Mashups with Community Development Non-profits, etc.

[Mark Tough]

I'm a (mostly) former coder/analyst/development teacher now working
for one of 14 "Healthy Neighborhoods" community development
corporations in Baltimore, Neighborhoods of Greater Lauraville, Inc.,
which works with Hamilton, Lauraville and other neighborhoods on
Harford Road (did similar stuff previously in Patterson Park, where I
live).

I'm attending as a "spectator" cuz it's been five years or so since
I've done any major coding but I'm working on various projects to up
to tech game of the CD non-profit arena (full disclosure: my org's
current web presence is terrible; it's legacy stuff and will change
soon).

A few random thoughts from my neck of the woods, just to see if they
spark any interesting ideas or feedback:

First, ethos seems to be that there is a) gvt and b) citizens. My
world is halfway in between. Neighborhood assocs rise and fall every
year with leadership changes, petty disputes, etc. Comm dev orgs work
to galvanize strengths of multiple tiny assocs, engaged residents,
etc. Our community social networks can and should be mashed up with
city data.

Crime, for instance: I love open data and want more of it. But I also
know from six years of doing it that Patterson Park (the neighborhood,
north and east of the park) would never have thrived if prospective
homeowners made one-dimensional decisions based on crime maps. Why?
Because those maps don't capture level of citizen engagement to
mitigate problems. They fall short in two ways: they are usually not
longitudinal; folks look at snapshots, not vectors over time. More
significantly, neighborhood engagement in a mod/high crime area often
results in a healthier neighborhood 2-3 years later than a lower-crime
area with less civic engagement. I and my peers know that strongly
from visceral experience all over the city, but can't at present make
the case with data. I'd like to move towards changing that.

Second, folks in this world have had much success in building bridges
between city services or police to prioritize problems for resolution
through "presidents' councils" and other forums. Absent this input,
city prioritizing is all down to density of 911 and 311 calls and to
Smalltimore connections. This is pretty blue-sku, but I'd love to see
neighborhood-level crowd-sourced rankings of various problems. Could
be legal/disclosure issues, non-anonymous reporting danger issues, all
kinds of stuff, but it would be amazing to allow for more intelligent
ranking/rating of problems.

Third, not really about city data but huge prob in my world is totally
ala carte IT infrastructure/web presence for comm dev orgs. I'm
working to select and evangelize for common platforms at dift levels
-- i.e. Tumblr, Joomla, Drupal -- something like that -- on a web
basis to allow for better sharing of skills, widgets, etc. amongst
cash-strapped non-profits. Any interest, let me know.

Fourth, there are multiple overlays for place-defining in Baltimore.
Comm dev orgs seek to work with coherent economic "peoplesheds" --
areas of defined social and/or economic activity that often don't map
very well to tiny neighborhood associations, police districts, or
other defined parameters. Again, not entirely about open data from
city gvt but it plays a part. But folks who do what I do would love to
have map-based illustrations of citizen economic and social activity
to make more compelling cases for working at the scale of multiple
neighborhood associations.

Bottom lines:

Comm dev non-profits have tons of knowledge of social capital and
community resources to mash up against city data; let's make more of
that happen.

Longitude, please -- and eventually down the road maybe a News Trust-
style crowd-sourced framework for scoring and promoting intelligent
commentaries on the raw data.

Comm dev funder community has some money to potentially throw at this
stuff if convinced of value. Not too many geeks in the arena, but a
few -- and that's why I'm here. Let's make some pitches.

Our Healthy Neighborhoods orgs, by the way, are all about maximizing
ROI in a poor city. We don't work in the middle of the worst
neighborhoods; we work in "strong but underserved" neighborhoods like
Highlandtown, Brooklyn Curtis Bay, Garwyn Oaks, Hamilton/Waltherson,
etc. to make decent places strong in the hope that doing so will
generate city-wide tax base to make the weakest neighborhoods better.
Which is to say: we're geek-weak, but rather private-sector-y in our
philosophy. Hopefully that's an intriguing prospect to some of you.

Turbo Pascal forever,
Mark

@marktough
ma...@marktough.com