Here's an announcement of a webinar on on children's health data you might want to attend:

The MCH Information Resource Center, funded by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau at the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), is pleased to announce the next program in the DataSpeak Series: "New Findings from the 2007 National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH).

"This will be one of the very first presentations on the results of this important survey. The NSCH, funded and directed by MCHB, administered by the National Center for Health Statistics and disseminated on the Data Resource Center website, examines the physical and emotional health of children from birth through 17 years of age. Emphasis is placed on factors that may be related to the well-being of children, including medical homes, family interactions, parental health, school experiences, and neighborhood safety.

This Web conference will provide an overview of the survey methodology, discuss potential applications of the survey as well as selected findings, and provide information about accessing National- and State-level survey data online and highlight key State-level survey results.

Details and Registration
This program will take place on Tuesday, June 2, 2009, 2:00 - 3:00 p.m. ET (1pm Central, 12noon Mountain, 11am Pacific). For full program details, please visit the MCHIRC Web site at: http://www.mchb.hrsa.gov/mchirc/dataspeak/events/2009/0602/index.htm

To register for this event, please go to DataSpeak registration at:http://www.mchb.hrsa.gov/mchirc/dataspeak/register.htm

When you register, you will receive the details on how to participate in the Web conference. There is no cost to participate in this program.If you have any questions at all, please contact MCHIRC at mchirc@altarum.org , or 202-842-2000.

About the Data Resource Center
The CAHMI Data Resource Center (DRC) website is a user-friendly and interactive resource that offers users immediate access to standardized results from the NSCH and the National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs datasets. The overarching goal of the DRC is to advance evidence-based program planning, evaluation, policy and advocacy. DRC users can view state-level summary profiles, generate rankings across all states, and interactively produce downloadable tables and graphs. The DRC website also provides tools and resources to help users learn about, interpret and present data findings. The website is designed to meet the needs of people with data skills of all levels - from beginning to advanced. Expert help from DRC staff is readily available by email: cahmi@ohsu.edu or phone: (503) 494-1930.

The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index group at the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) have released a new map showing differences in greenhouse gas emissions for urban v. suburban households within metro regions.

They state:

At first glance, cities may appear to be a big source of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. But new research by CNT, which compares greenhouse gas emissions of city and suburban households, yields some surprising results.

CNT looked at emissions of carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas, stemming from household vehicle travel in 55 metropolitan areas across the U.S. When measured on a per household basis, we found that the transportation-related emissions of people living in cities and compact neighborhoods can be nearly 70% less than those living in suburbs.

This is in addition to the maps they have on housing+transportation costs and gas cost impacts.

The presentation is interesting and might spark discussion about land-use patterns and the costs of sprawl in your community. I only wish they had more of the metro regions in the US covered.

(Hat tip: NNIP)

I received this note via email from Legenis and found it a nice thought for the day:


Community is not a group of people or an organisation. Community is an outlook toward life in which you define yourself in relation to the world around you rather than only in connection with yourself. It is the opposite of narcissism. It is what develops as your narcissism advances from self-love to love of the other.

I speak of “community” rather than “your community”, because the perimeters of your community shift and change. Your community might be the people at your workplace or in your organisation. They might be your neighbours or fellow citizens. Ultimately, a full sense of community embraces the entire world, the people, creatures and objects that are a part of it.

You don’t literally have to be active in a society to be part of a community, but if you are not cognizant of the society of which you are a part, then you risk being cut off, limited to your own concerns, and of course, lonely. Even hermits and solitary artists can feel profoundly connected to the world in which they live and work.

Source: Thomas Moore, “A Life at Work”

Jeffry Levy shared this list of news and links for increased government transparency and data sharing on GovLoop:

U.S. Government YouTube hub: gives you quick access to all agency channels.

White House blog post re: Gov't 2.0: Bev Godwin highlights social media projects all across government. Features a video with White House New Media Director Macon Phillips giving a guided tour of many gov't 2.0 sites.

Data.gov: the new gov't-wide site designed to give you raw data to play with. Mashups, anyone?

Round 2 of the Open Gov't Initiative: the White House invites all Americans to suggest ideas on how to make the gov't more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. The site features an innovations gallery, showing the best of open gov't.

Those are all from the gov't itself. But also today, the Sunlight Foundation launched Apps for America 2, where people are invited to create good uses for gov't data they find on data.gov.

And here's my bold prediction: in a year, we'll look back on this stuff and laugh at how little we were doing back then.

Just thought you might want to know.

(You can see my earlier notes on the ABTA Conference here.)

The next panel at the conference was on the Marriage of Planning, Budgeting, and Performance Metrics. The only powerpoint presented was of a logic model based on Mark Friedman's work.

Robert McMillan, founder of ScotCro, LLC (which describes itself as "a driver of government accountability") spoke first. They have been collecting unit cost information nationally. This is different from ranking efforts in that it is not survey-oriented but taken from published reports -- taking the expenditures and activities and developing a unit cost. The goal initially was to develop unit cost information for 10 states, selected because their budget and activity data were presented in proximity to each other. One thing they discovered was that there was little practical application in the way data were submitted to legislatures. Their most important finding was that there was no correlation between activity and cost, no way to match dollars to their activities, and no way to determine either effectiveness or efficiencies. The state of Florida was the only exception.

David Tanner, Division Director responsible for Performance Management in the Georgia Office of Planning and Budget (and a fellow BYU graduate!) spoke of Georgia's experience with results-based budgeting. In 1994, Georgia passed laws to require results-based budgeting. In 2006, the budgeting process moved to program-based rather than line-item based. They are supported by the bi-annual publication of Georgia in Perspective (PDF). They use a logic model to determine inputs, activities, outputs, and short, medium, and long-range outcomes, answering the questions How much did we do? How well did we do it? Who's better off/How are they better off?

Activities-based costing is not an end in itself, but a means to better trending and decision-making. They have to be supported by a series of measures, which require data collection and a series of assumptions about what the data mean. This allows for collaboration with both public and private data reporting and efforts, since many of the intended outcomes are similar and multiple viewpoints can be helpful.

Peter Miller comes from Indiana's Office of Management and Budget in the Government Efficiency & Financial Planning division. They use 2,000 internal performance metrics, as well as aggregate up to a few high-level indicators that can be seen at Results.IN.gov. Miller suggested that creating an index is "interesting, but not actionable," and urged us to stay away from indices as a measurement tool (a position that I wholeheartedly agree with.) The biggest difference, he added, between government and business is politics -- which is why he refers to "performance-informed budgeting" rather than performance-based since, in the political process, politicians can always say they don't care what the data say and want to fund a particular program anyway. He also said, when working with politicians, a few high-level indicators that tell the story in broad terms are much more useful than many detailed indicators -- the details are for management, not for legislators or other elected officials.

The point of high-level indicators (think of a pyramid where many smaller measures support the top measures) is not just to drive costs down. The point is to look at effectiveness. In Indiana, we could see that we weren't achieving the outcomes we wanted in child services and knew where we were falling short, so we hired an additional 800 caseworkers.

Mark Abrahams, of The Abrahams Group, said that activities are the core of a good auditing system. We connect costs to results through the activities. Using a logic model helps us respond intelligently to the reality that outcomes cross departments, so on one page of a logic model we can include multiple departments that are working together towards shared outcomes.

A key first step for governments is to institute timesheets that are activity-based. 75 percent of your expenditures are in salaries, and if you can't connect the salaries to the hours spent per activity you can't manage activity costs. The logic model also helps make sure that the activities are aligned with the mission.

That conversation took us until lunch. I'll continue with my notes in another post.