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Map This!

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The Idea:

What will change in the world because this Project happens?

Thousands of communities will be able to access data and map resources in their neighborhoods quickly, easily and at no cost to them. Advocates and service providers will be able to use a high-quality, well-designed, reliable platform for uploading data of their choosing and mapping that data against a wide range of demographic data, area resources, and other variables. This project will also allow nonprofit and community advocates across the U.S. to share and learn from each other how they can better use the power of mapping to advocate for and inform change. Not least, communities will be spared countless hours of effort and scarce dollars trying to build such tools from scratch, enabling them to focus more on the important work of finding the right data locally and interacting with people and organizations in their communities. The goal of our project is to make the public functionality of HealthyCity.org, the mapping tool we developed to serve Los Angeles, available throughout the U.S., free of charge, to nonprofit and community organizations. We believe this can be done in a fairly cost-effective and sustainable way, and we are looking for good thinking on how best to do it.
Examples of how Healthy City has worked in Los Angeles include:
- Mapping of overcrowded, multi-track calendar schools, to support a proposal of $25 billion in school construction bonds approved by California voters
- Analysis of areas of highest need for preschool facilities in Los Angeles, leading to over $100 million commitment of funds to develop preschool space
- Mapping of violent crimes and analysis of prevalence of gang crime, to identify priority areas for the City of Los Angeles
- Mapping the mismatch between concentrations of homeless people and availability of shelter space
- Grants analysis for foundations, including determining the location of grantees, the dimensions of their service areas (with information gathered by survey), and the magnitude of grant dollars relative to target population in grantees’ service areas

What information will people interact with to make this change?

HealthyCity.org currently offers users access to over 120 demographic and community characteric variables, from 9 different data sources. Our data and sources are described in detail at: http://www.healthycity.org/c/help/sc/indicator. For the proposed national service, some of the California-specific data sources may not be available nationally (such as data from the California Health Interview Survey or from the WIC program), but their functions may be replaced by other data sets. There are a number of health and economic data that state and federal offices use that are only available at the county level (so they cannot be displayed on our current site); offering a national view will make comparisons and disparities between counties and states accessible to users. Users will be able to:
- Upload their own data sets
- Overlay data points on top of demographic and other data
- Map and analyze data within a radius around an address, or within a ZIP code, city, legislative districts or other jurisdictions
- View core demographic and other data for the selected geography in tables and charts
- View assets, such as schools, parks, fire and police stations, on an interactive map, with types of service (identified by icons)
- Identify information about assets or service providers by scrolling over their icons
- Cut and analyze data by over 60 demographic, health and other indicators

What else have you done in this Cause Area?

Healthy City is entering its 5th year of service, and will be launching version 3.0, featuring new and upgraded capabilities and features, this June. Using an adaptation of open source software we developed, and the Los Angeles region’s most comprehensive database of public and nonprofit resources (schools, parks, community centers, health clinics), HealthyCity.org enables community residents, nonprofit organizations, advocates, public officials and civic leaders to see and analyze the distribution of critical community assets in relation to essential demographic information, electoral and school district boundaries and the like. HealthyCity.org offers unprecedented access to the largest public database of community resources, demographic and health data for the region, paired with best-of-breed database and GIS mapping technology.

Cause Area:
Project URL:
http://www.healthycity.org
Financial support?:
Yes
City:
Los Angeles
State/Region:
California
Country:
United States

The Assessment

What kind of help or resources do you need to turn your project idea into a completed mashup?

We need help with the design of this planned expansion. Specific questions we will need assistance with include:
- What technical infrastructure will be necessary to support this national service, and enable it to handle high loads with high reliability?
- Should we phase in the development? Should we begin, for example, with covering California, or a specific region, or the most populous states, first, or should we roll out a basic level of service nationally?
- What county, state and federal-level data should we offer to users? (Since our current focus is on Los Angeles County, our data is rich from the level of census blocks up to the county level).
- How can we financially sustain this project as a free service, including the costs of storing data uploaded by thousands of users, going forward? Is there a revenue model (advertising, or custom services for subscribers)?