2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

14 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
discusses local institutions and community information. It identifies
the types of individual institutions that have information-related
functions. It then examines how these institutions come together to
make decisions about policies and programs to achieve broader collective
goals. The section closes with a discussion of the roles of stateand
federal-level actors in influencing local information development
and use.
The second major section discusses local data intermediaries. Despite
considerable advances, most communities still face serious barriers to the
effective development and use of community information, barriers that
arise mostly as a result of the fragmentation of data and applications in
the local environment. Local data intermediaries, an institutional innovation
in this field that has emerged since the early 1990s, are designed to
address those barriers by assisting other local institutions in assembling
community information and applying it productively. This section is
largely based on the experience of the National Neighborhood Indicators
Partnership (NNIP), introduced in chapter 1.
Local Institutions and Community Information
All individuals are potential producers and users of community information.
Through their lived experience, individuals learn new things about
their community that guide their decisions. In this chapter, however, we
are interested in roles played by local institutions that are responsible
for the production and/or use of information. Figure 2.1 identifies the
most important institutions in this regard. Below we review the types of
institutions and the nature of, and trends in, their information-related
functions.
Local Government Agencies
Agencies of local general-purpose governments (i.e., counties and
municipalities) are most important to this field, primarily because they
produce most of the community information now available. Although
community information can be derived from surveys, it is the automation
of transactional data (particularly data produced by public agencies)
that has been responsible for the revolution in the availability of
community information.