2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

106 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
of the most popular data and statistics search topics. It began with data
from the World Bank, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the US
Census Bureau, and later added five additional core data providers: the
Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, the California
Department of Education, Eurostat, the US Centers for Disease
Control, and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Other notable examples of data and visualization sites are Tableau
Public and Esri community maps, released in 2010, and IBM’s City Forward,
released in 2011. With the pace of technology advances, new easierto-use
and powerful websites will continue to emerge.
From Portals to Application Programming Interfaces
and Mobile Applications
With the expansion of mobile device use and capabilities, organizations
from all sectors have expanded their focus from their own websites to
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and mobile applications.
Sanders’s essay describes the mashups that are fueled by APIs, a protocol
for requesting and delivering a data stream. In 2013, the Census Bureau
launched APIs for the Decennial Census and the ACS, making it easier
for developers to build applications using the data. Although mobile
applications are now commonly used as a tool for data collection, there
is even more potential for apps to display community data. Communityfocused
code-a-thons are time-limited events at which neighborhood
and government representatives meet with software developers to identify
community issues that could benefit from data visualized through an
app. The field is advancing in how to structure these events to have concrete
results, in addition to building bridges among the various groups.
Coping with the Fast Pace of Progress
This chapter documents the remarkable progress that has been made in
the availability of data and technology since the mid-1990s. Challenges,
including those noted in Sanders’s essay, remain for these advances to
translate to better policy and practice. However, the field is learning what
supports are needed to take advantage of the new opportunities. Chapter 2
discusses how NNIP partner organizations play this role in their local
areas, but new national institutions are also emerging to strengthen the use