what we intend their impact to be, based on our model of community change.

1. Indicators serve to measure how well the community is progressing in relation to a shared/articulated community vision, and provide the knowledge necessary to forge shared community priorities, inform planning process and strategic actions, and create data-driven decision-making. In order to measure their impact, we need to measure their explicit use in institutionalized priority-setting and decision-making, their implicit use in the same arenas, their function is shifting community conversations and setting a community agenda (through both media mentions and public reference to the indicators in community settings), their use in activities (actions taken or legislation passed) to implement those decisions, and the building of cross-sectoral collaborative partnerships to address the priorities identified in the indicators. In short, we measure (through an annual self-evaluation report) the effectiveness of the indicators in identifying needs and how often they are used in the community in determining how to address those needs. This also includes a survey of our identified key decision-makers in the usefulness of the indicators and an opportunity for them to share with us how they used the information and their suggestions for improving how we report the indicators to better meet their needs.

2. The same indicators are also used to measure the effectiveness of the decisions made and actions taken. The indicators are a key assessment tool to see if conditions have changed, whether the trend line is bending, whether the programs/projects/legislation/activities/allocation processes have addressed the underlying concerns that drove the community priority-setting in the first place. In other words, if your indicators project is effective in your community, the trend lines should show improvement.

Andrea then asked, once you identify the impact you want to have, how do you measure (quantitatively and qualitatively) the impacts of your indicators.

Dan: For the United Way, the five indicators drive all of our activities. Those are large issues, but they are also the indicators that can bring the community together. That's why we are developing performance measures around the strategies we use to affect the community indicators. They allow us to ask, “Are we doing things right, and are we doing the right things?”

We have an online system to track those performance measures and track them on a quarterly basis. Tis helps us bring people around the table to track these issues
and refocus our efforts where necessary.

Viki: Our impacts have pretty much been indirect effects and indirect impacts. The performance measure efforts were an uptake and an outgrowth of the community indicators process. Because we're relatively new, we're working on developing the quality of our systems internally. On the participatory side, one measure of our impact is to look at whether our participation is representative of the larger community. This way we can measure our participatory processes and their impacts.

Jon: Evidence-base policy doesn't exist, at best it's evidence-influenced. Hard to quantify even the influence of GDP on policy. The process and conversation may be more important than the indicators themselves. The hardest distance is the last two inches from people's eyes to their brain. In Australia when we first put these progress measures out I asked the policy makers why they wanted the information. Having these sets of measures is helpful to focus on the things that matter. They can help shape the debate and influence things in that way.

Andrea: To whom are you accountable?

Ben: First and foremost, we're accountable to ourselves. Our continued existence and role in the community is entirely dependent on our integrity and honesty -- integrity can only be sold once. We have a rigorous Credo we test ourselves against to ensure all of our actions are ethical. We are accountable to the community we serve. They expect us to be a neutral, trusted community convener and we need to honor that expectation by providing quality information that responds to their values and visions for the community and needs. We need to be able to serve as the conduit for the voices and stories of people who don't have other ways to be heard. We are accountable to our funders to ensure that we follow through with what we promise to deliver. By maintaining the community's trust, we can ensure our relevance and effectiveness in helping create community change.

Dan: We used to be just accountable to our donors every year. Now with the initiatives we're doing, we're not just the data arm but the organizing table around these issues, and we're accountable to the people that we're trying to help. The key is to keep the focus on the broader issue and create the civic and political will to make the hard choices for the greater good.

Viki: Accountability to the community at large. But what they are holding us accountable to is whether the information has meaning to them and whether it has relevance. This was demonstrated to us when we were working at the neighborhood level and the information we were providing was valid and reliable but it wasn't meaningful to them, and so they disengaged with us. The good news is that the neighborhoods have connected together to develop new partnerships. The challenge we face is to reconnect with them.

Jon: All must be accountable to the community, must be nonpartisan and honest and clear. If you lose the perception of objectivity and appear to be biased, they won't look at the data any more. Newfoundland: before you put the data out, we used to sit and argue over the figures; now we can argue over the issues.

Andrea: How do you demonstrate community impact in order to make a compelling case for funding?

Ben: We use our measurements of effectiveness -- how many people use our work, how often they use the work, in what ways they use the work, etc. In addition, we've compiled a Highlights of Change document that shows over time how critical our work has been in making the community better. For some of our funders, we point to how they use the work to justify its continued funding -- institutionalizing the use of the indicators in their decision-making processes helps support long-term financial support. We point to how others use the indicators to assist them in addressing the same priorities. For others who sponsor our work, we point to how the major community decision-makers use the work, and offer an opportunity for them to put their name on the document in support of that work for the entire community to see.

Dan: We're responsible for the work and the fundraising together. In today's world, donors don't like the middle person, soo we have to talk about the accountability of the United Way system and what we are achieving. To a large part, we're selling aspirations, and we're finding donors and grantors who care about the things we care about. We look for what they care about and try to match their passion and their intent – what the grantor wants and what are their expectations. We now raise more from grants than we do from donors. This comes from owning the issue and owning the results nd being very clear about that.

Viki: In our latest incarnation, we are a data commons. Our primary interest in making sure information is linked to action. The assumption from some of our paartners is that not much action is taking place. We need to interest our partners in understanding that we are bringing the information to inform the action in the community. We see that those people who have a sustainability agenda are interested in sharing their accountability and responsibility and showing how they are contributing to the solutions and successes of the indicators. We're linking that to the indicators themselves on the website.

Jon: We haven't been very successful in raising money because people think we have enough money. Ultimately, this should be funded through government, because this is a public good. We need to point out that if we didn't do this, somebody else would have to, but probably not as well.

Andrea: Tell me about your failures.

Ben: We had early difficulties with our public school system, who saw our indicators as one more assault in a long history of attacks on public education. Naturally, they responded defensively. Data is too often perceived as a weapon until you build joint relationships of trust. Through relationship-building, we helped them see that our intent was not to attack them, but to shift educational issues from being "their problem" to a community problem, which allows for the greater community to take part in the solutions (and to take responsibility for creating success.) This was a much more effective approach.

Jon: We had an initiative around family violence. We saw that the indicators weren't strong enough to make the changes and build the civic/community will around the issue at this time.

Viki: When I think about the trajectory of Sustainable Seattle and the capacity we had developed, we probably didn't have the capacity to sustain a bigger strategic vision. For a while, we lost direction and were in search of that strategic vision.

Jon: Projects tend to fail when they haven't engaged the community from the beginning. You need to build that ownership from the beginning, even if it takes time. Perceptions of bias can be extremely damaging. Because we had built the shared ownership, others could defend us.

You don't want to sensationalize these things, but if you let statisticians write these things they end up really boring. Don't underestimate the difficulty in presenting this information to people.

Andrea: We have had plenty of struggles in getting the Arizona Indicators project off the ground. We tried so hard to be nonpartisan and not interfere and tried to let the numbers speak for themselves. However, the data by themselves were not compelling. People wanted to know both the what and the why, and they need the why in order to hear a call to action.

The closing plenary was facilitated by Adam Luecking. They divided the room into three groups, and asked: What is your vision for CIC in the next 2 years?

Lots of great discussion ensued. I'll let the CIC Board formalize that conversation, but the energy (one person said "vibe") in the room was palpable and positive, which is a great way to end a conference.

CIC Conference 2009, Part One

2009-10-02T07:46:00.007-04:00

We're at the halfway point at the Community Indicators Consortium conference. The discussions we've been having and the quality of the presentations have been pretty good -- they've offered me quite bit to think about. Let me share some high points, with the caveat that I couldn't be in all of the sessions and I've already heard I missed some great ones.

Click the link to read my notes from Wednesday morning through Thursday evening.

The conference really began on Wednesday with a selection of pre-conference workshops. I'd like to thank those who braved a three-hour session with me Wednesday morning to talk about Making a Difference with Indicators: What You Need to Know. The conversation was an expanded follow-up of the June 25 webinar, and I'm going to be collecting the material and the comments into a more formal article soon. The only point I want to emphasize is the importance of intentionality -- what results are you trying to accomplish, who is your audience, what are the expected actions you want that audience to take, how does your design cohere to your explicit theory of change -- and the importance of openness to serendipity. In other words, target your efforts, measure your outcomes, and be prepared/design for expanded uses beyond your core. We'll talk more later.

Wednesday afternoon was a meeting of the Community Indicators-Performance Measures Integration Working Group, which is a diverse group of really smart folks trying to figure out best practices and effective techniques for bringing together two similar ways of using data to measure progress. We'll be making a couple of announcements about the progress of this group at today's sessions of the conference, so I'll wait to report on that. At the conference, a Maturity Model of integration is posted for public comment, and a revised version of that model (incorporating the feedback) should be available shortly after the conference, at which point I'll have something more to share and that we can talk about.

Friday morning's opening plenary was from Richard Conlin, of the Seattle City Council and co-founder of Sustainable Seattle. Take a look at what they're doing -- it's not the same organization that once pushed sustainability onto the national agenda, and the organizational transformation would be a fascinating case study. The cutely-named B-Sustainable initiative is going through a re-launch/marketing push. There's energy and good work happening -- the efforts to reduce waste, not just increase the percentage recycled, is a great example -- and Seattle provides a number of lessons learned for anyone working on environmental sustainability. (Side note: they're also an interesting example of how difficult it is to manage the tension between being the community's trusted data source and being effective advocates for a cause. The trade-offs are real and are worth thinking about in your own organization's strategic planning processes -- where will you shine?)

Then I joined Meriko Kubota and Lidia Kemeny of Vancouver Foundation's Vital Signs in a session entitled Partnering for Progress. I shared JCCI's model for community change, as seen below (click on picture to enlarge):

I also shared how this works in practice, following one indicator through the visioning/measuring/prioritizing/planning/advocacy/evaluation processes to show how the teen birth rate was slashed, going from nearly double the national rate to (based on 2008 preliminary figures) below the national rate. Indicators serve dual functions in a powerful method for creating sustainable community improvement.

Vancouver Foundation's Vital Signs are interesting. Canada's community foundations are doing really interesting work with indicators, and Vancouver's no exception. They're the largest community foundation in Canada. They first produced a Vital Signs report in 2006, and followed that with reports in 2007 and 2008. They're not releasing a 2009 update, but are preparing a 2010 report in conjunction with the Olympics.

There are 12 key areas measured in the report, and that framework is worth a look. I especially like the categories of "Belonging and Leadership" and "Getting Started". In 2008, the report focused on the differences between community perceptions and reality, illustrating the sections with fuzzy pictures (perceptions) and then with the pictures in focus (reality). The report tried to distinguish between what was happening and what people thought was happening in Vancouver.

These three survey questions are fascinating. Vital Signs asked:

What is the single most important issue you would like to see addressed to improve the overall quality of life in metro Vancouver?
Give an example of a specific event, action, or other thing that has improved the quality of life in metro Vancouver over the past 12 months?
Over the last 12 months, what actions, if any, have you taken in your own life to make a positive difference in your community?

For question 2, 55 percent of respondents couldn't think of anything. For question 3, 26 percent of respondents couldn't name something they had done. Full results are here.

The report was provided as an insert in the local newspaper, and was translated into Chinese and inserted into three Chinese newspapers.

The report has changed over time. They use an online poll for “citizen graders” – and had 1070 responses in 2008, three times that of 2006. These "graders" assign letter grades to each section, which creates some controversy and pushback within the community (political leaders like to point out that Vancouver is consistently ranked as one of the top cities to live in the world, and yet the graders give it a C+.) They also conduct a more scientific sampling of the population through a telephone poll – with 854 responses in 2008.

The other major change was the geographical shift in 2007 from the city of Vancouver to Metro Vancouver, giving the report a more regional focus.

Take a look also at Youth Vital Signs, a community indicators report designed and developed by youth to reflect their perspectives and ideas about what's important and what's happening in metro Vancouver. That report also built on new uses of technology -- one input came through text messages, where a message was sent out and returned 3000 responses in one day.

The next session I attended was How Creative Partnerships Improve Indicators, with Sandra McBrayer and Paula Ingrum from The Children's Initiative in San Diego.

Sandra McBrayer began by discussing the origins of the Children's Initiative, which was born because foundations needed to figure out why their money didn't matter. They provided resources, but the underlying problems didn't seem to be improving. So they decided to bring all the stakeholders together to be part of the process of improving the lives of children, helping them all gain ownership of the problems and encouraging them to meet together often. The county had been doing a San Diego report card for years (since 1999) but it was a data document only – when you opened it up, you saw numbers and graphs but you didn't know what the report was telling you.

So they looked at report cards across the country, trying to figure out what are the best examples of report cards and why are they the best. If we called the top agencies in a community and asked them about the report card and they didn't know what it was then that report card wasn't a model we wanted to follow. Quality report cards shared several characteristics:

They raise community awareness
Community partnerships are key to sustainability
Multiple funding streams are necessary
They link what is learned to a process for change

They transferred the responsibility for the report card from the county health department to the Children's Initiative. Building partnerships is critical – not about blame, but shared responsibility. Created a Leadership and Scientific Committees-- calling it “Leadership” made it special. Scientific Committee consists of epidemiologists and biostatisticians. They used the Results Based Accountability model to select the indicators.

So look at the 2007 San Diego County Report Card on Children and Families(PDF). Each indicator includes the following – why is it important, what are the national best practices, do we have that in San Diego, if not who are the partnerships who share the responsibility to make it happen. They rethought the indicators by asking:

What is this data telling us? Do we understand it and does it make us want to do anything?

What is the area of real concern? What do we really want to know?

Is the data we want available? Where do we get it or how do we make it?

Then they put on the dashboard things they didn't have but wanted to develop the data. Some of the keys they shared for their success:

The personal touch matters in building partnerships. They provided food at their meetings, hand-written thank you note for providing data, $5 gift cards to Starbucks.
Focus on making change. "If you look at an indicator and can't tell what you're supposed to do about it, it's not a good indicator."
Get the right data to focus on prevention. They looked at youth involved in alcohol-related traffic crashes. They mapped the crashes – and busted the community myth that it was simply a border/Tijuana issue. They built partnerships and relationships to be able to use DMV data to find out where the kids lived and could then focus in on who's drinking and driving. It wasn't the military -- another flawed perception. They were able to show that it was mostly white, middle-class kids in certain rural areas. They developed partnerships, including insurance companies, driver's ed instructors, schools, law enforcement, etc. Could now focus on targeting prevention activities to those kids who were most at risk.
If the data you need doesn't exist, work to create that data. They brought a focus group together around domestic violence, and asked: What do you want to know? It wasn't the rate of domestic violence reports filed; they needed to know what children were exposed to domestic violence. Created new DV supplemental form, shared as common form among all police agencies. Missed a step – brought together police chiefs, but not the data analysts as part of the partnerships. So forms collected, but not always inputted. Now we know to build partnerships with the data side as well. If you don't forge the relationship with the people who do the work with the data, you stuff becomes the bottom of the pile – and no one ever gets to the bottom of the pile.
Use research to determine most relevant data. School districts were touting Average Daily Attendance as a measure of student attendance -- and by this measure, they were doing well, with ADAs around 95%. However, studies showed that missing 10% of school in secondary school (18 days!) and 5% in primary (9 days) has serious academic consequences. Now they track data, by school, grade, district. (They have 42 school districts in their county!) The data showed serious problems -- as well as some places where they were doing it right and could learn from those efforts. Then Hedy Chang and MariaJose Romero in Center for Children in Poverty released their report Present, Engaged and Accounted For. (Hedy Chang was sitting near me, which was cool to have an author's work cited and have them in attendance.) The report promotes using this threshold to measure attendance.
Never use data to sensationalize an issue. The level of data (school-specific) is internally owned. If media sensationalize an issue, it causes partners to walk away from the data. No scores on report cards – it would turn them off. We want to be better, not place blame, so we intentionally did not do that.

They closed by adding these thoughts: Right now, all of our work is based on data. How many kids does this effect, and who should be leading this effort. We have a priority list – criteria which all new projects must meet. Our role is a critical one in the community -- we don't do direct service, but we change the life of kids.

That gets us to lunchtime. Lunchtime on Thursday at the Community Indicators Consortium conference had a keynote speaker - Stephen Bezruchka, from the Departments of Health Services and Global Health, School of Public Health, at the University of Washington. He spoke about the kinds of indicators we should be measuring to reshape U.S. policy towards health, especially in terms of improving American life expectancy. I found this interview and transcript online where he covers many of the same points he did at lunch, so this should compensate for my inability to eat and take notes simultaneously.

After lunch, I heard Tad Long from NewCity Morehead speak on measuring civic engagement (I already pointed to his presentation online, so I won't add much here.) Following the same theme of Community Engagement and Mobilization, Sandra Noel and Mary-Louise Vanderlee from Niagara spoke of how they used the children's rights framework to engage their community around measurement and action. They will be releasing their work to coincide with National Child Day on November 20, so I'll hold off on describing more about the project until I can share the results.

The last session on Thursday that I attended focused on New Tools for Data Visualization. Scott Gilkeson, from State of the USA, presented on Data Visualization Fast and Cheap. His goal is to show ways to put information and data up on the web. Many Eyes, from IBM, is a few years old. You can upload data to the web and then visualize it in one of 18 data visualization opportunities. Then you can copy the code to your webpage and show the visualization there. Let's say you have downloaded data from the Center for Medical Statistics website on national health expenditures. The data has to be configured in an Excel spreadsheet to match many-eyes conventions. Then you can log in to Many Eyes (registration is required, but it's free) and paste in the data. The site will show you that it understands the data you have entered, and prompts you to enter in the title, source, tags, description, and other information about the data. Select the data visualization type and the graph appears. You can then grab the embed code and put it on your own site or blog. All of the interactivity is available on your site.

Google has also made available data visualization tools. Uploading your information into Google docs, and again arranging the spreadsheet according to Google conventions, you can insert a Gadget. This allows you to choose a chart type. After formatting the chart the way you want it, you can publish the gadget, and it will give you code that you can publish online. Again, registration is required, and it's free. This process is limited because the metadata information doesn't automatically move with the graph.

However, you can use Google's API to create your own customized code. Scott said that they've just finished an open source product based on Google gadgets that would allow you to create a full metachart. He'll be putting the information together in a clearer fashion and making the code available shortly for all Google docs/gadgets users. (It should be at the Google Code projects page shortly,under "metacharts" --I'll link directly when it's available.)

Alex Baumann from University of Massachusetts-Lowell spoke next about An Open Source Resource for Data and Indicators. Seven founding members, complex entities, came together in an Open Indicators Consortium. We wanted to get high performance/large dataset visualization tools available for people to use.

This is an agile development process – updates released regularly to members, and many will be releasing their results next week. Want to make this a good, robust open source product free for nonprofits.

Second year they'll add personalization, collaborative visual tools, integrated voicechat, flexible configuration, controlled/secure data access, and ontology/middleware to allow comparisons between OIC member and National Data Commons sites.

What followed was a series of demos, which were fun but describing them is hard so I won't. It was good stuff. It's a work in progress – will be in three levels, novice, middle, advanced, right now working on advanced and then will create novice-level later with fewer features. The product features multiple layers, different shape files, animated probing. You can click on data outliers and see it on google maps, wikipedia, etc. Mouseover and get the data and name. Right-click and you can search for data in google. Data is downloaded on demand -- they want to be able to scale to very large data sets/detailed geography. Tools right now can be embedded in a website, and are working on being able to embed a specific exploration onto a page.

Question: Will you build api's to connect to the data sources? Right now data stored in databases so you can do complex queries and scale the data-- have to load data in and tag it with metadata. Have to be able to link your data to a geography. It uses compressed shapefiles – stream in detail as you zoom in.

John Bartholomew, from GeoWise, presented on InstantAtlas: Interactive Indicator Presentation in Maps, Charts, and Tables for the Web. He began by showing some of the kinds of ways people are using interactive mapping as part of their data display/sharing efforts, and then went to demos.

Business case: more powerful open source and commerical graphic and mapping tools to help engage commitment to priority community issues. Mapping and data can sensitize policy makers to priority needs and empower local communities over local issues.

Challenge: scarce skilled resources in the public sector. Data in government is presented primarily in static formats. Restrictive Itpolicies present hurdlesto adopt new reporting media.

Samples of interactive mapping. Want to provoke discussion, not a sales pitch. Sometimes single platform is best, sometimes combination is better.

Healthmap – implementation on google map background. Easy to see, hard to quantify data.
Rhiza labs – H1N1 tracking – user-contributed data then mapped.

Heat maps – pioneered in Scandinavia – hard to allocate resources on blurred contours. Make sure visualization serves intended purpose.

Statistical relationships between indicators – how do you do it? Circles on colored backgrounds is the way we used to do it-- is it always the best?

With microsoft comes powerful flex api implementations, but require skilled developers.

WHO – using multiple tools/platforms to get information to help countries withoutsophisticated technical resources?

Good practices for mapping include:

Ease for audience to grasp
Intuitive interactivity
Audience-appropriate
Design focused on promoting valid, evidenced-based conclusions

(Those four points are critical. My two cents: DON'T FORGET WHO YOUR AUDIENCE IS! We go overboard sometimes creating stuff that intimidates and confuses rather than invites and informs.)

He went to demos, which are available on their website. One demo I would like you to check out is this one: JCCI (click on Community Snapshot to see more). That's the site I just launched last week using InstantAtlas technology.

After that session was a social/reception, then we wandered off for sushi and more conversation. All in all, a really good beginning to the conference.

Mad Props to Tad Long!

2009-10-01T17:27:00.003-04:00

I'm at the 2009 Community Indicators Consortium Conference in Bellevue, Washington. I'll be sharing my notes on the sessions shortly.

But I had to applaud Tad Long from NewCity Morehead for concluding his presentation by going to his website and showing how his presentation, report, and template were online and waiting for us, collected on a page for conference attendees.

Two quick thoughts from his presentation:

measuring results has to go beyond usual ways we measure
engaging citizens needs to go beyond the traditional ways we have brought people together

www.newcities.org

I'm going to be spending more time comparing their community engagement scorecard with the Indicators of Civic Health project we did with the National Civic League back in 2002. I like how many of the same themes have been develloped further.

Way to represent!

Defending GDP: WSJ Opinion

2009-09-29T12:21:00.002-04:00

On the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal Online, Brian Domitrovic poses a novel defense of GDP as a measure of national progress: President Sarkozy only wants to change the measure because he's "losing."

The argument goes something like this: The U.S. has high GDP. France once was on par with the U.S. France didn't follow Reagan and Thatcher in 1982 deregulation. So Frane's only interest in challenging GDP as a measure is to "move the goalposts" and develop a different measure of progress that shows them as competitive.

At no point in this article does Domitrovic display any hints that he has read the report of the Stiglitz commission (at one point, he suggests a measure of leisure time ought to be included in the report, because he says France is good at that. In the U.S., we work so much because we want to, and would spurn additional vacationif offered.)

We've talked about the flaws of GDP for some time now, and the need to measure progress more broadly. I don't think we need to re-hash those discussions. But you might want to see this op-ed piece just to remind yourself that change alwwys meets with resistance, even if that resistance involved merely sticking one's fingers in one's ears and extending the tongue in gratuitous French-bashing.

Graphs That Work

2009-09-29T08:03:00.003-04:00

We've talked about how to select the right graph/data visualization before, and we've talked about the importance of storytelling with graphs. Seth Godin now gives us a few rules for creating graphs that work, and they're worth considering.

The good folks at Junk Charts have commented on Godin's rules -- you may enjoy their perspective. (The rules are mostly good, they say.) And Andrew Gelman is the one that brought Godin's rules to their attention -- the comments on Gelman's blog make sense.

Summarizing the rules and discussion and adding a couple thoughts of my own:

Rule 1. Don't let popular spreadsheets be in charge of the way you look

His argument: the default settings in Microsoft Excel and Powerpoint tend to dominate presentations, and that gets boring. The counter-argument: default standards can be good, like reading from left to right or publishing books using a standard font and font size. My thought: If you're telling a story, don't let the blandness of default settings interfere with the message (especially when the defaults in Excel are pretty awful), but don't let creativity run amuck and make it too hard to see the story behind the strange graphics. Be compelling, and use the style necessary to make your point clear.

Rule 2. Tell a story

Godin says:

There are only four reasons I can imagine you would want to show someone a graph (not a chart, or an infogram or a diagram, but a graph of numbers):

Things are going great, look!
Things are a disaster, help!
Nothing much is happening.
We need to work together to figure out what the data means.

We've been pounding the data-as-storytelling thought a lot here -- that's why we do community indicators. Godin suggests discarding graphs that fit category 3 as pointless and 4 as a work session and not a presentation. However, "nothing much is happening" is a compelling story, especially after significant community effort/resources are poured into a problem. Failure to bend the trend line is sometimes the most important story we tell -- what we're doing isn't working, and we need to try something else.

Rule 3. Follow some simple rules

This is where he says to use known conventions -- time on the x-axis, increasing left to right. He suggests that the data/y-axis be structured so that upward-moving trend lines are good. We tried that, once upon a time. Graphing the "employment rate" rather than the unemployment rate was just silly, and meant that viewers couldn't see the story while they were trying to figure out why we were being cute. That said, following patterns in how data are displayed can help the real story line pop out -- the less time trying to decipher the message, the better.

Rule 4. Break some other rules

Somehow, your graph has to be memorable -- the story has to stick. That means mixing things up once in a while. Hard to argue with that.

So what rules would you add? What do you use as your guidelines as you present your information?

Int'l Society of Child Indicators Newsletter Released

2009-09-28T11:45:00.002-04:00

The International Society of Child Indicators has released its Summer 2009 Newsletter. You'll want to take a look at the following:

Their 2nd International Conference scheduled for November 3-5, 2009, at the University of Western Sydney, Australia;
The collected papers from their first 2007 conference;
A nice write-up of Measure DHS (Demographic and Health Surveys), a collection of free data from more than 200 surveys in 75 countries. "The strategic objective of MEASURE DHS is to improve and institutionalize the collection and use of data by host countries for program monitoring and evaluation and for policy development decisions."

You'll also be interested in this announcement:

Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago has published a report on “Improving Indicators of Child Well-Being.” The report makes a number of recommendations on new directions for child well-being indicators, including the areas of early childhood and young adult transitions. It also argues for additional indicators on childcare, poverty, and immigration. The report follows a symposium on child well-being indicators held in December 2008, attended by leading experts from universities, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations. It is available on the Chapin Hall website at http://www.chapinhall.org/research/report/improving-indicators-child-well-being.

Take a look at ISCI. Membership is available.

JCCI Releases New Indicators Website

2009-09-23T09:00:00.000-04:00

I'm excited to announce that we at JCCI have finally launched our own interactive web-based indicators portal!

Come visit our new site at www.jcci.org, click on "Indicators", and you'll see three options for accessing our local/regional indicator sets:

Our Quality of Life Progress Report, begun in 1985 and updated annually since then, in our traditional PDF format;
Our Race Relations Progress Report, which reports on our community's progress in eliminating race-based disparities across six elements of the Quality of Life, a project launched after a 2002 community-based study and informed by a fascinating 1946 precursor report; and
Our new Community Snapshot, which lets you select indicators and see the data displayed simultaneously on a map and time-series trend lines and quintile comparisons and more.

The Community Snapshot is powered by InstantAtlas, which is a pretty neat software package. John Bartholomew from GeoWise, the company that produces the software, will be at the CIC Conference demonstrating what they've put together.

We're just launching our effort, and right now we've only included one mapping template and state/regional/county-level data for our indicators. Phase II of our community indicators reporting will take many of these indicators down to a neighborhood level, and then allow us to do some interesting performance evaluation work with community targets.

In the meantime, here's your chance to take a look and give me some feedback!

American Community Survey Data Release and Update

2009-09-23T08:02:00.002-04:00

UPDATE - U.S. Census Bureau Release of 2008 ACS 1-Year Estimates

The Census Bureau has released social, demographic, housing, and some economic data from the 2008 ACS for areas with populations of 65,000 or more.

On September 29, 2009, the remaining 2008 ACS economic data will be released. The delayed release of these data is due to the discovery of a coding error that affected the estimates of poverty, family income, and food stamp receipt. The Census Bureau released all tables that weren't affected by the coding error. For a list of the impacted tables, please see the revised release schedule http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Products/2008/schedule.html.

Below is a sample of the topics included in the current release:

Educational attainment
Industry
Occupation
Class of worker
Journey to work
Employment status
Work status
Veteran status
Housing
Foreign born
Migration

Information about the 2008 ACS data release can be found at: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Products/index.html.

What's New and Notable

Economic Briefs - The Census Bureau is introducing a series of briefs spotlighting the economic characteristics of the nation, states, District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico using data from the 2008 ACS 1-year estimates.
You can access these briefs at
http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Products/2008/prodchanges.html#New.

Table Shells - New Table Shells are available at our 2008 Data Products Details page http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Products/users_guide/index.htm.

Comparison Guidance - New guidance is available for comparing 2008 ACS 1-year estimates with 2007 ACS 1-year estimates, as well as comparing 2008 ACS 1-year estimates with Census 2000 estimates. This guidance can be found at: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/UseData/compACS2008.htm.

Information on Data for New and Revised Content Beginning in January 2008, three new questions were added to the ACS and 12 questions were revised. In addition, the wording and format of the age, sex, race, Hispanic origin, relationship, and tenure questions were revised to be consistent with the 2010 Census. A summary document on the differences between the 2008 ACS and earlier years can be found at http://www.census.gov/acs/www/AdvMeth/content_test/summary_results.htm.

A Look Ahead

October 27, 2009 - Planned release of 2006-2008 ACS 3-Year estimates.

Fall, 2009 - The Census Bureau has revised the release dates for the 2008 ACS 1-year and 2006-2008 3-year PUMS. We expect to release the 2008 ACS 1-year PUMS by the end of October and release the 2006-2008 3-year PUMS by the end of November or in December. We will issue an ACS Alert when each of these files is ready for release.

Contact Us

If you have questions or comments about the American Community Survey, please call (800) 923-8282 or visit ask.census.gov.

Ola Rosling at Gov 2.0 Summit

2009-09-22T14:07:00.002-04:00

The Gov 2.0 Summit was held September 9-10 in Washington, D.C. Much of what was talked about is highly interesting, especially as we think about new ways for civic engagement, transparency, performance measurement, and the like.

One of the speakers was Ola Rosling, who is Dr. Hans Rosling's son who works at Google. He takes us into the world of GapMinder and some of the new data sets and tools available for us to use, and what some of the take-aways might be from that data visualization. (Favorite quote: "A static image is lying, because the world changes.")

Enjoy!

Update on CSIN Conference

2009-09-22T13:47:00.002-04:00

Just a quick update on the upcoming Canadian Sustainability Indicators Network conference we mentioned before ... there's an updated conference brochure and registration form available on their website.

They also have opportunities to sponsor the conference and an application for conference scholarships available.

The updated materials look very good. To stay in the loop on what the organization is doing, consider joining CSIN -- it's free and you'll get their alerts via their listserve. Plus you can follow them on Twitter -- @CSIN2010.

Introducing Neighborhood Nexus

2009-09-22T11:54:00.005-04:00

Flattery gets you everywhere. I received this nice note from Marcus Estes over at www.opensourcery.com:

The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta just launched a new community indicators project serving the citizens of great Atlanta. It's called Neighborhood Nexus:

http://neighborhoodnexus.org/

I work with OpenSourcery, the web company that developed the technology for them. It involves a few innovations, including a custom spreadsheet
upload tool that allows them to change the indicators they're tracking merely by changing their spreadsheet, without having to rely upon a tech company for more development work.

We've open sourced it, and we're seeking additional partners to help us improve upon the software for use in other areas. Please give Neighborhood Nexus a little much-deserved attention on your (wonderful and informative) blog, and let me know if you see opportunities for us to use this software to help other organizations.

Naturally, I went to the site to explore Neighborhood Nexus. I saw quite a bit I liked.

1. Getting to the data is quick, easy, and intuitive. Select an indicator, then a level of geography, and bam! the table is there for you. Minor quibble: using a tiny yellow font in the headers against a graduated blue background mad them really hard to read, though the result looked pretty. The options on the left to change measures, years, and filter out geographies were simple to use.

2. Learning more about the data involved clicking on a Data Sources button, which had some information, and following that up by clicking on the Glossary button. Even then, I was left with some unanswered questions about just what some of the indicators were measuring, and to get that information I needed to follow the links to the data source providers. I liked that I could find the information. I did, however, remind myself once again that at some point those of us who work with indicators need to get together to devise a core set of metadata standards. Maybe we can have that conversation at the CIC conference in Seattle.

3. Full, interactive maps are coming soon, according to the site. In the meantime, they have some nice maps they've created using some of the indicators on the site. I liked the concept (and execution) of the map of "where Gen-Xers live."

4. They also provide a neighborhood factbook that compiles the indicators by neighborhood into a set of PDF documents.

There's a survey for site users to describe what indicators are missing and how the site might be improved.

Overall, a good site, with more in development. What makes this site something to really pay attention to is that it was built as open source software, and is one of the early efforts to bring open source solutions to the community indicators community. There are other open source efforts underway. We should be paying close attention to this trend to see how it plays out.

OECD World Forum -- Register Now!

2009-09-21T15:21:00.003-04:00

Here's a reminder about the upcoming OECD conference in Busan, Korea. I'm not going to be able to attend (unfortunately!), but I'd love to hear from any of you who will be attending. The conference looks like it will be fantastic.

Register Now!
If you would like to attend, then go and REGISTER now please on this webpage, by following the instructions. You will also find here logistical information including transport and hotels in Busan. We strongly encourage you to register as soon as possible to secure your place. Please note that the special discount rate for accommodation is until 30 September 2009.

Agenda
The 3rd OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy will address some crucial questions that today, in the current economic crisis, have become more important than ever. See the Preliminary Agenda. There are will be over 40 sessions that consider how the world is progressing (and how to measure that progress), what does a focus on wellbeing and progress mean for policy making and how can we improve the ways in which evidence on progress promotes change.

Speakers
Some of the high level speakers include:

Bader Omar Al-Dafa, Under Secretary-General of the UN, Executive Secretary of UN-ESCWA
Fabrizio Barca, Director General, Ministry of Economy and Finance, Italy
Ohm Collins Chabane, Minister in The Presidency, South Africa
Juan Díez-Nicolás, President of ASEP, Spain
Amir Dossal, Executive Director of the UN Office for Partnerships
John Evans, General Secretary of Trade Union Advisory Council to the OECD (TUAC)
Jean-Paul Fitoussi, President of the "Observatoire français des conjonctures économiques"
Arturo González de Aragón, Auditor, General, Superior Audit Office of Mexico, Chairman of the Governing Board of INTOSAI
Angel Gurría, Secretary General of the OECD
Oh-Seok Hyun, President, Korea Development Institute, KDI
Katsuji Imata, Deputy Secretary General of CIVICUS
Jeni Klugman, Director of the UNDP Human Development Report Office
Tae-shin Kwon, Minister, Prime Minister's Office, Korea
Lord Richard Layard, London School of Economics
Yanghee Lee, Chair of the UN Commission on the Rights of the Child
Ahmed Lahlimi Alami, High Commissioner for Planning, Morocco
Denise Lievesley, President of the international Statistical Institute
Antonio Marzano, President, National Economic and Labour Council (CNEL)
Geoff Mulgan, Director of the Young Foundation, UK
Mark Orkin, Director General, South African Management Development Institute, SAMDI
Pier Carlo Padoan, Deputy Secretary-General, OECD
Roger Ricafort, Director, Oxfam Hong Kong
Sergey Stephashin, Chairman of the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation
Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Columbia University, New York
Danilo Türk, President of Slovenia
Anders Wijkman, Vice-President of the Club of Rome
Insill Yi, Commissioner, Statistics Korea

"6 BILLION OTHERS" Yann Arthus-Bertrand launched the project “6 Billion Others”, in 2003, following “The Earth from above“. The concept is simple: go out and meet the 6 billion inhabitants of this planet, listen to their testimonies and share them with others. We are pleased to announce that “6 Billion Others” will be part of the 3rd OECD World Forum and will present a film focused on the question: ”What does progress mean for us?”. The participants in the World Forum will have the opportunity to be interviewed during the event and to offer their views on the same questions.

Canada's Social Indicators Show Poverty Is Greatest Challenge

2009-09-21T10:54:00.004-04:00

The Conference Board of Canada released their report card on social indicators for Canada, and addressing poverty remains the top concern.

The gives letter grades to Canada and 16 other "peer countries" for 17 indicators of Society, divided into three main categories: Self-Sufficiency, Equity, and Social Cohesion. The framework for understanding these indicators, as well as the indicators chosen, is interesting--take a look (click on the image to make it larger):

From their website:

Self-sufficiency is assessed by two indicators that measure the financial autonomy of individuals within the economy and society. For most people, employment participation is probably the most important means of achieving self-sufficiency. Canada’s relatively low unemployment rate implies that our economy is doing a good job at ensuring that people who want to work are able to do so. But the situations of two vulnerable sub-populations—youth and people with disabilities—are often masked by the overall numbers.

Equity has two broad dimensions: equality of outcome and equality of opportunity. Opinions on what is a “fair” or “just” distribution of resources vary widely, and it is difficult to obtain measurable and comparable information on equality of opportunity. One indicator can be seen as a measure of equality of opportunity—intergenerational income mobility. It assesses the likelihood that individuals can break out of the income class into which they are born. The remaining five equity indicators focus on equity of outcomes: elderly poverty, child poverty, working-age poverty, income inequality, and the gender income gap.

Social cohesion is assessed through indicators that:

measure the extent to which people participate in their communities (voter turnout and social isolation)
measure how they feel about their lives and communities (trust in parliament, life satisfaction, and acceptance of diversity)
report on the breakdown of community life (homicides, burglaries, assaults, and suicides)

The Conference Board also releases a separate report card for Economy, Education and Skills, Innovation, Environment, and Health. The framework is interesting, and the indicators are a fascinating set.

When you look at the display layout, the combination of letter grades and colors make it easy to quickly see where the problems are. What's even more interesting is to use their radar chart to look at the indicators against peer averages.

Take a look and see if your country is included in the peer comparisons. When you click on the specific indicator (in the left-hand column), you get more charts, maps of the data, and quite a bit of contextual information and research (footnoted) about the indicator. This setup provides clean, clear messages to a target population -- which is different, perhaps, than some of the target populations served by community indicators projects. However, the report as structured looks very helpful in setting priorities for national policy.

There's a great deal to learn from this report, and I highly encourage you to take the time to prowl through the data and the reasons why these indicators were selected.

"Bending the Curve" Under Attack

2009-09-17T16:31:00.003-04:00

Constrained curmudgeons among us have risen up in opposition to the phrase "bending the curve." William Safire writes in the New York Times that

Came the current recession, the graphic-metaphor crowd stopped worrying about a cost line bending inexorably upward and directed its attention to the need to get the upward-bending unemployment figures bending down. Thus, the meaning of the phrase bending the curve is switching from “bend that awful, upward-curving line down before we can’t afford an aspirin” to “bend that line up down quick, before we all head for the bread line!” This leads to metaphoric confusion. It’s what happens when you fall in love with full-color graphs to explain to the screen-entranced set what’s happening and scorn plain words.

Next we turn to Benjamin Zimmer at Language Log (which is a fascinating place to wander through, especially when one wants to experience the same blank-eyed sensation that too many in our communities have when they ogle our data.) Zimmer says,

The idea that the rise of something undesirable can be altered by "bending the curve" has been around for quite a while.

He cites a number of examples, suggesting that the phrase is not of such recent origin (or due to such nefarious pandering to policy-justification-through-optics-rather-than-words) as denounced by Safire. However, Zimmer's readers shudder at the use of the phrase.

I wonder how they would feel about the casual way I bat about the term "trend-bending"?

BEA Delays Release of Personal Income Data

2009-09-17T16:29:00.001-04:00

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has issued the following announcement today:

State personal income statistics for the second quarter of 2009 and comprehensive revisions to those statistics for earlier periods that had been scheduled for release tomorrow, Friday, September 18, instead will be released on Friday, October 16.

BEA had accelerated the production of the revised state personal income statistics that are consistent with the recently-released comprehensive revision of the GDP statistics, with the aim of releasing those statistics more quickly than in previous comprehensive revisions. Due to discrepancies just discovered in the data, we are unable to meet the accelerated schedule. We apologize for the delay; but the statistics BEA produces must meet our standards for accuracy.

More information available at www.bea.gov.

Job Openings at IPUMS

2009-09-15T17:04:00.001-04:00

Here's a message I needed to pass along. If you haven't used IPUMS before, you might want to check out what they have available.

Dear IPUMS Users,

I am writing to pass on information about several job openings at the Minnesota Population Center, and to inform you of upcoming data release plans.

POSITION OPENINGS
The Minnesota Population Center is recruiting a post-doctoral researcher to work on IPUMS-CPS; the start date is flexible. We also have immediate openings for Research Associates/Research Scientists to work on IPUMS-USA and two other projects.

To obtain more information and download position announcements, please visit our website at http://www.pop.umn.edu/about-mpc/employment-opportunities/research-positions/

UPCOMING DATA RELEASES
The Census Bureau plans to release microdata from the 2008 American Community Survey (ACS) on September 22nd, 2009. We will produce an IPUMS version of this dataset within a week of its public release. The IPUMS version of the data will be available via the IPUMS-USA site at http://usa.ipums.org.

Finally, earlier today we released the IPUMS version of the 2009 March Current Population Survey, available on the IPUMS-CPS site at http://cps.ipums.org.

Please redistribute this message to any researchers who might be interested.

Sincerely,

Steve Ruggles
IPUMS Principal Investigator
Regents Professor
University of Minnesota

Stiglitz Op-Ed in the Guardian

2009-09-15T16:59:00.001-04:00

Thought you might also enjoy reading this.

Stiglitz Commission Reports; Sarkozy Implements

2009-09-15T16:25:00.003-04:00

The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (often referred to as the Stiglitz Commission, after its chair, Joseph Stiglitz) has released its report on recommended measures of performance (PDF). France's president Nicolas Sarkozy "urged other countries to adopt proposed new measures of economic output," according to the Financial Times, and has already instructed France's statistical reporting arm to implement the recommendations.

The report begins with this:

"... statistical indicators are important for designing and assessing policies aiming at advancing the progress of society, as well as for assessing and influencing the functioning of economic markets. Their role has increased significantly over the last two decades. This reflects improvements in the level of education in the population, increases in the complexity of modern economies and the widespread use of information technology. In the “information society”, access to data, including statistical data, is much easier. More and more people look at statistics to be better informed or to make decisions. To respond to the growing demand for information, the supply of statistics has also increased considerably, covering new domains and phenomena.

"What we measure affects what we do; and if our measurements are flawed, decisions may be distorted."

They present a compelling case for the problems with measuring GDP (Gross Domestic Product) as a sole measure of progress. We've talked about some of those problems before; here Stiglitz and Amartya Sen and a host of others present 80 pages of analysis on the question. It's worth reading, and summarizing it would be a disservice (their summary is 20 pages long on this question alone!)

The report then discusses quality of life, which it defines thusly:

"Quality of life is a broader concept than economic production and living standards. It includes the full range of factors that influences what we value in living, reaching beyond its material side."

They make the point that trying to measure quality-of-life aspects through extending the economic accounting system is inherently flawed -- it's not just about resources and resource allocation. People experience the use of resources differently, many of the transactions don't act within traditional markets and resource assignments would be highly variable and non-comparable, and much of quality-of-life is related to life circumstances that cannot be described as resources with immutable prices.

They summarize three approaches to quality-of-life measurement as subjective well-being, capabilities, and fair allocations. This is a fascinating section of the report. Read this part, at least the summary piece!

The third section deals with sustainable development and the environment. You will find the discussion of sustainability indicators familiar. The connection of the three (economic, quality of life, and sustainability measures) is what we've been working on for some time in local communities and global networks.

This report was completed during a time of global financial crisis and an emerging environmental crisis. Here's how the authors addressed that: "...the whole Commission is convinced that the crisis is teaching us a very important lesson: those attempting to guide the economy and our societies are like pilots trying to steering a course without a reliable compass. The decisions they (and we as individual citizens) make depend on what we measure, how good our measurements are and how well our measures are understood. We are almost blind when the metrics on which action is based are ill-designed or when they are not well understood. For many purposes, we need better metrics. Fortunately, research in recent years has enabled us to improve our metrics, and it is time to incorporate in our measurement systems some of these advances. There is also consensus among the Commission members that better measures may enable us to steer our economies better through and out of crises. Many of the indicators put forward by the report will lend themselves to this purpose."

This is probably my favorite quote in the report:

"The report is about measurement rather than policies, thus it does not discuss how best our societies could advance through collective actions in the pursuit of various goals. However, as what we measure shapes what we collectively strive to pursue – and what we pursue determines what we measure - the report and its implementation may have a significant impact on the way in which our societies looks at themselves and, therefore, on the way in which policies are designed, implemented and assessed."

Anyway, check out the report. This is of tremendous value on a global scale to discuss well-being of nations, and should also be of great help on a local scale as we debate the importance of measuring community indicators.

CIC Announces Panelists for 2009 Conference

2009-09-14T08:16:00.002-04:00

Here's an update from the Community Indicators Consortium:

There are still some spaces available in our 5 exciting preconference workshops including:

And this isn't all. The final draft schedule of panels and panelists for CIC's Seventh International Conference on Indicators is now posted on our website. Take a look today to see some of the interesting and exciting topics and participants from across North America and beyond.

We'll be adding detailed descriptions of the sessions and additions regularly over the next days. Join us at the Meydenbauer Conference Center in Bellevue, WA, September 30 - October 2nd, so you don't miss a single learning and networking opportunity. Register now!

REMEMBER: We have two hotels offering rooms at a special conference rate: the rooms at the Marriott Courtyard are $149/night and just across the street from the Meydenbauer. The rooms at the Coast Hotel are only $94/night and several blocks away. These special room rates will run out soon, so make your reservation.

Note from me: I'll be there, and I'll be providing a half-day workshop as well as providing input into a couple of the conference sessions. If you're going to the conference, take a moment to say hello! If you're still deciding whether or not to attend, take a look at the schedule -- there's quite a lot of amazing information to share and people to meet and connect with. If you're at all interested in community indicators, this is the conference you need to attend.

Beyond GDP Followup: Exciting News!

2009-09-04T11:28:00.002-04:00

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while remember this series of articles I wrote from a hotel room in Belgium in Fall 2007 at the Beyond GDP conference. Now there's really good news about the results of the work launched at that conference. Let me share that with you:

B E Y O N D G D P N E W S L E T T E R
4 September 2009

European Commission adopts Communication "GDP and beyond"

At the closing of the Beyond GDP conference, Commissioner Dimas announced that the European Commission will present a policy paper that takes the ideas presented at the conference and moulds them into a road map for action. On 20 August 2009, the European Commission released its Communication “GDP and beyond: Measuring progress in a changing world”.

The Communication outlines an EU roadmap with five key actions to be undertaken now and in the near term. The text of the Communication is available in 22 languages.

The five key actions support the Commission’s aims to develop indicators relevant to the challenges of today—ones that provide an improved basis for public discussion and policy-making. The five key actions are:

* Complementing GDP with environmental and social indicators
* Near real-time information for decision-making
* More accurate reporting on distribution and inequalities
* Developing a European Sustainable Development Scoreboard
* Extending National Accounts to environmental and social issues

Live online video of presentation event for Communication “GDP and beyond”

The adopted Communication “GDP and beyond” will be presented and discussed with key stakeholders at an event on 8 September 2009 and will be streamed live online in 6 languages from 14:30 to 17:00 CET. Confirmed speakers include: Stavros Dimas (European Commission); Elisabet Falemo (Swedish EU Presidency); Aart de Geus (OECD); Pedro Diaz Muñoz (Eurostat); and Enrico Giovannini (Italian Statistical Institute). Speaker presentations will be followed by a discussion session with the stakeholders in attendance.

More information about this communication, including how to be involved in the live conference, is available at www.beyond-gdp.eu.

Kurt Metzger on Metromode

2009-09-04T08:33:00.002-04:00

Kurt Metzger is a guest blogger on Metromode. Check it out!

Music, Literature, and College Performance

2009-09-03T13:42:00.002-04:00

Sometimes we bring up creative indicators that strike our fancy for their unusual use of data to tell an interesting story. This isn't necessarily to suggest that these measures would be great community indicators -- we're not going to add "boxers or briefs" to our community survey any time soon -- but the way in which these measures are constructed can maybe set us thinking about how else we could measure key trends in our own communities outside of the more standard data sets.

The following data set provides that kind of out-of-the-milk-crate thinking. In Music That Makes You Dumb, Virgil Griffith at CalTech examined Facebook data to see what music college students were listening to. In Books That Make You Dumb, he did the same thing (but with books, not music.) (You probably figured that one out without me.)

He took Facebook network stats from 1,352 schools and the top music/books that their students listed as their favorites, and then mashed that data up with average SAT/ACT scores fro those schools, to get a correlation between music or book choices and IQ. (Yes, it's correlation and not causation. He says that a number of times.)

But check out the results -- you can look up your own school and see what the favorites are and how they rank, or you can look up you favorite music/books and see where they are.

Any way you slice it, it's an interesting data set. And you might see a book or a musical group you may want to try out.

Increased smartness or improved SAT scores not guaranteed.

Community Indicators and Performance Measures Update

2009-09-03T13:25:00.005-04:00

A number of initiatives are underway in improving government performance measurement systems and linking those systems with community indicators. If you are interested in thinking about how your community measures the effectiveness and efficiency of government services, and would like to bring those trend lines together with trends on civic engagement and community governance, and wrap it all under a picture of how the community is doing in relation to an overall vision of improvement, you need to be aware of several initiatives and opportunities.

First of all, two conferences are coming up that you should seriously think about attending. The Community Indicators Consortium will be meeting September 30 - October 2 at their Seventh Annual Conference in Seattle. The conference will focus on four aspects of effective indicator efforts:

From Planning to Implementation
Creating Partnerships and Crossing Boundaries
Promoting Social Change
Integrating Indicators & Performance Measures

I'll be providing a half-day workshop on the 30th and will be part of at least one other session during the conference, so if you're planning on attending please look me up and say hello. CIC will be sharing a great deal about its Integrating Community Indicators and Performance Measures initiative, including an awards presentation and discussion of its Real Stories project.

The AGA will be having its 2009 Performance Management conference November 5-6, also in Seattle. Sessions include:

Lessons Learned about Strategic Planning and Performance Management
Listening to the Numbers: How to Use Performance Data to Improve Service Delivery
Using Performance Measures to Improve Service Delivery
Public Interest in Government Accountability and Performance
What’s New: Toolkit for Preparing an Award-Winning Performance Report
Let’s Take a Look at Performance Based Management Reporting
Integrating Performance Measures and Community Indicators to Enhance Governance, Citizen Engagement and Results
The Chief Executive Officer’s Strategic Partnership: Critical to Driving Transformational Change
Performance 2.0—From Measurement to Management

Evie Barry says "Don’t miss this annual event if you are starting to think about performance reporting for your community or you are a seasoned performance reporter wanting to learn about innovative ideas from other governments."

You'll also want to take some time to provide your input to the GASB SEA effort. Go to GASB's website for more information and instructions on how to comment on their Proposed Suggested Guidelines for Voluntary Reporting, SEA Performance Information. Deadline is October 30, so you need to hurry. More information is available at the AGA blog.

Recession Metrics: Underwear and Donuts

2009-08-31T11:50:00.003-04:00

For an interesting look at key indicators of economic well-being, see this article from TIME Magazine's Brad Tuttle. In it, he refers to this Washington Post graphic/article on an Underwear Index, showing that as times get tough, men wear underwear longer and the sales of this clothing necessity dip.

Tuttle also (in another blog article) highlights the things we buy more of during a recession.

It's another creative indicator set ... but I don't think we'll be using this indicator in our community reports any time soon.

Please keep sending me the interesting metrics you find out there!

(Hat tip goes to Elaine Pace)

Using Data for Advocacy: Jacksonville's Nonprofits Make a Stand

2009-08-26T12:53:00.003-04:00

Thanks to Abel Harding and his JaxPoliticsOnline blog for this video of yesterday's press conference at City Hall, where local nonprofits used data to make their case that city funding for nonprofits not be slashed during these difficult financial times.

I thought you might enjoy the different ways the numbers are presented and displayed -- comparisons to familiar terms, straight-up statistics, visual representations of the numbers, and more.

Any thoughts?

Community Indicators Projects Underway: Buffalo and Greensboro

2009-08-26T12:25:00.006-04:00

At Indicators Session Report-Out, you can see the working notes of a community indicators project being developed in Buffalo, New York. The actual project site is at creativelysustainable.com.

I enjoy seeing these projects in their development stages, before the shiny graphics and glossy report covers get put on. This is community organizing to determine what's important, finding ways to measure it, and then using those measures to make sustainable change for the future -- how wonderful!

The discussion they had highlighted a number of reasons why they felt community indicators were important:

Increased community awareness
Can’t improve what you can’t measure
Can’t learn from the past if things are not recorded
Can’t unite people if they don’t have similar understanding
Helps to diffuse myths and misperceptions
Let’s people have a way to know when to celebrate progress
It improves decision making quality

Greensboro, North Carolina, is farther along in their indicators project development. First of all, they have one of the cooler names I've seen for a community indicators system: The "GreensbOrometer."
Greensboro, also, developed a set of reasons why they needed a community indicators system:

The most important and compelling reason Greensboro should implement a Community Indicators System is that the Connections 2025 Comprehensive Plan specifically directs the City to "create an ongoing housing and neighborhood condition monitoring strategy" (Policy 6A.3). Beyond this mandate however, a Community Indicators System is a valuable tool for:

• Measuring quality of life;
• Monitoring provision of public services;
• Identifying disparities of opportunity; and
• Promoting responsive, accountable, effective, efficient, and equitable government.

Whatever the reasons, I like seeing more community projects grow. If you're in either the Buffalo or Greensboro areas, why don't you see if you can lend a hand to these efforts. If you're not, take a look at what they're doing and lend them your moral support -- this is important stuff we're doing!

New Governance Assessment Portal Newsletter Available

2009-08-24T17:02:00.002-04:00

I don't know if you've seen the Government Assessment Portal (GAP) Newsletter yet, but I'd like to draw it to your attention because of the creative ways people are measuring government performance.

Articles in the newsletter include:

Bhutan: Planning for happiness
Angola: On its way to better local governance
Chile: Taking stock of democratic progress
Workshop in Cairo: Assessment Methods and Application of Governance Evidence
Workshop in Namibia: Call for participants
Work in the Pipeline

Take a peek, especially on the challenges Bhutan is facing on trying to operationalize its focus on Gross National Happiness and Chile's efforts to "develop a governance assessment in Chile through a multi-stakeholder nationally driven process."

Report Release: Roanoke, Virginia

2009-08-22T09:56:00.004-04:00

The Council of Community Services, in partnership with the United Way of Roanoke Valley, just released their second annual Roanoke Regional Community Indicators Report (PDF).

From their website:

The report updates key household economic indicators, presentations of valuable data that show change over time, for eight jurisdictions in the Roanoke/Alleghany Region. The report tracks the original 39 indicators and adds two key education indicators for a total of 41 indicators. Job related, education, income and asset related, housing, public assistance, low income and other categories of indicators are included in this updated, data rich, 2009 Edition.

The Council of Community Services is now tracking a limited number of economic indicators on a monthly basis for the Roanoke/Alleghany Region. This report, 2009 Economic Indicators: Monthly Trends (PDF) provides valuable indicator data for the eight jurisdictions in the Roanoke Region. The data covers the period from January to June 2009.

They've done a nice job of selecting indicators on a regional level and reporting them for the region and for each of the eight jurisdictions the region covers. For policy-makers and planners, this is an important tool for their region. They also do a nice job of taking advantage of the new ACS 3-year estimates for smaller-population jurisdictions. If you're not using this tool, you may want to check out how Roanoke can capture important information that was simply not available before outside of the decennial census.

Take a look!

(Read more about the report at The Roanoke Times.)

The Onion Satirizes Data Presentation Methods

2009-08-21T08:07:00.003-04:00

... and yet it's funny. Check it out at Wow Factor Added To Corporate Presentation:

Now that they've added the final touches of wow factor to Thursday's presentation, employees seem confident their pitch is a can't-miss.

"To think about what our presentation was before it had that sort of, you know, that wow factor, is kind of embarrassing," account supervisor Scott Weston said. "It was mostly just slides of straight statistics and comprehensive charts that explained very plainly that in order to more successfully get the word out about our clients, we should utilize all types of media."

Added Weston: "It would have been over in 30 seconds."

Nice send-up of our tendencies sometimes to overdo the data visualization in ways that obscure the message.

(Hat tip: The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method)

Report Release: Kaua'i Community Indicators Report 2008

2009-08-21T07:34:00.003-04:00

In Aloha Analytics, Brad Parsons summarizes the 2008 Kaua'i Community Indicators Report (PDF) released last month.

The report, put together by the Kaua`i Planning & Action Alliance, has 57 indicators in 7 sections, and was intentionally created to measure progress toward the community vision developed in the Kaua'i General Plan 2000. I like how they begin the document with this quote:

The future does not just happen to us. We, ourselves, create it by what we do and what we fail to do. It is we who are making tomorrow what tomorrow will be. For that reason, futurists think not so much in terms of predicting the future, as in terms of trying to decide, wisely, what we want the future to be.
– Edward Cornish, Editor, The Futurist magazine

The Foreword says:

This 2008 report, Measuring What Matters for Kaua`i, is the second study of Kaua`i community indicators. It tracks 57 indicators that explore the quality of life on the island, the strength of Kaua`i’s economy and the health of its environment. The report was created to provide qualitative and quantitative information on important facets of Kaua`i for those who make decisions about policies and the allocation of resources that affect the lives of residents and the `aina.

(I looked up the term 'aina and it refers to the earth or the land.)

Each indicator has a short statement describing the trend, a narrative section on Description and Relevance, another narrative section describing How is Kaua'i Doing?, a table, an Indicator Chart (or two), and sometimes a Status Chart. The last two were of most interest to me -- sometimes they compare themselves to themselves over time with a trend line chart, and then add a second chart (the Status Chart or a second Indicator Chart) to explore the same indicator from a slightly different angle.

Sources for the data are included, usually in the table section, and often include a web link for more information.

The report is strong on analysis and depth of data. My only regret is that it could be prettier -- more visually inviting to the reader. Something of the grace and natural beauty found here. Instead, this is a 112-page manual for the serious wonk, and it's a strong addition to the community indicators field. Take a look.

Cutest Indicators Ever!

2009-08-20T17:27:00.005-04:00

I just took a look at The 2009 Report Card on Child Well-Being for Austin/Travis County, Texas (PDF) and had to pass it along for the rest of you to take a look. It's three pages long, and it divides a series of 13 indicators of child well-being into 3 categories: Healthy Indicators, Happy Indicators, and Smart Indicators.

What I found most darling about the indicators was their method of marking progress. Instead of a stoplight scale (red-green-yellow) or up-or-down arrows or right-to-left gauges, they provided the following:

(Click to enlarge image)

I think this challenges us all to find the right way to communicate our message to our intended audience(s). Congratulations to the Capital Area United Way for a job well done!

How Do You Use Community Indicators?

2009-08-19T15:50:00.002-04:00

I was asked recently about how community indicators are actually used in a community to make things better. The context of the question was this: Someone new stepped into an organization that had an existing (and very good) community indicators program. She interviewed key stakeholders in her community and found two general responses: first, that people knew of and appreciated the community indicators project; second, that no one was quite sure what to do with it.

I suspect this is a question most of us face in our communities. What do you do with these indicators reports? Let me share with you an edited/expanded version of my answer, and get your feedback on anything I left out or need to clarify.

I firmly feel that community indicators need to serve as an integral part of a community change model. I've talked about that before on this blog, and I'll likely be talking about it again. We don't do indicators because they're pretty, or cool, or nice to have (though they are all of the above.) We do indicators because we want to help make the community better.

This community change model, the way we use it in Jacksonville, begins with a shared vision for the future. You have to have at least a broad idea of where you want to go.

The indicators then measure where we are in relation to that vision – are we getting closer to the desired future, or farther away. The indicators are not just about the specific aspects they measure – high school graduation rates aren’t just about high school seniors, but provide an overall proxy measurement of the effectiveness of the entire school system to achieve the desired results. The indicators point to areas of progress and areas that need greater community attention.

But the indicators themselves don’t identify solutions. They are descriptive, not prescriptive. They flag items of community concern, not just because we care about (in this example) education, but because this is an area we need to work on to improve our overall community and get closer to our shared vision. They set a general community agenda for action.

When the indicators identify priorities for community action, they need to trigger some sort of planning process. The indicator says something’s not working right in our current systems – what do we do about it? This planning process needs to identify strategies for action. Who will do what to address the issues identified by the indicators?

These plans need to be implemented. Someone needs to make sure the community follows through. This is where the indicators inform the decision-making processes of community institutions, from government to nonprofits to business entities and faith institutions and anyone else with a vested interest in the community. This is why the “shared vision” part is critical – to achieve the shared vision will usually take shared action, and people/institutions stepping out of traditional roles to address the shared community priorities identified by the indicators. This is one of the great strengths of the community indicators process: moving a community issue from “their problem” to “our problem.”

The actions will have results, and those outcomes need to be identified. The real success of the efforts to improve the community should be evaluated/assessed through the indicators themselves – did our strategies work? Did we make a difference? Based on what the indicators tell us, we may need to revisit our vision, rethink what we are measuring, or go back to the drawing board and develop new strategies for action.

That’s both why indicators are so important, and how to use them effectively:

1. To identify shared priorities for action;
2. To inform strategies and community planning efforts;
3. To hold the community accountable for action;
4. To assess results and evaluate success; and
5. To measure progress toward a shared community vision.

That’s the general overview. There isn't one right way to make them work, or one right set of actors to use the indicators to make change. In Jacksonville, the community indicators are used:

1. To inform philanthropic grant-making efforts
2. To develop Chamber of Commerce focus actions
3. To create the annual curriculum for our Leadership Jacksonville programs
4. To identify topics for public television/radio programming
5. To support grant-writing efforts
6. To influence legislation and policy-making at the local, state, and national level
7. To ask for community investment and increased corporate responsibility from local corporations
8. To bring together collaborative partnerships around an issue and break down silos
9. To highlight areas for further study, both in our own organization and in academic and other research areas

And more. As the indicators become institutionalized in the community, their influence broadens, but the role of the community indicators practitioner, besides sharing the data, is to help insure that they are being actively used to galvanize action.

How we do that is the subject of another blog post.

Bloglist: What's Your Favorite?

2009-08-19T06:00:00.001-04:00

The folks at Swivel's blog, Tasty Data Goodies, have put together an interesting list of their favorite blogs.

It's good list of data and data visualization groups. Many of the sites they list are on the blogroll on the right-hand column of this site, and I may add a couple more based on their recommendations.

Some of the blogs I follow that aren't on the list are:

GraphJam: It's a place for user-created graphs that tend to be on the silly side, but a lot of fun anyway. From the lolcatz folks.

Indexed: Sometimes humorous, sometimes thoughtful, Jessica Hagy draws graphical relationships on index cards. She's now published a book of these.

StrangeMaps: Not always data, but some interesting ways of looking at the world and representing it graphically. Worth a look.

The AGA's blog often has quite a bit to say about government performance measures. The guest authors are usually quite thoughtful in their presentations.

I also link to the blogs of PolicyMap and InstantAtlas as two of the more interesting tools out there for reporting/presenting community indicators.

There's more -- take a look at the blogroll -- but these I especially like. I'm interested in the blogs you follow that have something to do with community indicators -- or the blogs you write. Care to share? What have I left out? Which of these blogs are your favorites?

ETA: Don't forget this great list of blogs from Nathan Yau last May -- there's a wealth of resources available out there for us!

ACS Release Schedule

2009-08-18T16:47:00.003-04:00

This may be of interest to those, like me, who are in the process of updating their community indicators.

Release Schedule for the 2008 ACS and 2006-2008 ACS Data

On September 22, 2009, the Census Bureau will release the 2008 ACS 1-year estimates. Similar to last year's release, the 2008 ACS will include 1-year estimates available for the nation, 50 states and the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, every congressional district and all counties, places and metropolitan areas with populations of 65,000 or more. Included are the ACS income, earnings, and poverty data as well as all other ACS estimates on social, economic, demographic, and housing characteristics.

On October 27, 2009, the Census Bureau will release the 2006-2008 ACS 3-year estimates, based on data collected from 2006-2008, for all geographic areas with populations of 20,000 or more. Included are the estimates on social, economic, demographic and housing characteristics.

Additional ACS Tools and Information - Coming Soon

Later this summer and into the fall the Census Bureau will provide tools to aid ACS data users. These tools include guidance on making comparisons between the 2007 and 2008 ACS data, ACS table shells, and a new e-tutorial to assist novice ACS data users.

If you have questions or comments about the American Community Survey, please call (800) 923-8282.

Benchmarking and the Invisible Factors for Success

2009-08-18T11:38:00.002-04:00

Here's our good friend Dilbert, on benchmarking:

That's an ... interesting definition. But it's a starting point to talk about the problems with indicators and comparisons.

It's amazing how much history, personality, past decisions, key individual leaders, social structures, civic involvement (among people and different types of community institutions), legacies, traditions, and a thousand other factors influence the success or failure of community improvement efforts. Pick a topic -- teen pregnancy, high school graduation rates, economic self-sufficiency, crime prevention -- we've had a thousand communities wrestle with these problems and have their combined experiences to draw upon.

So we know something about what has worked (and what hasn't) in some places and for some issues. But implementing the same program/process/policy in a different place often leads to less-than-expected outcomes.

I suspect the art of community improvement has to be informed by the data, the research, the combined experiences of those who have had success and those who have not. But the factors that lead to success often remain left out of our narratives -- the trust factors and relationships that made it work, the key driving personality(ies), the community cultural backdrop against which the drama played out.

Over the years, I've been gaining a greater appreciation for our story in Jacksonville, Florida. My organization is about to turn 35 years old; our indicators project, 25. But the story of our success begins, in part, in our community's response to a smallpox epidemic in 1883. And the structures in place that created the community conditions that allowed a different kind of response to the disease predated that effort by generations.

Does that mean our successes in Jacksonville can't be replicated? Of course not -- hundreds of communities have shown they can do what we have done, and more. But those communities brought their own stories and histories and people and institutions together and developed their own organizations and their own indicators in ways that never cease to delight and teach me.

As we develop our own success stories and case histories, may I suggest thinking about both the principles/processes/projects that led to success, and also the context in which those principles/processes were put into action. Both, I think, are critically important to understand, as we increase the knowledge base necessary to make communities better.

Award Nominations Sought

2009-08-13T09:25:00.001-04:00

Call for Nominations:
Community Indicators & Performance Measures Integration Awards

The Community Indicators Consortium is inviting nominations of efforts to integrate community indicator and performance measurement projects (US or international) that best demonstrate the development and application of integrating these two forms of measurement to advance sustainable change in their communities and the power of this integration to drive that change.

The purpose of the Awards Program is to

recognize the collaborative efforts among community stakeholders to integrate community indicators-organizational performance measures projects and the people who made it happen and
add to the public body of knowledge about community indicator-organizational performance measurement integration promising practices.

Nominations are due by midnight, Wednesday, August 26, 2009. For more information about the awards, the awards criteria, and how to apply, please visit the Community Indicators-Performance Measurement section of the Community Indicators Consortium website.

Allen Lomax and Cheryle Broom
CI-PM Steering Committee Co-Chairs
CIPM@communityindicators.net
Community Indicators Consortium

Wikipedia Article on Community Indicators

2009-07-29T16:52:00.003-04:00

I just noticed a new section in Wikipedia on Community Indicators. It's nice to see the beginning of the wiki, especially since the field has been growing so quickly in the past decade or so and we've learned quite a bit about engaging communities, measuring what's important, and using that information to spur meaningful and lasting community change.

(The coolest thing about the article was seeing this blog referenced as an "external link." Hold on for a moment while I call my mother and tell her my name's in Wikipedia! She'll be so proud.)

However, the article is incomplete. We know a great deal more about community indicators. The history of the movement, the attempts to come together as a field, the development of a shared knowledge base through association, conferences, and journals, the creation of the certification program in community indicators research over at Virginia Tech, the reinforcement/coming together/shared learning with healthy communities, sustainability, quality-of-life, and benchmarking movements, the challenges and opportunities posed by rapid proliferation of data, the efforts at integration with government performance measurement systems, the global efforts to create local community indicators systems inside and outside of governments, and the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of reports, websites, and other community indicator efforts that have been transforming both community activism and public policy for the better.

So if you're the kind of person who likes to update Wikipedia articles, there's an opportunity waiting for you! If you're not that person but can think of information/articles/references that should be added, we can start talking about it here and then see how we can improve on the Wikipedia site.

(And if you're the one who created the article, a thousand thanks for getting us started! I really do appreciate what you've done, and only hope we can take advantage of this opportunity to better capture the state of the art and science of community indicators in the world today.)

Patchwork Nation

2009-07-29T06:00:00.000-04:00

There's a fascinating new website from the Christian Science Monitor called Patchwork Nation. It uses a series of data points to show geographic clusters of people across the United States in 12 distinct categories.

What makes it even more interesting is its ability to display county-specific data on a series of indicators, and to overlay two indicators to see interactions.

From their description:

About the Patchwork Nation project

The United States is a vast, diverse place – more than 300 million people spread over 3.5 million square miles. Yet our understanding of its complexities is limited. We think of demographic slices or broad regions, or we fall back on the overused, oversimplified ideas of red and blue America.

Patchwork Nation, funded by the Knight Foundation, a nonprofit philanthropic organization based in Miami, is designed to help us get past those views and understand how different communities and cultures within the US experience different realities – and shape the whole.

As America enters a period of great uncertainty – with a new president, a stumbling economy, rising foreign financial powers, energy challenges, and an unstable world – it’s never been so important and so difficult to understand the United States. That’s what Patchwork Nation is about.

We’ve identified 12 types of places across the US, which are distinct voter communities. They are:

* Boom Towns - growing and diversifying
* Campus and Careers - young and collegiate
* Emptying Nests - having retirees and baby boomers
* Evangelical Epicenters - culturally conservative
* Immigration Nation - heavily Hispanic
* Industrial Metropolis - big-city
* Military Bastions - bordering or encompassing bases for the armed forces
* Minority Central - heavily African-American
* Monied 'Burbs - wealthy and educated
* Mormon Outposts - many LDS adherents
* Service Worker Centers - small-town
* Tractor Country - rural and agricultural

We’ve also pinpointed specific communities that represent each type of place. For example, Sioux Center, Iowa, typifies “Tractor Country.”

Special thanks to Edwin Quiambao of the Annie E. Casey Foundation for drawing it to my attention. He pointed out some of the indicators available at the county level:

-election information

-hardship index

-health uninsured

-density of doctors

-chrysler dealers/closures

-hospital beds

-foreclosure rate2009

-unemployment rate

-median household income

-war deaths per 100,000

-high school graduates

-college graduates

Take a look!

Data Update: Annie E. Casey Releases 2009 KIDS COUNT

2009-07-28T15:16:00.002-04:00

The Annie E. Casey Foundation has just released the 2009 KIDS COUNT Data Book.

From their website:

Counting What Counts: Taking Results Seriously for Vulnerable Children and Families: The 20th annual KIDS COUNT Data Book profiles the well-being of America’s children on a state-by-state basis and ranks states on 10 key measures of child well-being. The Data Book essay calls for a “data revolution” that uses timely and reliable information to track the progress and improve the lives of vulnerable children.

Also go to their datacenter for another way to access the data.

Job Opening: Research Analyst for National Urban League

2009-07-28T15:12:00.002-04:00

The position includes production of the NUL's Equality Index.

The National Urban League Policy Institute seeks a Research Analyst to provide up-to-date statistics on a wide variety of topics and analyze data for the staff at the Institute. When requested from the Urban League affiliate network, the Research Analyst will provide statistical information as well. The Research Analyst will conduct empirical analysis using statistical software packages and utilize large data sets.

Click to read more:

Essential Functions

•Research, write and edit reports and fact sheets on various topics related to the NUL Empowerment Agenda;
•Acts as Project Coordinator for initiatives as assigned;
•Serve as the Census Information Center coordinator, handling data requests and organizing large amounts of data;
•Advise NULPI Executive Director and staff on relevant research;
•Research, write and edit articles for NULPI publications;
•Manage and coordinate electronic updates;
•Respond to research requests from NUL Affiliates and staff;
•Oversee production of the NUL Equality Index

Additional Qualifications:

Education:

•Master’s degree in economics, statistics, public policy or related discipline required.

Experience:

•A minimum of four years of experience with interpreting data and translating the data into reports and fact sheets.

Knowledge and Skills:

•Experience with quantitative computer-based statistical analysis software with large data sets required;
•Must have excellent analytical and writing skills and a record of producing research reports;
•Must have experience presenting research findings;
•Must be able and willing to work on multiple projects simultaneously;
•Must have experience with major statistical programs such as STATA, SAS or SPSS in producing research reports. Familiarity with PowerPoint is a plus;
•Strong inter-personal skills;
•Commitment to and ability to advocate for NUL’s mission and recommendations
•Write reports and fact sheets on various topics related to income security and labor market issues.
•Present results of research studies related primarily to social safety net issues at various conferences.
•Serve as the Census Information Center coordinator for the office, handling data requests and organizing large amounts of data.
•Supervise research interns on various data analysis tasks and projects.
•Coordinate and monitor preparation of research reports and publications

How to Apply: To apply send resume, cover letter an (3) page writing sample to Human Resources, National Urban League 120 Wall Street, NY , NY 10005 or e-mail recruitment@nul.org

Deadline to apply: August 10, 2009

Community Engagement and Civic Indicators

2009-07-28T14:50:00.000-04:00

I was reading David Brown's "Citizen-Centered Democracy" interview with Matt Leighninger (of Everyday Democracy and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium) found in Kettering's recent (2009) Higher Education Exchange, and I began thinking about the role and importance of community indicators in both facilitating meaningful civic engagement and in measuring the extent and effectiveness of that engagement.

In the interview, Leighninger (speaking of his book, The Next Form of Democracy) says:

"Different communities will come up with different frameworks for the relationship between citizens and government. But the question of how they know where they are headed, and (perhaps more importantly) how they know they are making progress, is a major challenge for the field. Right now, in most instances, communities and public agencies fail to measure how they are doing with public participation. We need systems that will help people track the quantitative kinds of information -- how many people participated, how diverse and representative they were -- along with more qualitative kinds of data -- what did the participants and the decision makers think of the process, what kinds of tangible changes resulted, and so on. This kind of tracking and measuring ought to be easier now, with all the online technology we have at our disposal, but I haven't yet seen an online system that does all this. Without these kinds of information loops, it is harder for communities to figure out where they are going and how they might get there faster." [emphasis added]

This intrigued me for multiple reasons.

First, I strongly believe that successful community indicators systems must be built on public participation. Absent meaning civic dialogue in determining a shared community vision and consensus in the kinds of information needed to track progress towards that vision, indicators become merely another academic exercise. Community indicators need to be of and from the community, not just for and about the community.

Second, part of our measures of a community ought to include the civic health of the community. How involved are citizens in governance? Are they successful? Do they feel successful? I disagree that counting noses at public meetings is a necessary or even useful indicator, but it is a start. I'd appreciate further conversations that would pick up where the National Civic League's Indicators of Civic Health project left off. To some extent, the current efforts toward bridging community indicators and government performance measures are leading to redefinitions of citizen involvement in community governance, but often in a round-about way -- we probably ought to be more intentional about that conversation and more precise in what we measure.

Third, I suspect that we have some difficulty at times in the field of community indicators bridging community-oriented public dialogue principles and skillsets with data-driven measurement and research capacities -- it's uncomfortable to recognize that we need to bring together both data people and people people in order for our work to make a difference. Balancing the competing needs for data excellence and community conversation (which is often much messier and much less quantifiable) is a challenge that will undermine our work if we're not aware of the tensions and plan our engagement processes accordingly.

I found Leighninger's response to the question of "professionalization" particularly intriguing. (You may remember Ken Jones leading a similar discussion at the 2005 joint Community Indicators Consortium/National Association of Planning Councils conference in Washington, D.C.)

Leighninger said:

"Professionalization is both promising and problematic for us. Right now, there are virtually no barriers to entry in this field -- it seems like all you need to set up shop as an expert on democracy is some free time and a Web site! There's a sort of excitement to that, and it may encourage various kinds of innovation, but at the same time it makes it very difficult for the prospective employers (public managers and other kinds of leaders who need help working more intensively with citizens) to find the right prospective employees (either job candidates for permanent positions, or nonprofits and consultants for temporary projects) who have the right skills and experiences to be effective.

"We need certain aspects of professionalization: a more unified sense of the main principles that undergird the field; stronger degree programs (in disciplines like public administration) that prepare students to engage citizens more productively; and greater awareness of the main organizations, models, and techniques. But we need to retain some antiprofessional qualities as well: the sense that at least some of the basic skills you need to do this work can be learned fairly quickly by committed amateurs without formal training; a shared understanding that your mindset and attitude toward citizens is at least as important as the skills and experiences you bring to the job; and the flexibility to continue adapting models, methods, and principles, so that shared learning is one of the most prized tenets of the field."

I found myself in wholehearted agreement, especially as I considered how this applied to our field of community indicators. I'd appreciate your thoughts and comments on what you think this means to our work.

Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project Releases Report

2009-07-24T14:50:00.003-04:00

The Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project just released their 2009 Annual Community Indicators Report (PDF).

The report is straightforward and to the point -- nothing overly elaborate, with clean text and clear maps supporting the indicators. It's a solid overview of the region's challenges and strengths. The indicator set is interesting -- it looks like they made a conscious decision to exclude the more commonly-used indicators (you won't find high school graduation rates under education, for example, or unemployment rates under economy.)

Associated with the report is their new MetroPhilaMapper interactive mapping system, containing 300+ indicators. This system is designed to allow you to build your own maps based on your own geography and indicator selections. They describe it as:

"a new web resource that allows users to easily find data about all communities in the region, to view the information displayed in charts, tables, and maps, and to compare data that used to be scattered across multiple sources. MetroPhilaMapper provides over 300 local and regional indicators, including land use patterns, population characteristics, school district spending and performance, income and wage data, and crime patterns for the two-state, nine-county region."

The printed report refers often to the extended indicator set in the MetroPhilaMapper online site.

The mapping interface generates some nice graphics, but has a few bugs in the display that didn't work well (I was using FireFox). I liked how you could select the indicators your liked, and then choose whether you wanted them displayed on a map, in a table, ranked, as a scatterplot, or with more detail in a "statistics" view. I also liked how you could save your project and come back to it later.

What I thought was unfortunate is the data timeliness -- household income data was available for 2000, annual wages for 2004. Similar patterns were seen in data availability in other areas. I hope the data is brought up to date soon -- more current data is available in the printed report, and I don't understand the data gaps in the online version.

In all, however, both the report and the mapping tool are worth a look.

(HT: MPIP on Twitter)

Mapping Assistance

2009-07-24T14:35:00.003-04:00

I'm back from vacation -- had to take time out to improve my personal quality of life before I could get back to measuring other people's QOL -- and am playing with some mapping software for our local community indicators project.

In the process, I needed to simplify a 3+ MB Census-derived shapefile map of Florida counties into something a little more nimble and useful. I found this great resource in beta test -- MapShaper shapefile editor -- that allows you to upload a shapefile map and then control the level of simplicity you'd like. I got my map down to a nice 98 KB and with no noticeable resolution degradation for what I needed it for.

You will need to copy over the other files associated with your shapefile and rename them in order for your new map to work. This took a matter of seconds to do.

Anyway, if you're using maps that are too large, and need to simplify them quickly (and for free!), visit the blog at MapShaper.org to find out more.

The (un)Happy Planet Index 2.0: Why good lives don't have to cost the Earth

2009-07-07T08:00:00.001-04:00

Here's an update from nef you might enjoy:

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

The (un)Happy Planet Index 2.0: Why good lives don’t have to cost the Earth

nef (the new economics foundation) is pleased to announce the release of the Happy Planet Index 2.0, the second global ranking of the ecological efficiency with which the world’s nations deliver long and happy lives for the people who live there. The report reveals a surprising picture of the relative wealth and progress of nations:

Latin America tops the Index with Costa Rica the ’greenest and happiest’ country. Nine of the ten highest-scoring nations are Latin American or Caribbean

The USA, China and India were all ‘greener and happier’ twenty years ago than today

The World’s richest plummet from 1960s to late 1970s, with scores still lower today than 1961

The UK comes 74th, USA 114th out of 143 nations surveyed.

The new Index is based on improved data for 143 countries around the world, representing 99 per cent of the world’s population. By stripping the economy back to its ultimate outputs (lives of varying length and happiness) and fundamental inputs (the Earth’s finite resources) the HPI is the definitive efficiency measure. It provides a clear guide to what matters to us and what matters for the planet.

We hope you enjoy studying the index and would encourage you to share this email with colleagues. We believe that the multiple crises we face provide a unique opportunity for societies around the world to speak out for a happier planet, to identify a new vision of progress, and to demand new tools to help us work towards it. The HPI is one of these tools. But if it is to be effective it must also inspire people to act. Please join the Soil Association, Friends of the Earth, the World Development Movement, Onehundredmonths, 38 degrees, the Gaia Foundation and others by signing nef’s Happy Planet Charter to start this process of change

The full report and data are available for free download at the accompanying web-site: www.happyplanetindex.org

www.happyplanetindex.org

nef was awarded the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies' Award for the Betterment of the Human Condition 2007, in recognition of our work on the Happy Planet Index.

Are your Community Indicators making a difference?

2009-06-26T11:34:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I led a lunchtime conversation via webinar on the question, Are your community indicators making a difference? The webinar was sponsored by the Community Indicators Consortium and was a members-only event, and I know several dozen of you were disappointed in not being able to attend. I thought I'd summarize my notes for both the attendees and those who missed the event, and continue the conversation. (Plus you ought to join CIC to not miss out on their next webinar!)

For the webinar, I'm speaking from the experience of an organization that is currently working on its 25th annual community indicators report. We've seen a generation of community leaders who have stepped into leadership roles that have always had our indicator reports there to guide them. Along the way, we've learned a little bit (through many trials and lots of errors!) about how to tell if your indicators are being effective.

I tried to organize my remarks this way:

One topic: Measuring the effectiveness of your indicators project

Two key questions: Who is your intended audience and what are your intended results?
Three meta issues: Design, Timing, and Source

Five areas to measure results

(I know there's no four. Feel free to chime in with what I missed.)

Let's jump to the two key questions: intended audience and intended results. Defining your audience is not easy work, but it is critical forthe rest of the discussion. Are you producing your indicators for elected officials? For public officials (the non-elected ones behave differently than those who need to campaign for their positions)? For community activists? For statisticians and data professionals? For chambers of commerce and business groups? For United Ways, community foundations, or other funders of non-profits? For grantwriters? For non-profit organizations and service providers? For everyday citizens? For students? For the media?

You may want everyone to use your indicators. I know the world would be a better place if everyone read and internalized every report I produce. But who is/are your primary audience?

And what do you want them to do with the indicators? Possible intended results include:

Inform/ educate/ raise awareness
Build shared priorities
Shape decision-making
Influence budget allocations
Define public policy
Inspire action
Demand accountability
Measure performance/outcomes

And there are more possibilities. Before we can deal with the big question -- are your indicators making a difference -- we have to be able to answer these two key questions -- who do you want to do what with your data.

In my organization in Jacksonville, the question of indicator effectiveness is driven by a Model of Community Improvement. It's our "theory of change" that explains why we do indicators and what we hope to accomplish with them. I'll include the model below:

Briefly, we suggest that change begins when we identify what change we want -- we create a vision for the future, based on our shared values in a community. (I know we like to think data are objective, but every indicator we include in our reports is a value judgement, as is every include we don't include. Every desired direction in a trend line is a value judgement. Go ahead and begin by articulating the values, instead of assuming implicit agreement on them.)

In order to know where we are as a community in relationship to that vision, we develop indicators. These community indicators then help us determine where we are falling short, what our priorities for action are, and inform the research, planning, and strategizing processes. The indicators themselves don't tell us what to do -- they are descriptive, not prescriptive. They do tell us where we need to do something, and we suggest that indicators be accompanied by planning processes to determine what to do about the indicators that fall short of our desired expectations.

Plans require action, which is the next step in the model. If we can act ourselves, we do so; if we need to convince others to act, then advocacy is required to get the desired actions.

Actions have consequences; the outcomes or results of those actions then need to be assessed to see if they achieved the desired results. Here is where our indicators come into play again -- are we closer to where we want to be? Based on the indicators, we can determine if we need to reshape our vision, adjust what we're measuring, or go back to the drawing board and develop new plans.

Indicators play two critical roles in our model for community change -- they identify priorities for action, and they assess the results of that action. In order to measure the effectiveness of our indicators, then, we measure how well they serve both of those functions.

This isn't the only possible theory of change, of course. Yours might be quite different. But detemining indicator effectiveness has to include some thinking about the model you're using in applying those indicators. Why are you measuring indicators? What difference do you want your community indicators to make?

That moves us from our two key questions to our three meta issues: design, timing, and source.

By design, I mean simply presenting the information so that your intended audience can use it to achieve the intended results. We don't think about design that way, I'm afraid. We look at what looks cool, what our peers are accomplishing, and what we like to see. We want to present our data in the most impactful way possible -- but many times, we're thinking about what is most impactful to us. And we tend to be different than our targeted audiences.

Elected officials, for example, tend to want the information presented clearly on one printed page in their hand when they need it. Researchers want more detail. Grantwriters need different kids of data break-outs. Regular citizens need something that's not so intimidating and doesn't make them feel like they're back in math class. Your design has to meet the needs of your audience in a way that allows and encourages them to use the information to achieve the desired outcomes. (On the webinar, I shared a quick succession of a series of indicator reports, both print and web-based, to show the wide variety out there. If you've been reading this blog, you've seen the examples and many more. Not every report needs to look alike -- but to work, they have to meet the intended audience where they are!)

By timing, I mean three things: time of year, update frequency, and data relevancy. The report needs to coincide with the decision cycles it hopes to influence, and the information in it needs to be current enough to influence action. For example, one of our intended audiences is our local United Way's resource allocation team. They need the information in our report to inform their decisions in allocating money to different programs. The report needs to be available before they meet, but not too far before they meet because the information in the report needs to be as current as possible. They make decisions on an annual basis, so to institutionalize the indicators in the decision-making cycle the indicators need to be updated annually. If your indicators are out of sync with your intended audience, they won't be used to achieve your intended results -- they become an interesting curiosity, not a decision necessity.

By source, I'm talking about who you are as an organization. When you publish your indicator report, is it seen as trusted information from a trusted place? Take a moment for some painful introspection. In general, data from advocacy organizations are not trusted by people without a shared belief in the cause. If your mission is to tell people to put children first, and you issue a report with indicators in it that say children should come first, your organization values will cloud the usefulness of that data. Your indicators will not be used by people who don't already believe children should come first.

How open and transparent is your indicator selection process? Who determines which indicators are chosen? Does the community know why you're measuring what you do? How open and transparent is your data review process?

Sometimes we have to choose our role in the community. It is remarkably difficult to be the trusted neutral source for information AND the community advocate for a single position. It almost never works to try to be both.

Once we have dealt with these issues, we can look at how we measure ourselves and the effectiveness of our indicators. There are at least five different areas in which we can look at effectiveness:

Explicit use of indicators in information sharing. By this I mean the number of times your indicators are used by other people (media, public officials, other organizations, your intended audience) in talking about the issue. For example, we have been able to track not just the media coverage of our report releases, but the way the indicators have been used over the course of a year to talk about issues, to justify positions, or to advocate for a cause. If the intended result is to raise awareness, you can track how the indicators are being used for that purpose and how often your reported is cited, linked to, or quoted.
Explicit use of indicators in decision-making. We find in whereas clauses and in public debates the use of our indicators in making key decisions. Sometimes we are asked to present the data to a decision-making body. Sometimes the indicators are cited in justifying decisions. Sometimes people will come to us and thank us for having the indicators available which helped them prevail in a political decision or in receiving a grant. If your intended result is to influence decision-making, track these. We also survey our intended audience and ask them about how they have used the indicators in their decision-making.
Institutionalization of indicators in decision-making. This is where the process of making decisions are built with the data report in mind. This is an important outcome we work towards. This can include policy and budget decision-making, but it can embrace many other things. Our local Leadership Jacksonville program builds its curricula for its four leadership programs with our indicators in mind -- all participants receive a copy of the report, and they are encouraged to use the indicators to better understand the community. Think about who you want to use the indicators, and in what fashion, and then help them design their processes with the indicators as a fundamental/necessary piece of that process. Remember the issue of timing!
Cross-disciplinary/cross-institutional priority-setting and collaboration around identified issues. Your indicators can help set the community agenda. What priorities have you identified? Who has embraced those priorities? More importantly, who has stepped out of their silo or comfort zone to step up to a shared community priority identified by your indicators? In our case, we pay attention when the indicators are used by our Chamber or Mayor to tackle an issue that's not traditionally their focus or responsibility, or when multiple groups join together in a common cause identified by the indicators. That's a desired result, and we note that activity.
Improvements in the indicators themselves. Your measure indicators that you want to improve. They're important, or else you wouldn't measure them. Our model for community improvement demands that we pay attention to what the indicators are telling us -- are we moving closer to the desired goals? If none of your indicators are getting better over an extended period of time, then your report isn't being effective in motivating change.

That's a summary of what we talked about in the webinar. I'm interested in your comments and suggestions to continue to conversation.