Seven-step Program for Community Information Strategies

High speed Internet access, global positioning systems and other information and communication technologies have revolutionized urban and regional economic development, both planning and practice. Communities willing and able to make the appropriate investment decisions regarding information improve their abilities to compete. Certain communities and sections of cities, or even smaller neighborhoods, however, miss the first cut for economic development leading to higher wage jobs for area residents because of a lack of easy, regular and current access to basic information.

More complete community information systems also improve the effectiveness and efficiency of many community development and quality of life issues, important factors for maintaining or sustaining a knowledge-based local economy driven by innovation and creativity. With a successful information strategy, communities can adjust the distribution of key public service delivery to reflect real-time information of undesired trends. For example, often it is geographic areas of blight or more mature downtown neighborhoods that are targeted for technology-based redevelopment and tax incentives to attract tech firms. These areas, once "cleaned up," may provide shining examples of successful local TBED investment, but also may have simply transplanted the original concerns of declining property values, vacant buildings, vandalism and crime to other areas of the community. Use of a well conceived community information system can help track the movement of these issues as trends first appear, rather than before major reinvestment is necessary.

A new paper from the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program lays out seven steps to help these areas to develop successful community-based information strategies. Written by Pari Sabety, director of Brookings’ Urban Markets Initiative, Fulfilling the Promise: Seven Steps to Successful Community-based Information Systems points out some of the challenges of replicating one good community information system to another, but outlines a process which Sabety believes is scalable from the neighborhood to the national level.

While individual communities are developing useful models of the power of community information systems, Fulfilling the Promise is focused more toward the larger funders and national policy makers to ensure applicability to the smallest neighborhoods across the U.S. There are important roles to be played by states, regions, universities and localities as well.

The seven steps required are:

* Invest for scale from the smallest neighborhood to the national level.

* Invest for replicability and impact.

* Make it easy to share data and tools. For instance, the National Infrastructure for Community Statistics could serve as a potential open source for a broad range of community-based information, the author suggests.

* Embrace open source approaches.

* Build local capacity to provide and use community information.

* Improve the data available on neighborhoods through increased federal, state and local government investments to capture these statistics and data.

* Recognize and leverage the tremendous role of the private sector in urban information.

Fulfilling the Promise is available at: http://www.brookings.edu/metro/umi/pubs/20060508_cdinfopolicy.htm

Links to this paper and nearly 4,000 additional TBED-related research reports, strategic plans and other papers can be found at the Tech-based Economic Development (TBED) Resource Center, jointly developed by the Technology Administration and SSTI, at: http://www.tbedresourcecenter.org/.

Copyright State Science & Technology Institute 2006. Redistribution to all others interested in tech-based economic development is strongly encouraged. Please cite the State Science & Technology Institute whenever portions are reproduced or redirected.