PolicyMap Releases New Widget

Introducing the PolicyMap 'Widget'!

PHILADELPHIA, Nov. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- PolicyMap.com, a national online data warehouse and mapping application, now offers subscribers an exciting new tool: the ability to embed fully interactive maps on their own websites. PolicyMap provides a wealth of neighborhood data through fluid online maps, tables and reports.

This new offering -- The PolicyMap Widget -- is a customizable instance of PolicyMap that displays interactive maps on your website in just a few, simple steps. Like PolicyMap, the widgets can display data at a variety of geographies -- from an address to a block group, zip code or congressional district. PolicyMap widgets are fully interactive -- giving both the visualization of a thematic or heat map and the underlying information for any place you click. 

"When Mercy Portfolio Services (MPS) partnered with the City of Chicago to design, implement and report on the City's $55M Neighborhood Stabilization Program, we created a system called Community Central. Integrating Community Central with the PolicyMap widget takes us to a new level of data capacity and presentation," said Bill Goldsmith, President of MPS. "It allows stakeholders to analyze our work more strategically. With our data and PolicyMap's, we track projects and identify trends affecting our communities. PolicyMap's data warehouse and technology is unmatched in today's marketplace."

PolicyMap uses cutting-edge technology to display sophisticated, fast, interactive maps in ordinary Web browsers. "These are not maps that give you driving directions or help you find the nearest cafe," said Maggie McCullough, PolicyMap Director. "But if you want to track unemployment or home sales in communities nationwide, this is where to go. The ability to dynamically render and customize thousands of shaded maps sets this technology apart, making it especially suited to interactive research and data analysis."

To see a widget in action, check out TRF's charter school investments.

Or embed PolicyMap’s first FREE widget: a national map of county unemployment data. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases new monthly unemployment data, your widget automatically updates. 

About TRF and PolicyMap

A CNET Web100 award-winning online mapping tool that makes it quick and easy to gather and analyze geocentric information, PolicyMap is a service of The Reinvestment Fund, a not-for-profit leader in the financing of neighborhood revitalization. PolicyMap empowers decision makers with credible market and demographic data in an easy-to-use geographic information system. For information, visit www.policymap.com or call 1-866-923-MAPS.

CONTACT: Margaret Bradley, +1-267-304-5397 margaret.bradley@trfund.com

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Londrina, Brazil and Using Community Indicators for Transformation

Tuesday this week I met with representatives of the Fórum Desenvolve Londrina (roughly the Londrina, Brazil Development Forum). Londrina is a city of about a half-million people in the state of Paraná, Brazil.We had gone down to Paraná a few years ago to help them launch a community indicators project, and they had last come up to Jacksonville to see us in 2006.

They're doing some impressive work. Their Manual de Indicadores de Desenvolvimento Londrina 2008 (PDF) begins with a vision:

“Londrina 2034: uma comunidade ativa e articulada, construindo uma cidade humana, segura e saudável, tecnologicamente avançada, integrada com a região Norte do Paraná e globalmente conectada, com uma economia diversificada e dinâmica promovendo o equilíbrio social, cultural e ambiental.”

(Londrina 2034: an active, connected community, building a humane, safe, healthy, and technologically advanced city, integrated with the entire North Paraná region and connected globally, with a diverse and dynamic economy promoting a social, cultural and environmental balance.)

They use their indicators report to:

– Fomentar as ações comunitárias;
– Estimular a comunidade para melhoria da qualidade de vida;
– Facilitar o direcionamento de atitudes para implantação de projetos;
– Detalhar melhor a situação por área especifica;
– Intensificar a comunicação da comunidade.

• Encourage community action;
• Stimulate the community to improve the quality of life;
• Facilitate change in attitudes towards project implementation;
• Provide details of the current situation in specific areas of the community; and
• Enhance community communication.

Their indicators reports are accompanied by annual studies. Last year's study was on providing opportunities for all in business development, and a task force is currently working on implementing the principal ten recommendations from that study. The new study is on human mobility -- looking at transportation systems from a broad perspective, including roadways and public transit but also including sidewalks and pedestrian traffic in an overall examination of how people get around in their community.

They've been working hard to align the business, government, and university sectors of their community to create cooperative partnerships and a shared community agenda. They're doing some pretty amazing work, and demonstrating the universality of a community change model structured around community indicators.

If you speak Portuguese, take a look at the work they're doing. Ary Sudan told me that the model is spreading to other cities across Brazil as the country moves through a remarkable transformation into a global power. If you don't speak Portuguese, now would be a good time to learn.

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Richmond, Indiana Using Community Indicators for Community Discussion

Check out this report from the Palladium-Item (which is one of the odder names for a local newspaper I've ever seen) about the RICHMOND INDICATORS: A Community and Economic Benchmark Report (PDF). They're hosting a televised program with interactive internet chat to discuss the implications of the indicators report for competition, struggle, and opportunity in economic development.

The report covers demographics and economic indicators, plus a social capital index, commute sheds, and an innovation index. It's an interesting report out of eastern Indiana and worth a look at what they're doing and how they're trying to engage the public around the report.

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Request for Comments: Healthy People Objectives

Thought you might appreciate this opportunity to give feedback --

Message from Dr. William Thompson regarding the US Department of Health and Human Services' Healthy People objectives:

Dear All,

Every 10 years, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) develops what are called Healthy People objectives. These national objectives are designed to measure important health outcomes that can be monitored over time and can be improved upon based on disease prevention and health promotion. The objectives serve as a planning guide for the nation, states, communities and other stakeholders to improve the public's health. The draft objectives by topic area for Healthy People 2020 have been published online (http://www.healthypeople.gov/hp2020/Objectives/TopicAreas.aspx). Under the heading Quality of Life and Well-Being, there is text describing the current status of this topic area. A set of objectives encompassing the areas of Health-Related Quality of Life and Well-Being have been submitted and are under consideration by the Healthy People program. The proposed objectives are listed below.

We would like to encourage interested stakeholders to provide public comments regarding the scientific data that support the reliability and validity of measuring Health-Related Quality of Life and Well-Being outcomes at the population level as well as propose potential additional objectives.

Feedback from the public, particularly those with expertise in the area, is a very important part of this process and can help with decisions regarding topics to include. The public comments can be made at http://www.healthypeople.gov/hp2020/Comments/default.asp.

Please note that all comments will be needed by December 31st, 2009.

Thanks,

William W. Thompson, PhD

Team Lead, Health-Related Quality of Life National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

E-mail: wct2@cdc.gov

Julie Dawson Weeks, Ph.D.

Chief (acting), Aging and Chronic Disease Studies Branch National Center for Health Statistics US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

E-mail: JWeeks@cdc.gov

Proposed Healthy People 2020 Health-Related Quality of Life and Well-Being Objectives:

Objective 1: Reduce the reported number of physically and mentally unhealthy days among adults in the US population.

1a. Reduce the reported number of physically unhealthy days.

1b. Reduce the reported number of mentally unhealthy days.

Objective 2: Increase the number of adults in the U.S. population who report high levels of health-related quality of life in the physical, mental, and social domains.

2a. Increase the proportion of adults who report high levels of physical health-related quality of life.

2b. Increase the proportion of adults who report high levels of mental health-related quality of life.

2c. Increase the proportion of adults who report high levels of social health-related quality of life.

Objective 3. Increase the percentage of persons in the US population who report physical, mental, and social well-being.

3a. Increase the percentage of adults who report satisfaction with life 3b. Increase the percentage of adults who report feeling positive affect 3c. Increase the percentage of adults who report receiving social and emotional support 3d. Increase the percentage of adults who report 20 or more days of vitality 3e. Increase the percentage of adults who report a sense of autonomy, competence and relatedeness

Objective 4. Reduce the proportion of adults in the U.S. population who report being unable to participate, or who report having difficulty participating, in common activities.

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Follow OECD World Form LIVE

The 3rd OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy will address some crucial questions that today have become more important than ever. This OECD World Forum, focuses on Charting Progress, Building Visions, Improving Life and will attract very high level participants with a mixture of politicians and policy makers, opinion leaders, Nobel laureates, statisticians, academics, journalists and representatives of civil society from all over the world.  Please see the Agenda. Webcast If you wish to follow this exciting Forum, then view the webcast and chat online from the  3rd OECD World Forum Webcast starting live from Busan, from the 27th to the 30th October 2009. World Forum Twitter Account  we will be using Twitter during this event, so please follow us there with your comments and use hashtag #OECDWF when you write about the 3rd OECD World Forum

The 3rd OECD World Forum is organised by the OECD and the Government of Korea (Statistics Korea KOSTAT) in co-operation with the United Nations, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the European Commission and the World Bank, as well as other sponsors and partners.

Forum website: http://www.oecdworldforum2009.org

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New U.S. Gross National Happiness Index Implemented!

We've talked about Bhutan's Gross National Happiness Index before. Now we have a Gross National Happiness Index for the United States, updated on a daily basis, brought to us free ... by Facebook.

Here's how it works:

Every day, millions of people share how they feel with the people who matter the most in their lives through status updates on Facebook. These updates are tiny windows into how people are doing. They're brief, to the point and descriptive of what's going on this week, today or right now. Grouped together, these updates are indicative of how we are collectively feeling. Measuring how well-off, happy or satisfied with life the citizens of a nation are is part of the Gross National Happiness movement. When people in their status updates use more positive words--or fewer negative words--then that day as a whole is counted as happier than usual. (To protect your privacy, no one at Facebook actually reads the status updates in the process of doing this research; instead, our computers do the word counting after all personally identifiable information has been removed.)

The New York Times quotes Adam D. I. Kramer, the creator of the index, as saying: “When people in their status updates use more positive words — or fewer negative words — then that day as a whole is counted as happier than usual.”

Adam explains the methodology for the index in this Facebook blog post. Check it out and see what you think.

(Hat tip: ISQOLS)

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Free PPMRN/GASB Webinar

Share your comments on the Proposed GASB SEA Guidelines

Tues., Oct. 20 12:30-2:30pm (ET)The Public Performance Measurement and Reporting Network (PPMRN) will host a FREE online webinar / audio-conference featuring members of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) team who will answer questions about the Proposed Voluntary Service Efforts and Accomplishments Reporting Guidelines.

PPMRN hopes to encourage wide participation and to provide constructive feedback to GASB on the content of this proposal. Please pass this information along - participants do not have to be PPMRN members.We ask that participants read and be familiar with the entire document prior to the webinar.For more information about this webinar, including a link to the document and instructions on how to register for this free event, please visit the PPMRN website at: http://www.ppmrn.net/resources/articles/5749.

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Call for Papers: Housing Data

From: American Housing Survey (AHS) ListServ <ahs@huduser.org>:

Cityscape is a scholarly journal published three times per year by the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development's Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R). You can read more about it an access past issues at http://www.huduser.org/periodicals/cityscape.html . I am the editor of the Data Shop department, which publishes short (3000 word) articles on the use of data in housing and urban research. Data Shop articles are aimed at researchers in these fields and intended to alert them to new data, novel applications of existing data, and the operational difficulties of data use. The official description of the department runs:

"Data Shop, a department of Cityscape, presents short articles or notes on the uses of data in housing and urban research. Through this department, PD&R introduces readers to new and overlooked data sources and to improved techniques in using well-known data. The emphasis is on sources and methods that analysts can use in their own work. Researchers often run into knotty data problems involving data interpretation or manipulation that must be solved before a project can proceed, but they seldom get to focus in detail on the solutions to such problems."

If you are interested in contributing such a note, please send me an abstract by November 13 in order to be considered for the July 2010 issue. The timeline would be I would notify you of selection by December 1, and I would want a draft by February 1, with a final version by February 19. If you are interested in making a contribution but cannot meet these deadlines, please send me an abstract for possible publication in later issues.

Dav Vandenbroucke
Senior Economist
U.S. Dept. HUD
david.a.vandenbroucke@hud.gov
202-402-5890

(Hat tip: Glenn Brown)

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Portraits of Peel

I first met Srimanta Mahonty some years ago at a CIC Conference and was impressed by the work he'd been doing. He was analyzing a set of quality-of-life factors by population group within Peel, Ontario, Canada, and was demonstrating the inequities and resilience of a range of immigrant populations. His thinking helped me in the growth and development of our own Race Relations Progress Report.

His work has continued. He just sent out this note on his new, updated website:

The Portraits of Peel website provides three types of information:

• Portraits of Peel Online Database (Population data from 1996, 2001 and 2006 Census at the Peel Neighbourhood level)
  Available On-line at: http://www.portraitsofpeel.ca/pop.php
• Target Group Profiles (for example: Seniors, Recent Immigrants, South Asian, Chinese, Blacks and other communities)
  Available On-line at: http://www.portraitsofpeel.ca/tgp.php
• Peel Statistics from different sources (for example: Region of Peel, Peel Police, Statistics Canada, HRDC, Health Canada, etc.)
  Available On-line at: http://www.portraitsofpeel.ca/peelstatistics.php

Please forward this information to your networks as appropriate.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Srimanta Mohanty, Ph.D.
Director of Research & Administration
The Social Planning Council of Peel

Take a moment and check it out!

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State Health Data Scorecard

Here's an interesting site to play with -- it maps out a series of close to 40 health indicators by state in four areas: Access, Prevention & Treatment, Avoidable Hospital Use & Costs, and Healthy Lives. It then adds one more category, Equity, and measures indicators of equity across income, insurance coverage, and race & ethnicity.

So take a look at the Commonwealth Find's State Scorecard 2009 for some interesting indicators, trends, and state rankings. The indicator set is an intriguing one to consider as we think about health indicators on a local level, and the set should make us think a little bit about the federal and state context within which we measure local health indicators.

(Hat tip: kuri)

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Call for Chapters: Best Practices in Community QOL Indicators

Call for Chapters
Special Volume on
Community Quality-of-Life Indicators: Best Practices V
Published by Springer in the new
Best Practices in Quality-of-Life Research Book Series

Volume Focus: This volume will publish best practices of community quality-of-life indicators projects. The first volume was published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2004 (edited by M. Joseph Sirgy, Don Rahtz, and Dong-Jin Lee). The second volume was published by Springer in 2006 (edited by M. Joseph Sirgy, Don Rahtz, and David Swain). The third and fourth volumes were published by Springer (visit www.springer.com and type “Community Quality-of-Life Indicators” in the Search window) and the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (both edited by M. Joseph Sirgy, Rhonda Phillips, and Don Rahtz).

For the fifth volume, we are seeking excellent case studies that can be used by community planners, policy makers and others as good examples or “prototypes” of community quality-of-life indicator projects. Papers dealing with theoretical issues in planning, developing, and using community quality-of-life indicators are not suitable for this volume. Instead, they should be sent for review and possible publication in Social Indicators Research (SIR) or Applied Research in Quality-of-Life (ARQOL). The fifth volume will be published in the new book series, Best Practices in Quality-of-Life Research. The book series editor is Dr. Dave Webb of the University of Western Australia.

Volume Editors: M. Joseph Sirgy (Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, USA), Rhonda Phillips (Arizona State University, USA), and Don Rahtz (College of William and Mary, USA)

Submission Deadline: December 31st, 2009

Submit to: M. Joseph Sirgy, Department of Marketing, Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061-0236, USA. Tel: 540.231.5110. Fax: 540.231.3076. E-mail: sirgy@vt.edu

Submission Guidelines:

• The paper should be typed in either Arial or Times Roman, font size 10-12 with a margin of 1 inch on all sides.
• The paper should be typed either 1½ or double-spaced.
• Paper length should not exceed 30 pages in total including references, tables, and figures.
• Reference style: American Psychological Association (APA) style is preferred.
• E-mail attachment is the preferred mode of submission. Submit paper electronically to sirgy@vt.edu.
• All submissions should be original and not previously published. The submitted paper should not be submitted simultaneously to other publication outlets.

Guidelines for Paper Selection and Final Manuscript Preparation:

• Each paper will be subjected to a review by 2-3 referees who are experts in the field.
• The editors in consultation with the referees will make the final decision concerning acceptance or rejection.
• Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent out by the end of January 2010.
• It is very likely that the editors will request changes to the accepted papers based on the reviewers’ suggestions. We will forward a production schedule once all papers are reviewed.
  

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