2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Institutional Context 35
Conclusions
Three conclusions stand out as most important in considering how best
to enhance the role of community information in making decisions
about collective issues in local governance.
First, the number of institutions that need to be involved is likely to be
large, and their interactions will inevitably be complicated. In this field,
trying to work only with local government or any other single institution,
even on a single relevant issue, is hardly ever sufficient. Fortunately,
most urban areas already have networks of community groups and
coalitions of civic leaders that offer good places to start more productive
engagements.
Second, the automation of administrative records by these institutions
for their own individual purposes has vastly expanded the amount
of community information that is now potentially available. Most of
these institutions are both producers and users of this information, and
it is important to remember that they play both roles.
Third, in most urban areas, the data remain in individual agency silos;
that is, they are not shared across agencies. However, in a significant
number of places, local entities—local data intermediaries—have been
formed that have learned how to break down those silos effectively. They
have been able to convince local agencies to share their data, demonstrating
how doing so can expand the range of data available for agencies’
own purposes as well as support broader collective applications.
What kinds of applications have been implemented so far to illustrate
the value of this approach? Various examples are described in chapters 5
and 6. However, for the reader to understand them, we must first present
a more complete picture of recent advances in data availability and
technical capabilities (chapter 3) and of the basic types of applications
that are relevant in community work and how data are used within them
(chapter 4).
Notes
1. The types of local transactional data now available are reviewed in chapter 3.
See also the catalog of administrative data sources for neighborhood indicators provided
in Coulton (2008).
2. Today, most local government records are automated. The current central
handbook of the International City/County Managers Association on record keeping is
entitled Electronic Records Management; see Stephens (2005).