2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

The Potential and the Way Forward 407
do have them, more resources are needed to assure sustainability and to
allow intermediaries to pursue new ideas for creative, cost-saving applications
that could serve as valuable models for others.
One way this can be done is to make sound local data work a criterion
for awards of competitive federal grants and to assure that those grants
provide sufficient funding for such work. Other ways federal agencies
could promote this field would be to include descriptions of innovative
applications by local data intermediaries in their newsletters and other
publications, recognize such work in their awards programs, and build
it into their technical assistance programs.
In addition, broader ongoing support should be considered through
the Community Development Block Grant program and the Social
Innovation Fund. Explicit support for data-driven decisionmaking
would seem not only consistent with, but also important to, the goals
of both.
Finally, we recommend that the federal government reinstitute a
program of matching grants for technical innovations, similar to the
Technology Opportunities Program, which was administered by the
National Telecommunications and Information Administration of the
US Department of Commerce from 1994 to 2004. As discussed in chapter
3, Technology Opportunities Program funding was responsible for
several of the most important advances in this field during that period. It
encouraged local NNIP partners and others to reach out to create bolder
changes to current practice than they otherwise would have done. These
changes (e.g., web-based interactive mapping) accelerated the progress
of the field as a whole.
Conclusions
This chapter discusses the forces underlying many advances in the production
and use of community information that have been made over
the past two decades. Our overall conclusion is strongly positive. The
future of this field appears promising, enough so that we suggest it
could be the basis for a transformation in the quality of local governance,
community decisionmaking, and urban research in America. We
also suggest, however, that this potential will not be achieved automatically.
Special efforts are needed to take advantage of the opportunities
that exist.