The State of the USA has responded to the New York Times editorial calling for a national indicator program. That's a good thing, because I'm a big fan of the work they've been doing, and I'm getting pretty excited about their official launch, scheduled for some time this fall.

Chris Hoenig, President and CEO of The State of the USA, writes:

In response to a growing call for new ways to achieve shared understanding, increased transparency and improved accountability, a new dialogue is unfolding among Americans and in the media about how to measure the performance and progress of our society. The State of the USA’s mission is to help Americans better assess the progress of the country. We aim to provide key national indicators on the Web as a public service, bearing on major issues ranging from health and the economy, to education and the environment. In the next few months, we will begin by publishing data on key national health indicators, followed by a steady progression of information on other issues. This is a daunting task, which will take some time to accomplish. A working partnership between the public and private sectors will be central to accomplishing this mission.

As a private, non-profit organization dedicated to free information dissemination in the public interest, we rely in particular on working with the people and the products of the U.S. federal statistical system. Without them, we and thousands of other institutions like ours would be unable to make our contributions to better informing the American people. Our role as a private institution allows us to perform an important function that government cannot: combining in one place both public (i.e., official) statistics from federal sources as well as the best quality data from other organizations – commercial, state or international. It is also possible for us to be more selective in our choices of measures that are especially important for Americans to focus on. To do this in a responsible fashion, we rely on an editorial process with a variety of inputs – from polling research and public workshops run by America Speaks and Westat, to expert advice from institutions such as the National Academies. (The National Academies is the umbrella organization for the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine.)

Conversely, there are vital functions that public institutions, like the Federal government, have a unique ability to provide to help Americans assess the progress of the nation. These go beyond the tremendous service of managing the nation’s multi-billion dollar statistical system – the lifeblood of so many decisions in our democracy. From the moment of the State of the USA’s founding, we have encouraged the federal government to create a key national indicator system to ensure that Americans get even better access to valuable data on the changing nature of American society. (The State of the USA engages in limited advocacy on behalf of an independent key national indicator system, which is allowed under the Internal Revenue Service code and governed according to the respective policies of its funders.) Such a system has been recommended to Congress by the GAO, and recent media coverage has highlighted growing bipartisan support for the Key National Indicators Act – a bill to be introduced by Senators Edward M. Kennedy and Michael Enzi. This legislation would establish a bi-partisan commission to create such a system. The commission would then charge the prestigious National Academies with the task of creating and managing the system.

Ever since its founding, America’s democracy has grown and strengthened when the best of the public and private sectors are brought out in appropriately constructed partnerships. As we have also seen recently, it can weaken when these partnerships are neglected or poorly constructed. The historical lesson is not to avoid them or ignore them, but to design and manage them well. It is our greatest hope that, should the Key National Indicators Act be enacted into law, we and many other public and private organizations can make contributions to such a partnership in the interest of the American people and future generations.

Some of you may have noticed the list of blogs on the left-hand side of the page. These are some of the blogs that I think might be of some interest to community indicators practitioners.

As we were going through the latest updating of this site, the blog list was accidentally deleted. I've added several of the blogs on to the list, but I know I'm missing quite a few.

If you would like your own blog linked in, or know another blog you like to follow that the rest of the folks here ought to know about, please let me know and we'll add it to the list.

Thanks!

This is fun -- a challenge to the Duberstein editorial, some self-promotion, and a throwdown challenge to the State of the USA project. Perhaps some controversy in the field will help draw attention to it -- it's embarrassing that the editorial could have been written without at least acknowledging the work already occurring on the subject.

From Tom Paper:

Dear Editor,

Ken Duberstein wrote in an opinion piece titled “1,000 Points of Data” on February 23^rd that “What we need now is a Web-based system for measuring our changing society with key national indicators — in a free, public, easy-to-use form.”

Such a system already exists in a site called Data360 (see www.data360.org). In business, successful companies build operating reports that are published internally, usually on a monthly basis, that explain very clearly (and visually) the state of the world for that business. When I started my consulting practice, five years ago, I asked myself, “where is my business report for the state of the world?” The answer was that insightful and succinct reports about the state of the world are not publicly available (although if I was a client of Goldman, Sachs I could get an insightful report on almost any subject, but, alas, I was not a client). And so I went about building a tool that would be web-based, free and tell stories graphically with data that left the reader feeling more certain about the state of the world. Four years later, that tool is Data360, a free, public, open-source, easy-to-use and objective tool for reporting on what’s so in the world. Steven Levitt positively reviewed our site in May of 2007, as have many others.

There are other sites today helping to unlock the data in our world, including Swivel and Many-Eyes, although anyone can load data onto these sites and so the certitude of the data presented is not always known. There are also quasi-government sites like State of the USA that they are dauntingly large, not fully launched and not customer-focused. What is really needed is a site like Wikipedia, that can grow organically and respond to the interests of readers. I gave a talk last June at the Community Indicators Conference in Washington, DC, in which I pointed out that the trend towards data democratization is happening, but for it to fully take hold, there are some key principles that must be followed, the most important of which are:

1.Integrity. Data presented graphically must have integrity. Seems simple, but as Mark Twain once said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”

2.Dynamic. The data must be updated on a regular basis so that it is current. Business people will see the exact same report every month, updated for current data, and, because of that repetition, the thing that they begin to notice is how things are changing.

3.Interpreted. The data must be interpreted. This is the most challenging principle, because data is like a haystack. It’s easy to present a lot, but hard to present just what is important. The best tool will make an interpretation that is distilling AND fair.

Ken Duberstein is correct: a national indicator system is needed; however, an international indicator system is also needed, as well as city indicator system and a state indicator system, not to mention an indicator system for issues, like global warming and education. Data360 is already partnering with innovative organizations like California Forward to unlock California’s data and Applied Survey Research to unlock and empower citizens with dashboards in literally thousands of communities around the globe. Our biggest challenge, as a non-profit, is finding both the resources and the people to populate and manage the data on our site. However, I know we will overcome these challenges and I felt it was important to let readers know that the “web-based system” that Mr. Duberstein mentions is already built.

Sincerely,

Tom Paper

I was unhappy with the commenting software we were using on the blog, and so we're now using the Blogger commenting system.

In order for this to happen, we had to lose all the comments from previous posts.

Hopefully, the new system will be easier to use, and you'll feel comfortable adding your thoughts to the information we share.

Thanks for your patience as we upgrade this blog!

Have you seen the editorial today in the New York Times? Kenneth Duberstein writes about the State of the Union address:

But given today’s challenges and the rapid pace of change, a yearly formal address is no longer sufficient to measure the true state of our Union. To recapture the spirit of the founders — and to fulfill President Obama’s own promise to provide greater accountability in Washington — another tool is needed, one that enables all Americans to gauge whether we are making progress as a nation.

What we need now is a Web-based system for measuring our changing society with key national indicators — in a free, public, easy-to-use form.

That sounds like a pretty good idea, doesn't it? It's such a great idea that "Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Michael Enzi, Republican of Wyoming, plan to soon introduce a bill that would allocate about $7.5 million a year for such a comprehensive database of key national indicators, and the idea already has wide bipartisan support. The data, selected by the National Academy of Sciences, would come from public and private sources of information on issues like education, the environment, the economy, energy use, housing, health care and the state of our roads and other public works."

Which would be fantastic -- except Congress already did this. Through the GAO and the National Academies of Science. And they spun it off, and it's now called the State of the USA project. And it's scheduled to be done and online by Fall 2009.

Here's more:

The State of the USA, Inc. (SUSA) is a new nonprofit organization that will assemble high-quality measures and data that can be used to assess the progress of the United States; it will display those measures—as a public service—on its website. SUSA will serve nongovernmental organizations, the media, policy makers, business leaders, foundations, scientists, educators and citizens by providing valuable information so all Americans can educate themselves about the progress of the United States.

With advice from the National Academies, SUSA is assembling a set of key national indicators to measure specific conditions or trends in this country. Data will be drawn from this country’s most respected public and private statistical sources (e.g., the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis) and will help the public track the nation’s progress on a wide variety of issues at many demographic and geographic levels, to the extent such data are available.

So what's up with the editorial? The legislation? Any ideas?