Enhancing the art and science of community indicators and building a network of interested people.
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 Some of the thinking is outdated, and many of the links may have broken over time.
Showing posts with label data display tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label data display tools. Show all posts
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
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!
Read more ...
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.")
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:
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.
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:
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.
I just received a press release from PolicyMap that the readers of this blog might be interested in.
TRF’s PolicyMap.com Unveils Version 2.0
Upgraded Online Mapping Site Lets Users Layer and Compare Data
(Philadelphia) May 12, 2009 – TRF’s PolicyMap.com today unveiled version 2.0. The newest version of this revolutionary website provides quick and flexible analysis of neighborhood-level data nationwide. At subscribers’ fingertips now are answers to questions relevant to job training (e.g. Where are neighborhoods with low educational attainment rates and low household incomes, but close to mass transit?), housing (e.g. Where are high poverty areas in close proximity to a mass transit stop and in good school districts?), energy (e.g. Where are stable communities with high utility costs, potentially most in need of home weatherization assistance?) and more.
With PolicyMap.com 2.0, professionals are now able to match and compare up to three custom criteria for any neighborhood in the nation. The PolicyMap upgrade is a major breakthrough, making good on PolicyMap’s promise to empower policymakers and professionals with handy access to reliable market and demographic data and analytical tools in a single Web-based location.
With PolicyMap.com 2.0, those involved in deciding where and how to spend unprecedented stimulus dollars or foundations deciding how to allocate limited resources have a quick and flexible tool for searching for those neighborhoods where intervention could matter most.
“With the introduction of PolicyMap Analytics, TRF’s PolicyMap.com can reshape how policymakers use data and maps to understand the markets in which they work,” said Jeremy Nowak, President of TRF. “PolicyMap is the simple, fast, and efficient platform that many are demanding to guide policy decisions and help strategically allocate resources.”
PolicyMap subscribers can find those neighborhoods that meet up to three criteria from more than 4,000 data indicators related to demographics, real estate markets, education, employment, money and income, crime, energy, and public investments. TRF aggregates data from a variety of public and private sources including U.S. Census, Claritas, FBI, IRS, the Postal Service, and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. Additional PolicyMap 2.0 functionality lets users rank data, download public datasets and provides for an extraordinary level of customization.
“PolicyMap offers tools both for us as the investor and for the organizations that we support, offering both of us the detailed neighborhood data to plan for real impact," said Lois Greco, Senior Vice President and Evaluation Officer, Wachovia Regional Foundation.
Nearly 150,000 people have used PolicyMap since the site launched just under a year ago. To date, PolicyMap has more than 11,000 registered users. Its varied subscribers include the Federal Reserve of Philadelphia, foundations such as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, public agencies including the New Jersey Housing Mortgage Finance Agency, private entities like Comcast as well as nonprofit community organizations nationwide. PolicyMap is a 2009 finalist for CNET’s Webware100 award.
About TRF’s PolicyMap.com PolicyMap is an online mapping tool that makes it quick and easy to gather and analyze geocentric information. PolicyMap is a service of The Reinvestment Fund (TRF), a not-for-profit leader in the financing of neighborhood revitalization. TRF developed PolicyMap to empower decision makers with better access to credible market and demographic data. To see how PolicyMap Analytics works, check out http://blog.policymap.com/?p=2334. To learn more about PolicyMap, visit www.policymap.com. To learn more about TRF, visit www.trfund.com.Read more ...
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.
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.)
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.
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?
I've been getting some grief from folks who want to know why I haven't posted my presentation from the NAPC Conference on Data Displays -- 30 Examples in 30 Minutes. The short answer is that the presentation was a conglomeration of a whole lot of stuff that didn't fit easily into one PowerPoint presentation, and the mishmash of stuff that WAS in my Open-Office-Powerpoint-equivalent-presentation is way too big to e-mail. I tried PDF'ing the whole thing and lost most of the fun interactive portions, and then tried re-creating the whole thing as a movie, but ended up aggravated by the limitations of time and technology to do what I wanted.
Enough of my whining. After the jump are the different examples I showed the group -- the intent was to get a conversation started and people thinking about new ways to tell stories with data, and for those who have been following this blog for a while, nearly everything I shared has been discussed in much greater detail already. I hope you enjoy the overview -- feel free to remind me of all the really cool stuff I left out.
Now click on the link to get the whole presentation. (For any of the images, clicking on them should make them larger and hopefully more readable.) To get the group moving and a little less scared of talking about data visualization techniques, we began with Sid the Science Kid:
(Go ahead and play the video. This is fun. Dance along if you need to.) Introduction
When we work with data in communities, we use that data to tell stories and inspire action. Data should make our story-telling more relevant, impactful, truthful, and powerful.
Instead, we take good stories like this one:
And then we use data to turn them into messages like this one, which drains any of the excitement and meaning out of the story:
Spatial relationships among the numbers of items, numbers of characters, and relative sizes mentioned, before Goldilocks encounter
Hans Rosling talks about the importance of good data presentation by showing sheet music from Chopin, and asked if we could tell how beautiful it was. A composer, who specializes in this, can look at the notes and see the beauty. We can't, because all we could see were the notes -- we needed an instrument and someone to play it. Even an electronic keyboard, would help -- they're inexpensive and a child can play them. Too often we get excited about statistics, but all we present to the public are the notes, not the music.
Nathan Yau says, "Approach data visualization as if you were telling a story. What kind of story are you trying to tell? Is it a report or is it a novel? Do you want to convince people that something is necessary? Think character development. Every data point has a story behind it the same way that every character in a book has a past, present, and future. There are interactions and relationships between those data points. It's up to you to find them."
Summary: It's not the data, it's the presentation. Just see what XKCD has to say about it:
(I know I only shared two at the conference, but I meant to show all three and just ran out of time.)
www.ChartChooser.com is one approach that brings the template you choose back into Excel for you.
Andrew Abela's Flow chart for charts should be printed out and hung above your desk.
The Periodic Table of Visualization Methods is more fun than we should be allowed to have on company time. Use your mouse to discover all the options they have for you. The color codes help you determine which of the options fit the data you have and the message you're trying to convey.
You may want to use a number of online tools to share your story. Here are some useful ones you should be aware of:
Swivel is a fun way to create graphs and share data.
Many Eyes is similar in its approach, with different visualization tools available.
Widgenie adds a little movement when you share graphs online.
And for ease of use and the unusual nature of the "data" presented, nothing beats GraphJam. Making It Move
This next section looks at how you can tell stories better when you've got the notion to add a little motion. This may not be the approach you want to take with all the stories you have to tell, but for some messages, movement makes the data come alive.
We mentioned GapMinder earlier. Now click this link to see what GapMinder technology can do to tell multi-faceted, time-series stories that hit close to home.
A couple of years ago, I shared a motion-based graph from Speculative Bubble at the NAPC conference, to warn us to prepare for the coming real estate collapse. Atari's Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, a game program, was used to create a roller coaster that follows the trend lines and lets you "ride" the graph. Compelling, isn't it? (Hold on to something while you watch this!)
Mapping Worlds lets you choose between the USA and the World for data displays. I like this map of the aging population:
And that should transition us to:
Using Maps To Tell Your Story
The first site I wanted to link to was DataPlace. Right now, it's undergoing site maintenance -- I'll add something more to this when it comes back online -- unless I forget, in which case feel free to remind me to do so.
So go to PolicyMap and poke around -- there's a great deal of free data (registration required, but that's free too) and additional information/tools available for those who subscribe.
Instant Atlas is another mapping software tool -- this one's not free, but the samples are really interesting examples of how to use maps to tell stories with data.
Don't forget Google Earth as a free mapping software tool with opportunities to customize the display with your own data. Google Earth is inspiring a great number of mashups, such as CrashStat 2.0 and EveryBlock -- as great examples of what you can do with data and maps to create messages and transmit information.
I don't think I had time to do more than holler out "Check out GraphWise!" in my presentation. I said a little more about it here when it was first launched. It's not loading right for me today, so fans of GraphWise should remind me to say something more about it when I can get back into the site.
I closed the presentation with a rapid-fire look at some imagines that use graphs and images in ways to make people sit up and notice. I called this section:
The challenge we have is to display the data in ways that provoke conversation and promote understanding. I think this chart does that. A similar U.S. map is also available:
Are you still counting to see if I've provided 30 examples of data display techniques in 30 minutes? I'm nearly done. The last section is called: What About the Big Numbers?
Sometimes we have to tell stories with large numbers. Making those stories come alive poses special challenges.
Here's another effort to help people visualize large numbers, this time using rice to tell the stories. (Watch the video at the link!)
Let's finish with Chris Jordan, artist and photographer, as he helps us understand the impact we can make with data -- if we can help people visualize the data in ways that speak to their hearts.
I've been poking around on a fun site from the good folks at OECD, and liking what I'm finding. The site is called OECD Regional Statistics, and it's off to a pretty good start.
The site opens with maps of the world, focused down to a country/state level. The focus is not on nations, however, but on smaller geographies -- I could scale down to my metro region fairly rapidly. (see tabs for "Large Regions" and "Small Regions.") And I could then compare my metro with other similarly-sized geographies on a global basis.
There's some interesting information there, mostly demographic and labor market information. What's really interesting is that it's organized by "stories," which they describe as "Stories load some indicators into the graphs to the left and explain what you see." They also provide opportunities to load in other stories and/or indicators, either from their data sets or you can load your own.
I was stumbling around looking for some information about the data when I finally figured out to mouseover the "i" icons for information. This gave me the description of the indicator and the year measured. More information is presumably available at OECD Stat.Extracts, but I found it a little intimidating to try to match the data I was looking at to the data in their collection. It ought to be easier to discover the source of the data!
All in all, though, it's an exciting beginning to use GapMinder-style displays to examine intersections of data in 2 or 3 dimensions across sub-national regions. I highly recommend trying out the site and seeing the insights it might give you about your community and its relative place among similar communities in the world.
I'd enjoy hearing from you about your experiences with this site.
Here's what you can do: Go to your city (within the United States), and zoom in to the level you're interested in. (It's Microsoft Virtual Earth based, which isn't as easy to navigate as Google Earth, but it's not too hard -- I just keep ending up in the Atlantic Ocean if I zoom in too far without centering in on my city first.)
Now watch the time-series map display housing construction by year, and see visually the housing patterns in your community over the last 100+ years. Pretty amazing, isn't it?
I enjoyed checking on the development patterns of different cities in the U.S. and comparing how they grew, and at what rates.
I don't know how to integrate this kind of visualization into a local community indicators project as yet ... I'd be interested in your thoughts. But it was fascinating to watch anyway.
With the Results Scorecard, leaders in the public and nonprofit sectors will accelerate the improvement of the quality of life in their communities and the performance of their agencies and programs. Importantly, the Results Scorecard aligns indicators of community well-being with organizational performance measures. A web-based tool, the Results Scorecard is easy to use and implement -- and affordable.
The Results Scorecard is the only decision software designed specifically to support the RBA methodology, described by Mark Friedman in Trying Hard is Not Good Enough (Trafford 2005). The Results Scorecard's architecture, with built-in tools and templates, is particularly useful for efficient and collaborative decision making on an ongoing basis at both the community and program levels.
Feel free to contact us at 301-907-7541 with any questions or to schedule a private demo if you can't make the webinar on April 14, 2009.
I apologize for taking so long to update this blog -- the piles of work on my desk got too big and I had to focus on doing stuff (instead of just writing about doing stuff) for a little while. The good news is, a whole bunch of exciting news is coming soon -- this mini-hiatus turned out to be highly productive. (And I'm on a web conference right now discussing the intersection of community indicators and government performance measures, so I'm not slacking right now, I'm multi-tasking!)
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