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 Some of the thinking is outdated, and many of the links may have broken over time.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Data Visualization: Federal Budget


While it may not be as straight-forward as the AGA's Citizen-Centric Reporting Initiative, this Death and Taxes 2009 poster of the federal budget is pretty amazing.

Here's how they describe the image:

"Death and Taxes: 2009" is a representational poster of the federal discretionary budget; the amount of money that is spent at the discretion of your elected representatives in Congress. Basically, your federal income taxes. The data is from the President's budget request for 2009. It will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress by October 1st to begin the fiscal year.

The poster provides a uniquely revealing look at our national priorities, that fluctuate yearly, according to the wishes of the President, the power of Congress, and the will of the people. If you pay taxes, then you have paid for a small part of everything in the poster.

They're selling the poster, so don't view this as an advertisement. Instead, look at the sheer volume of information conveyed in one place. Now what could that mean for the way we display community indicators? What if our indicators were laid out, not in reports or tables, but in some sort of interconnected graphical representation suitable for framing? How cool would that be?



1 comment:

  1. If you gonna do something like that you should have very clear what are you gonna rate, the best thing now is you can do it by yourself, with the social networks it's very easy and if you want to get somefresh air make a paper with questions and made some copies and go to downtown.
    Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete