2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

30 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
Assembling, Transforming, and Disseminating Data
Data assembly. This most basic function for local data intermediaries
entails obtaining data through open-data portals or data-sharing
agreements. The intermediaries commit to regularly updating the data
over the long term; the commitment of civic leaders to support this
activity needs to be long term as well. With this model, local stakeholders
only have to go to one source to access neighborhood data on
a variety of topics.
Assembling data across topics leads to greater insights. For example,
foreclosure and home sales data are critical to demonstrating the housing
market impacts of the foreclosure crisis across neighborhoods. However,
by linking those data to school enrollment data and crime data, as some
NNIP partners have done, it becomes possible to identify the human
consequences of the crisis as well. These data then provide the basis for
consideration of a wider range of policy responses, such as changing
policies on school assignment to reduce student school mobility due to
involuntary moves (Pettit and Comey, 2012).
Data transformation. Even for experts, working with raw administrative
data to create useful measures is challenging and can be very
costly, especially when it becomes necessary to combine data from the
files of different agencies. Intermediaries play an essential role in transforming
data to make them easier for nontechnical users to understand.
This work includes cleaning the data and creating new indicators, new
forms of display, and metadata (e.g., definitions and documentation on
processing).
Because data intermediaries regularly update datasets they have
worked to obtain, they build up substantial knowledge over time about
the reliability of the data and the purposes for which they are best used.
This knowledge is used to improve the transformation process. The
example described above of the analysis of linked school enrollment and
foreclosure rates requires substantial transformation of data from each
source.
Government datasets released through open-data portals support
many important policy and service innovations today, and they will be
the basis for more in the future. But most of these data will be in a raw
form that will be difficult for those without a high level of expertise to
use directly. These datasets still require transformation to maximize their
usefulness for influencing policy and improving communities.