Placebase: The Power of Place

Community Indicator Systems provide access to data describing various aspects of our social reality. These systems are often focused on topics such as housing, health, the environment, employment or transportation. Typically they provide detailed data for neighborhood-level areas. Their aims are varied, but the focus is on assisting community efforts in local policy making and community building.

CIS case study

Find out how Placebase helped build the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge build the first truly statewide Community Indicator System, Neighborhood Knowledge California.

NNIP

Placebase is an affiliate of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, whose members are doing some of the most exciting work in this field.

For information visit
www.urban.org/nnip/

Placebase and CIS

Placebase is deeply committed to these systems. We advocate of free and fair public access to public information, and believe in the power of open information to make positive social change.

We have many years of experience in designing, building, and nurturing community- oriented information systems. We were involved with some of the earliest efforts in the field, and today are involved in building community statistical systems at metro, regional and nationwide scales.

Trends: Broader Coverage

The earliest community indicator systems generally covered larger metropolitan areas. Such systems are now also becoming more common in smaller cities and rural areas. As technology and data availability have improved, some systems are covering ever- wider swaths of the national landscape, moving beyond metropolitan areas toward statewide and even nationwide data coverage, using an increasing array of datasets that have state and national coverage.