The Children's Defense Fund has issued a report called America's Cradle to Prison Pipeline. The report identifies what it calls "an urgent national crisis at the intersection of poverty and race that puts Black boys at a one in three lifetime risk of going to jail, and Latino boys at a one in six lifetime risk of the same fate."

The narrative is compelling. The photos are haunting. But the real story, and why I'm bringing this report to your attention, is the constellation of indicators that together tell a story that both saddens and overwhelms.

It is in this appendix (PDF document) that we see a series of state-by-state indicators that begin with the number of children and advance chronologically through childbirth, poverty, school, foster care, abuse, dropping out, gun violence, and incarceration. The picture is bleak.

But I would like you to review the use of indicators to make the point. And think about how you use indicators to tell the stories of your community.

I had the opportunity yesterday to explore EveryBlock.com, a new website that captures community information on an address-specific basis for a different way to look at what's happening in your community. Right now the site covers Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, but the author is promising to add more cities over time.

Al's Morning Meeting blog provides a quick assessment of the functionality of the website and its tools. I played around with the site and quickly got Flickr photos, news stories, crime reports, restaurant inspections, business reviews, and a number of other localized information bits about a part of Chicago I knew nothing about.

On the one hand, this is an exciting expansion of usable information into the hands of people who might want to know more about a neighborhood. Combine this with www.zillow.com and you've got an incredible amount of address-specific information in one spot.

On the other hand, however, finding the meaning behind the signal noise just got a little bit harder. What does all of this information mean? What can I do with it? How can I aggregate or constellate the information in a way that tells me the story -- or even a story -- of the neighborhood? Can I draw a conclusion from the information in any way that makes me feel comfortable that I've added to my understanding of the community? Can I make better decisions about public policy or social service provision or economic development at any level more than "gee, that looks awful. don't think I want to live there!"

I don't know the answers to these questions. I'm excited for the product, but I suspect it will take others to figure out how to best use this new tool for community improvement and not just voyeurism.

But you need to know more about the project itself. Here's a selection from an interview with Adrian Holovaty at Poynter Online (click here to read the full article):

Tompkins: What does EveryBlock do?

Holovaty: EveryBlock filters an assortment of local news by location so you can keep track of what's happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over your city. We compile news, we classify it by location/geography, and we present a beautiful, easy-to-use interface that lets people view news in specific locations.

Tompkins: How does EveryBlock work?

Holovaty: There are two main ways of reading news on EveryBlock -- by location and by type. You can search for any address, neighborhood or zip code in the city (more on the city list in a bit), or you can browse by type of information: restaurant inspections, mainstream media articles/blog entries, crimes, building permits, etc.

Tompkins: How does the data gathering/classification work?

Holovaty: We have a sophisticated collection of computer programs that crawl news and information from all around the Web. We've written some algorithms that are able to detect locations in free-form text with a reasonable degree of certainty, and we also manually tag information in cases where the computers don't cut it. This is an area of ongoing experimentation.

Comment here on what you think, or let them know at EveryBlock.com -- they have a nice feedback form to allow for your input on how to make the product better.

Hat Tip: Kathy Pettit

Nick Chrisman has an interesting article in ArcNews in the Fall 2007 issue (which just showed up in my inbox -- don't know how long someone else had been reading it). The article, Living Inside Networks of Knowledge, begins by discussing the history of the architecture of the Internet. He makes the point that:

The Internet was not unprecedented. Connecting a significant portion of the world's population to an integrated network of communication is something our society has done over and over again. The telegraph system was one such system. From its inception in the mid-19th century, the telegraph provided light-speed communications from place to place. It remained centralized, and the last mile involved boys on bicycles, but the overall increase in speed was enormous. The telegraph was followed by the telephone, bringing the equipment right into each house. In a sober analysis, the Internet, as most people use it, simply makes another transition in the details of the connection.

He argues for a transformation in the way we think about knowledge distribution. GIS, which is his subject, is still "living out the original dreams of the 1960s" – we're still using 1974 technology in File Transfer Protocols (FTP) to take a worldwide interconnected network of information providers and users and force onto it the centralized model of the telegraph office.

Here's the exciting part:

As long as the current distribution of geographic power revolves around being a gatekeeper, a custodian of data, the potential of the distributed sensor network is diminished. What is required is an escape from the "Prisoner's Dilemma." [Note: This dilemma comes from game theory: many situations are structured to disfavor cooperation.] And there are glimmers of hope in this regard. In the tightest of information economies, there are "Free Data Movements."

How do we make use of the real power of the internet? Reshaping the "data economy" is a human issue, not a technical one, he says. "Knowledge networks have escaped from the hierarchical structure." Spatial search is a step forward, but even Google Earth misses the social networking side. But the data movement is marching on.

One of the key elements of the technology is the empowerment of citizens to produce their own spatial information, then to present it publicly. This overthrows the specialist model of the centralized model from decades past.

If social networking is the transformative future of the web, then licensing/closed shop/restricted access to tools and data is standing in the way of progress. (You do remember that this newsletter/newspaper is published by ESRI?) This is an incredibly important message, and one that ought to be transforming the way we do our work in community indicators. How open is our information? How open source our software? Are we gatekeepers and presenters of data, or are we part of a network that allows for everyone to be part of both providing and using information?

The knowledge networks of the web contain their own challenges. How do we know which information to trust? How well do we provide metadata so that others can trust the information we provide? How collaborative are we in engaging to build networks of data users and providers?

Read the article at http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/fall07articles/living-inside.html and then comment here. This conversation needs to be louder and more of us need to join in.

Posts have been a little slower lately -- I'm working on a project that should be of interest to the blog readers here, and am looking forward to when it can be brought into beta testing and I can invite all of you to participate. (If any of you are interested in helping in the alpha stage as we deal with site design, please drop me a line.)

In the meantime, I've been talking with the good folks at http://www.activestrategy.com/. (Here's a shout out to Heather Smith!) They have some interesting free webinars on performance improvement, geared largely to private sector and government applications.

They invite the people on this blog to check out their archived webinars -- there's some interesting information available there.

They're providing an intermediate webinar on February 6 for people already familiar with building Balanced Scorecards. They're also doing one on how to leverage the Balanced Scorecard framework within their software, and finally one about BSC in hospitals. He tells me that a public sector webinar probably won't be scheduled until April.

They also have educational seminars coming up this year - the first is in LA, with a general track and a healthcare track. Their first seminar with a public sector track will be in Nashville in September. The information is located here:
http://www.activestrategy.com/events_and_news/seminars/index.aspx.

They also have a blog with a public sector category:
http://www.strategyexecutionblog.com/ese_in_government/index.html.

Take a look and see if this helps meet your needs. Let me know what you think. If you have other resources you'd like the blog audience to know about, drop me a line.

From the NNIP listserve:

Please consider submitting a map for display at the first ever Regional Equity Map Exhibition at Regional Equity '08: The Third National Summit on Equitable Development, Social Justice, and Smart Growth, to be held March 5-8 in New Orleans, Lousiana.

We are looking for maps used to further equitable development in communities and regions. Maps may have been created for any purpose, such as data analysis, community organizing, civic engagement, policy advocacy, planning processes, program implementation, or evaluation.

Submissions are due by February 8, 2008. Please follow the guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.regionalequity08.org/atf/cf/%7BF0BEAA1E-C0AD-4629-A5A9-9925BBAA1467%7D/MapExhibitSubmissionGuidelines_final_feb8.pdf

And to find out more about the Summit and register go to www.regionalequity08.org.