JCCI Releases 25th Annual Quality of Life Progress Report

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.

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JCCI Releases 5th Annual Race Relations Progress Report

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.

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Londrina, Brazil and Using Community Indicators for Transformation

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.

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Richmond, Indiana Using Community Indicators for Community Discussion

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.

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JCCI Releases New Indicators Website

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!

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Canada's Social Indicators Show Poverty Is Greatest Challenge

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.

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Stiglitz Commission Reports; Sarkozy Implements

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.

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Community Indicators Projects Underway: Buffalo and Greensboro

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!

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Report Release: Roanoke, Virginia

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.)

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Report Release: Kaua'i Community Indicators Report 2008

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.

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Cutest Indicators Ever!

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!

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Patchwork Nation

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!

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Data Update: Annie E. Casey Releases 2009 KIDS COUNT

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.

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Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project Releases Report

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)

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Greater Louisville Project

The Greater Louisville Project has released their 2009 Competitive City Report (PDF), and I commend it to you for several reasons.

First, I want you to look at the amount of information the report conveys in 7 pages. They have historical, current, and projected data over a number of indicators that show Louisville's place among its peer cities. (I was particulary interested because Jacksonville is one of those peer cities selected -- the more research others do about Jacksonville, the easier my job becomes!)

Second, the report is focused on a single goal -- "to move Louisville into the top tier among its peer cities by the end of this decade." To do that, they identified three "deep drivers" -- Education (specifically raising educational attainment to develop a more highly skilled workforce), Jobs (21st century industry and jobs), and Quality of Place (which deals with the urban vitality required to attract talent and the 21st century industry.) Each of the indicators then become linked to one of the drivers and linked directly to the goal.

Third, the mix of graphics and use of color makes the report engaging. You get the picture quickly.

Fourth, the website is engaging. You get the overview, and then can click through any of the three deep drivers, and then go to any chart, and then get an Excel data chart for each indicator -- I like the way they meet the information needs of multiple audiences.

The last thing I'll mention is that I liked how Jacksonville was improving -- our rates of progress, specifically in educational attainment and household income, have been a concentrated local concern, and I'm glad to see other people taking notice of our growth in these areas. Plus check out Jacksonville's parkland indicator! Hooray for preserving land as a recreational asset, environmental protection, and growth management tool!

Anyway, check out the report, and keep the new report release information coming.

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Indicators Report: Whatcom Counts

Elizabeth Jennings, Executive Director of the Whatcom Coalition for Healthy Communities in Whatcom County, Washington (Bellingham area) sent me a note to look at their indicators website, Whatcom Counts.

The focus of the website is on community health indicators. They do some nice things with the site that I think community indicators practitioners should pay attention to.

First, they use dashboard images well to identify where the indicators are against a scale of where they ought to be. The visualizations appear as mini-dashboards, gauges marked off in red, yellow, and green, so that the message is easily recognizable, even without any numbers attached. Clicking through the image gives you the current value, the values for red/green/yellow, and a mouseover gives you a legend that explains if the comparisons are made over time, by average, or by region.

Secondly, clicking through the indicator gives you more detailed information, including what the indicator measures, why it is important, technical notes, source information, the URL of the source, the URL of the data, and a graph of time-series data. I appreciate this attention to the metadata needs of the end user, and applaud how they've taken a simplified image and combined it with more detailed data to meet needs of multiple user types.

Third, I like the grouping of the indicators by topic centers (with a broad vision of what constitutes community health), as well as providing the option to search for individual indicators. The interface for finding indicators appears intuitive and easy to use.

Fourth, i like the bringing together of multiple information formats -- indicators/statistics, reports/data, and current news. The inclusion of a "feature story" on the main page provides ways to engage with the information for those who are not comfortable extracting meaning by themselves from the data, and provides a context for understanding how the indicators interact with key community issues.

Last, I like the way the user is given options to Click -- Learn -- Act. The Act section is interesting; they've provided the following links:

ACT - Get involved. Apply information and ideas to an issue that is important to you.
Promising Practices - Find solutions
Local Resources - Get involved locally
Contribute Content - Submit content

I think this is an exciting presentation of information. Elizabeth writes:

"Since launching in 2006, we’ve been piloting how to use the site as a tool in our community convening work, not just a static source of information. Our traffic has grown from about 1,500 visits per month at the beginning of 2008 to over 9,000 in January 2009. "

I think you'll agree that they're doing some remarkable work. Take a look and let me know what you think.

And keep sharing with me your indicators projects! We all benefit when we can learn from each other.

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JCCI Releases Report on City Government Finances

The Jacksonville Community Council Inc. (JCCI) has released a new study called Our Money, Our City: Financing Jacksonville's Future. The report is a result of eight months of work of a volunteer citizen task force exploring local government finances.

I share this with you because one of the conclusions of the report speaks to our ongoing conversations about government performance measures. From the report:

Jacksonville lacks the kind of transparent performance management measurement and benchmarking systems necessary to demonstrate efficiency and effectiveness in
government, and to build confidence in government’s stewardship of taxpayer money. Therefore, many residents of Jacksonville do not trust government to spend their tax
money wisely.

The report recommends that:

Based on a clearly stated set of roles and priorities for City government, the Mayor and City Council should establish and make publicly available explicit financial and operating goals together with appropriate performance standards (i.e. “benchmarks”) for use in evaluating actual performance. This level of accountability is critical for providing citizens with a tool to help determine the effectiveness of local government as well as the efficient use of taxpayer dollars. As part of developing this performance measurement system, the City of Jacksonville should participate in state and national organizations, such as the Florida Benchmarking Consortium, which allow cities to compare performance in key areas with other cities known for delivering high levels of service with high efficiency.

At the study release press conference, attended by over 150 community leaders and interested citizens, study chair J.F. Bryan IV said, "We don’t have the kind of transparent performance management, measurement and benchmarking systems needed to adequately demonstrate efficiency and effectiveness. You can’t manage what you don’t measure."

The early press reports of the study focus on the current financial crisis being experienced by the City and the hard choices between raising revenues and/or cutting services that Jacksonville must make. But central to making those decisions is the need to build public trust, and the development of transparent performance measures is seen as a critical component to developing that trust.

I'll keep you informed as the conversation continues ... this promises to be an interesting opportunity to transform the relationship between the people and government. I thought this group might want to think about the connections between community indicator systems and government performance measures that are designed for public trust, not just internal management efficiencies.

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New Indicators Report: Rochester, NY

ACT Rochester (ACTRochester.org), a partnership of the Rochester Area Community Foundation and the United Way of Greater Rochester, has launched a new community indicators website with "a wealth of information for everyone from policy makers to parents," according to Jennifer Leonard, Executive Director of the Community Foundation.

From ACT Rochester's website:

The mission of ACT Rochester is to stimulate community solutions to our most critical challenges by changing the culture of public discussion and debate. This will be achieved through focused, independent and objective measurement of key community indicators, through diverse and timely dialogue and by promoting results-oriented actions.

We hope that the comprehensive data and other information contained here will serve as a focal point for formal and informal community forums and inspire you and others in the community to share comments and participate in polls, which will be added to the Website in the coming months. In addition, we will be scheduling a variety of community discussions and activities beginning in the fall of 2009.

The name ACT Rochester urges action, specifically in response to the issues highlighted by the data. The name also stands for Achieving Community Targets, which signals the potential to establish specific targets or goals for improvement. These targets will be the result of the community involvement process, and will form the future development of ACT Rochester.

ACT Rochester currently covers a seven-county region: Genesee, Livingston, Monroe, Ontario, Orleans, Wayne and Wyoming. This Website contains indicators, analysis of trends, summaries of community efforts to address issues and numerous listings of community resources.

It's a nice website -- the structure is easy to navigate, the indicators are clear and easily readable, the explanatory notes (What does this measure?, Why is this important?, How is our region performing?) well-written, and the options to customize the chart or download the data as a *.csv file are greatly appreciated.

The site has a wealth of information, and it's worth taking a look. Nice job!

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New Indicators Report Underway in Issaquah, WA

The City of Issaquah (located just east of Seattle) has launched a new Issaquah Sustainable City Indicators project. The City convened a panel of community leaders they called the "Sustainability Sounding Board" with the charge to "help weigh the interconnected issues of sustainability and provide recommendations on ways to measure progress toward sustainability in our community."

The Board has issued its report, available in PDF format here. They call on the City to measure a set of sustainability indicators to assist in planning and policy-making and to educate the community. The ChamberPost blog says that:

The City's Resource Conservation Office (RCO), along with staff from Planning and Economic Development, will now set tangible goals for each of these indicators, as well as collect the data needed to actually measure Issaquah's progress. The City's first "report card" is scheduled to be released a year from now.

The report is of considerable interest, as it explains the process and the reasoning the group used in deciding which indicators to measure. I like what the report says:

The Sounding Board recognizes that our work is a starting point to a more ambitious goal of taking Issaquah’s sustainability leadership to a higher level. The intent of this project was to establish a set of measures to track what matters to Issaquah – to measure progress towards a sustainable vision. However, the important next step is to use the tool to communicate and motivate success. Putting our recommendations into action requires additional work with community partners to further refine the indicators and collect data, establish benchmarks and goals, communicate progress, and inspire action across the Issaquah community. Specifically, taking our recommendations forward involves:

Refining some indicators; beginning data collection. Several of the recommended indicators will need further refinement with the help of community partners to design the most meaningful metrics, as well as to acquire the necessary data. In many cases, data are already available. In others, new work to collect data will be needed in order to effectively track progress.

Reporting and communicating sustainability progress regularly. Communicating sustainability progress across city departments, with the City Council, and to the broader community on a regular basis is critical to spreading awareness, creating community collaboration, and driving positive change.

Take a look! I'm really looking forward to their first indicators report sometime next year.

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New Community Indicators Report: Pierce County, Washington

A new community indicators report has been released -- this one in Pierce County, Washington, provided by the United Way of Pierce County.

Here is a local news story describing the project.

Please continue to let me know of new indicator report releases. Thanks!

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