2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Progress in Data and Technology 101
aggregate the data to create neighborhood indicators. The pairing of this
data and technology certainly was a prerequisite for the NNIP model,
and it also affected local governments, as related in Fleming’s essay in
chapter 2. Esri currently dominates the desktop GIS market in the public
sector with its ArcMap software, but open source mapping software and
online services are growing in popularity. For now, the wide adoption of
Esri’s products provide a default format for file sharing and student and
staff training.
Data Portals: Delivery, Visualization, and Analysis
In addition to facilitating the collection and processing of data, technology
has resulted in new tools to share, visualize, and analyze data.
Since 2010, the number of data and indicators portals has exploded, and
continuous advances in available technology have led to a constantly
shifting environment. The following discussion is organized by the type
of organization that stewards the data portals, with an emphasis on the
growth in nonprofit systems.
Nonprofit Portals
Local data intermediaries pioneered the field of online community information
in the late 1990s with websites that organized data and indicators
to support community action. One set of early systems shared a common
purpose: to assemble data on individual properties in one place in order to
predict and combat financial disinvestment and building abandonment.
Snow et al. (2003) documents the origin and contents of these “early warning
systems” in Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia. 16 The
latter three emerged in the late 1990s, but the Center for Neighborhood
Technology led the way more than a decade earlier by unveiling Chicago’s
Neighborhood Early Warning System in 1984 using shared floppy disks. 17
These systems combined community-collected data with administrative
data on land use, code violations, water arrears, and property tax delinquencies.
They enabled community development corporation staff, city
officials, and residents to access an unprecedented amount of integrated
information to track problem properties through user interfaces tailored
for their needs.
Early warning systems largely focused on detailed parcel information,
but other early data tools centered on aggregated local data.