2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

118 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
driven mainly by resource-poor customers. The result is an inadequate
supply of affordable tech tools for the important work of community
and economic development.
Several barriers have historically kept community activists from the
data promised land:
• Government as fortress. Governments at all levels have traditionally
acted as protectors of information, charged with keeping their
secrets out of hostile hands. Careers have been wrecked over data
breaches when hackers have exposed confidential information.
Unsurprisingly, government workers have responded by circling
the wagons and making data protection their highest priority, even
for nonconfidential information.
• Intellectual property rights. Many important datasets are readily
available to community activists, sort of. The “sort of” qualifier
can take many forms. Some datasets are available for a fee; others
are available at no charge but cannot be freely distributed. Some
require laborious negotiations over terms of use, which might drag
on for months or years.
• Complexity. Information systems are almost always built on complex
architectures. Technicians routinely speak of “hiding” complexity.
Grady Booch, a guru of object-oriented programming, famously
declared that “the function of good software is to make the complex
appear to be simple” (Fitzek et al. 2010)—which is great unless you’re
the person in charge of simplifying the complex, in which case your
job is anything but simple. Community-based intermediaries often
must accomplish the simplification, which has proved to be a formidable
stumbling block.
• Diverse needs. Activists find themselves in the position of needing
to fill a daunting variety of information needs, ranging from the
personal needs of individual residents to the institutional needs
of community organizations. Such a wide divergence of required
solutions can be crippling, because the solutions might have little
overlapping functionality. Code reuse across systems is always
ideal, but there are inherent challenges in designing information
systems that serve such a range of needs.
The remainder of this essay describes the progress to date in overcoming
these barriers, as well as prospects for the future.