Community Indicators: Citizen Scientists

I like the trend highlighted in this report from CNN's SciTech blog -- everyday people contributing to data collection. John Sutter calls it the "democratization of science" -- people capturing photos of wildlife, entering GPS locations of animals found, recording bird migrations -- all adding to a much broader scientific picture. It's the same message we've been trumpeting about data openness -- except it's headed the other way, with ordinary citizens providing information that scales upward.

This brings data sharing full circle, and I like it. See how you can be involved with this list of citizen scientist opportunities. I think we as community indicators practitioners ought to be paying attention to this trend, and with the right kind of framework/schema, we can be haviing more and more citizen-generated data aggregating upward to tell us much more about our communities, states, and the country we live in.

If you have experience in citizen-created data collection, please share!

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Demographics: What We Know Is Wrong

I just read a fascinating article at The Wilson Quarterly on world demographics. I highly recommend reading the whole article to get a vastly different picture of world population dynamics than we've been talking about in recent years.

For those of you who are still here and not reading the article like I told you to, here are some highlights:

• "In 2050, according to United Nations projections, it is possible that nearly as many babies will be born in the United States as in China. Indeed, the population of the world’s current demographic colossus will be shrinking."
• "In Russia, the effects of declining fertility are amplified by a phenomenon so extreme that it has given rise to an ominous new ­term—­hypermortality. As a result of the rampant spread of maladies such as HIV/AIDS and alcoholism and the deterioration of the Russian ­health ­care system, says a 2008 report by the UN Development Program, “mortality in Russia is 3–5 times higher for men and twice as high for women” than in other countries at a comparable stage of development. The report—which echoes earlier findings by demographers such as the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Murray ­Feshbach—­predicts that within little more than a decade the ­working-­age population will be shrinking by up to one million people annually. Russia is suffering a demographic decline on a scale that is normally associated with the effects of a major ­war."
• "[B]irthrates of Muslim women in Europe—and around the world—have been falling significantly for some time. ...These sharp reductions in fertility among Muslim immigrants reflect important cultural shifts, which include universal female education, rising living standards, the inculcation of local mores, and widespread availability of contraception. Broadly speaking, birthrates among immigrants tend to rise or fall to the local statistical norm within two ­generations. The decline of Muslim birthrates is a global phenomenon."
• "[T]he total depen­d­ency ratios of the 21st century are going to look remarkably similar to those of the 1960s. In the United States, the most onerous year for dependency was 1965, when there were 95 dependents for every 100 adults between the ages of 20 and 64. That occurred be­cause “dependents” includes people both younger and older than working age. By 2002, there were only 49 dependents for every 100 ­working-­age Americans. By 2025 there are projected to be 80, still well below the peak of 1965. The difference is that while most dependents in the 1960s were young, with their working and saving and contributing lives ahead of them, most of the dependents of 2009 are older, with more dependency still to come. But the point is clear: There is nothing outlandish about having almost as many dependents as working ­adults."

There's more, but that should be enough to pique your interest.

Comments? Agree? Disagree? Implications?

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Google Public Data New Tool Released

The Official Google Blog reports that they've released a new search tool -- one that accesses public information and builds on their acquisition of Trendalyzer.

Here's how it works:

1. Go to Google.com.
   
2. Type in [unemployment rate] or [population], followed by a U.S. state or county. (Just type in the county name -- "unemployment rate duval" worked for me, while "unemployment rate duval county florida" gave me other links but not the publicdata information.)
   
3. The most recent estimates will appear. Click on the publicdata link, and you'll get an interactive table.

The table gave me monthly unemployment rates from 1990 to March 2009 for Duval County, Florida. It then had a list of states and counties and I could click on any one of them and get instant comparative data charted alongside my original county on the graph. Very cool.

Google says,

"The data we're including in this first launch represents just a small fraction of all the interesting public data available on the web. There are statistics for prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers' salaries, number of wildfires, and the list goes on. Reliable information about these kinds of things exists thanks to the hard work of data collectors gathering countless survey forms, and of careful statisticians estimating meaningful indicators that make hidden patterns of the world visible to the eye. All the data we've used in this first launch are produced and published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Division. They did the hard work! We just made the data a bit easier to find and use.

Since Google's acquisition of Trendalyzer two years ago, we have been working on creating a new service that make lots of data instantly available for intuitive, visual exploration. Today's launch is a first step in that direction. We hope people will find this search feature helpful, whether it's used in the classroom, the boardroom or around the kitchen table. We also hope that this will pave the way for public data to take a more central role in informed public conversations.

This is just the beginning. Stay tuned for more."

You can read more about the new tool in this Washington Post article. I'm pretty excited about the possibilities.

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Child Indicators Research Volume Online for Free

This journal is available in its entirety free for a limited time. There's some articles in it that should be of interest to the community indicators practitioner; take a look at the piece on data challenges in developing child well-being indicators and the article called "Beyond GPA."

Here's more details about how to get access to the material in the journal:

Dear Researcher,

We are delighted to offer you FREE access to the entire issue of Child Indicators Research until May 20, 2009. Take advantage of this time-limited offer - bookmark the site, visit it throughout this period and pass the link to your colleagues.

Table of Contents:
Read, download and save these articles online as if you were a subscriber:

• Editorial
  Asher Ben-Arieh
• Creating a Longitudinal Indicator: an Exploratory Analysis of Turbulence
  Kristin Anderson Moore, Sharon Vandivere, Akemi Kinukawa & Thomson Ling
• From Rhetoric to Reality: Challenges in Using Data to Report on a National Set of Child Well-being Indicators Sinad Hanafin and Anne-Marie Brooks
• When Children are Asked About Their Well-being: Towards a Framework for Guiding Policy
  Toby Fattore, Jan Mason & Elizabeth Watson
• The Preliminary Development of the Children's Overall Satisfaction with Schooling Scale (COSSS)
  Justus J. Randolph, Marjaana Kangas & Heli Ruokamo
• Beyond GPA: Toward More Comprehensive Assessments of Students' School Experiences
  Keith J. Zullig, Thomas M. Koopman & E. Scott Huebner

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Job Announcement: Vice President for Policy and Research

From the Corporation for Enterprise Development:

CFED, the Corporation for Enterprise Development, seeks to fill the newly created position of Vice President for Policy & Research. Our successful incumbent will develop, articulate and champion a robust research and policy agenda predicated on a vision of expanding the economic opportunities available to all Americans.

CFED is a leading organization in asset building and economic development, collaborating with diverse partners at the national, state and local level. Current flagship initiatives and programs include our unprecedented Assets and Opportunity Scorecard, a state-by-state analysis of the impact of public policies on individual asset-accumulation; SEED, the national, multi-year children's development account demonstration; I'M HOME, our multi-faceted initiative to build high-quality manufactured homes and create public policies and financing options that support them as an avenue asset-building; and SETI, an innovative exploration of the use of the tax code to scale-up delivery of financial services and business literacy to millions of micro- and small business enterprises. We're deeply engaged in an array of advocacy activities, including universal children's savings accounts, expansion of the Saver's Credit, IDA tax credits and Auto IRA.

The Vice President for Policy and Research will provide vision, direction and a cohesive framework for advancing CFED's evidence-based advocacy strategy, embracing the full spectrum of asset-building and economic development strategies and bringing to fruition a wide array of emerging opportunities at the local, state and federal levels. The Vice President leads a team of 10 professionals and will serve as a member of our executive team, helping to shape our long-term agenda and drive forward CFED's strategic goals. The incumbent will be based in our Washington D.C. office and will report to CFED's President.

For more information and to apply, click here.

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Request for Input on ACS Data Query System

Here's a question and an update from the American Community Survey I thought you might want to respond to: 

Request for Input and Feedback on Advanced Query (AQ) System for ACS Data

The Census Bureau seeks your input and feedback on whether it would be useful to have an Advanced Query (AQ) system for the tabulation of data from the ACS and the Census 2010 short form.

As part of Census 2000 data dissemination, the Census Bureau developed an AQ system that allowed for no-cost, user-specified tabulations from the full microdata file for a limited number of users (because of its experimental nature, the AQ system had restricted access.) It included safeguards against disclosure of identifying information about individuals and housing units.

The AQ system was discontinued in November 2008 due to concerns with emerging IT security risk trends, information on newly discovered vulnerabilities in the legacy AQ system, and the obsolescence of the hardware.  Since then, the Census Bureau has been discussing the possibility of developing a new AQ system for the tabulation of ACS and 2010 Census data.

If you think you would be able to make productive use of such a system, please respond to michelle.e.jiles by May 1, 2009, with examples of the kinds of analyses you would perform with those data. 

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

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New KIDS COUNT Data Center Available

The KIDS COUNT Data Center has been redesigned and is now available for use. This replaces the former CLIKS database, and has been in the works for a little while -- we told you earlier this was coming (and had a sneak peek at the NAPC Conference in March), and now it's here!

From the site:

• The Data Center now has county-level data 4/17/2009

  Welcome to the NEW KIDS COUNT Data Center, the place to get all the information you are looking for about the kids and families living in your community. Now including the information formerly in the Community-Level Information on Kids (CLIKS) site, the KIDS COUNT Data Center has data for states, cities, counties, and school districts.

• New Education and Demographic Data Available 4/17/2009

  The education and demographic sections in Data Across States have been updated to include the 2007 American Community Survey data. Updated data for states and large cities include:
  • Children in households where the household head is a high school dropout
  • Young adults enrolled in or completed college
  • Grandchildren in the care of grandparents

Go check it out!

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Call for Papers: Sustainability Conference

SIXTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENVIRONMENTAL, CULTURAL, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY
University of Cuenca, Ecuador
5-7 January 2010
http://www.SustainabilityConference.com

Here's a note from the conference organizing committee:

We are particularly excited about holding this year's Sustainability Conference in Cuenca, Ecuador. Ecuador is a country of remarkable environmental and cultural resources, and has made significant progress in their sustenance. The Galapagos Islands, for instance, were designated Ecuador's first national park in 1959 and remain one of the most biologically diverse and unique locations in the world. The Cuenca city center, a UNESCO World Heritage Trust site, continues as a site of picturesque and historically important architecture.

This Conference aims to develop a holistic view of sustainability, in which environmental, cultural and economic issues are inseparably interlinked. It will work in a multidisciplinary way, across diverse fields and taking varied perspectives in order to address the fundamentals of sustainability.

The Conference will includes numerous paper, workshop and colloquium presentations by practitioners, teachers and researchers. We would particularly like to invite you to respond to the Conference Call-for-Papers. Presenters may choose to submit written papers for publication in the fully refereed International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and social Sustainability. If you are unable to attend the Conference in person, virtual registrations are also available which allow you to submit a paper for refereeing and possible publication, as well as access to the Journal.

Whether you are a virtual or in-person presenter at this Conference, we also encourage you to present on the Conference YouTube Channel. Please select the Online Sessions link on the Conference website for further details.

The deadline for the next round in the call for papers (a title and short

abstract) is 14 May 2009. Future deadlines will be announced on the Conference website after this date. Proposals are reviewed within two weeks of submission. Full details of the Conference, including an online proposal submission form, may be found at the Conference website

- http://www.SustainabilityConference.com/.

We look forward to receiving your proposal and hope you will be able to join us in Cuenca in January 2010.

Yours Sincerely,

Lucia Astidillo

University of Cuenca, Ecuador

For the Advisory Board, International Conference and Journal on Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability

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Spokane Vitals 3rd Edition Released

A new community indicators report update, Spokane Vitals, is available, thanks to Greater Spokane Incorporated. (I have to pay a lot more attention to Spokane, Washington now, because that's where my wife is from -- about as far away as you can get from Jacksonville, Florida and still stay within the continental U.S.)

There's a nice synopsis of the report available at AmericanTowns.com, or you can download the full report here.

There's a lot of good work in community indicators happening in the Pacific Northwest, which is why the Community Indicators Consortium conference that will be held in Seattle this fall looks so inviting. (The latest news about the conference can be found in their April 2009 newsletter (PDF).)

One of the things I really like about the Spokane report is their inclusion of their peer metro areas, with map included:
I'd appreciate your thoughts on including this kind of frame of reference in your community indicators report. Good idea? How might you improve it?

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If The World Were A Village of 100 People

You've seen the numbers and the lists. But have you seen the pictures? Toby Ng has assembled a set of 20 posters that try to visualize the data in simple terms.
The premise is simple: Take a series of statistics, and translate the percentages to the number of people out of 100 that would live in your world village. Out of the 100 people in your village, for example, 48 would be men, 52 women.

I'm not normally a fan of this attempt to turn statistics into lists of hypothetical villagers. (For example, the list tends to obscure and oversimplify sometimes -- all the wealthy people in the "world village" are Americans? Really?) But these posters are nice, clean, and tell stories that have immediate visual impact.

(I do agree with Flowing Data that some of the images appear random -- did he really use a banana to symbolize sexual orientation?)

Take a look and let me know what you think. How might this approach help get your message across in your community indicators project?

(For more on the topic of visualizing graphs, see Graphs and Charts USA Today Style.)

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TODAY: Results Scorecard Demo

If you haven't signed up yet for the Results Scorecard software demonstration, you're running out of time. The demonstration will be today, Tuesday, April 14, from 12:00-1:30 p.m. EST. Go to ResultsLeadership.org for more information and for the link to sign up for the webinar.

The tool is intended to provide you with the ability to see the "big picture" for community well-being by highlighting both indicators and results.

Additional information also available at ResultsScorecard.com or by calling 301-907-7541.

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