Community Indicators for Your Community

Real, lasting community change is built around knowing where you are, where you want to be, and whether your efforts are making a difference. Indicators are a necessary ingredient for sustainable change. And the process of selecting community indicators -- who chooses, how they choose, what they choose -- is as important as the data you select.

This is an archive of thoughts I had about indicators and the community indicators movement. Some of the thinking is outdated, and many of the links may have broken over time.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

More Fun Maps

There's a link to the Strange Maps blog on the left-hand column. I'd like to encourage community indicators practitioners to take a look at it, if you haven't recently.

Besides an amusing map of Montana (divided into fringe groups), there's this great map about blondness in Europe:



Why do I point out these maps? Because community indicators are about storytelling, and storytelling is often about visualizations, and because most community indicator reports have fascinating information obscured by conventional Excel-created charts and graphs.

I don't have the answers to perfect data display technology or storytelling. Dr. Hans Rosling suggests technology -- the right instrument -- is an important part of the solution.

I just know that sometimes the creative-but-silly ways other people display information can trigger a new way to look at our continuing problem of making data relevant and meaningful in the lives of ordinary people and decision makers in our community.

So take a peek -- it's fun, and I applaud the work they're doing to pull together these maps.

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