How To Measure A City’s Success- Communities across the nation have launched formal "indicators" projects.

How does an American city or region honestly measure its successes and failures so that it can forge smart future strategies?

Neal Peirce The Washington Post Writers Group

How does a community decide if it is on the right track for improved school performance? For public health? Adequate homeland security measures? Sufficient housing? The building and upkeep of roads, transit, fresh water and waste systems?

Enabled by the flexible Web-based technologies of the 1990s and driven by the necessity to use scarce dollars more smartly, communities across the nation–about 169, according to a recent survey of the General Accounting Office–have mounted formal indicators projects.

Many are official state or local government projects; others are mounted by universities, public interest groups, even foundations. Increasingly, they’re going democratic: relying on broad-based discussions with local citizen and public policy groups.

But there’s been a problem: indicators are too often presented as seas of statistics–a march of evenly toned measures, with few points of context or comparison. Or lost in a fat book of figures.

Now Boston seems on its way to overcoming that drawback. Its secret is the Internet. The Boston Indicators, released by the Boston Foundation with cosponsorship of the city’s redevelopment arm and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, has a brief paper version.

But the indicators’ main form, announced Feb. 28 at a meeting including Mayor Thomas M. Menino and hundreds of city and regional civic leaders, is a Web site– http://www.bostonindicators.org

Check there and you find readable, quick-to-click text summaries plus innumerable tips and links. You can move quickly among 10 major topic areas, ranging from civic health to the environment to technology. It might take months or years to learn as much–especially in context–from newspapers, radio or TV.

The site does remind you of how Boston has historically surmounted its boom-and-bust cycles through smarts and technological innovations. But then it moves quickly to a big current problem–an apparently serious brain drain. During the 1990s, Metro Boston lost 21 percent of its 20-to-24-year-olds, and 13 percent of its 25-to-34-year-olds.

To sustain and grow its creative economy, Boston clearly has to reverse that trend. One often-debated strategy: Find ways to reduce the region’s wildly inflated housing costs, which are pushed up by towns’ and individuals’ "NIMBY" attitude toward new housing supply. Another is mentoring or other community outreach to retain more of the 265,000 university students that Boston and its neighboring communities attract.

The Boston indicators are far from perfect: Statistics don’t, for example, easily measure the effectiveness of civic leadership, or explain the role of government fragmentation or patronage patterns in such negative phenomena as the multibillion-dollar Big Dig cost overruns.

Still, notes the Boston Foundation’s Charlotte Kahn, the will and wizard behind Boston’s indicators, the active involvement of citizens and agencies in formulating indicator questions leads to unconventional measures of assets: for example, the ratios of kids to computers in schools, the swimmability of the area’s waterways, the extent of tree cover by neighborhood.

Plus, with computer access the viewer can make unusual cross-cutting connections: how bad health plays out in poor school performance, for example, or how school scores impact economic outcomes.

The Boston effort is just one example of the virtual flood of indicators-type projects that have been flowering around the country. Prime examples include Jacksonville, Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, the Twin Cities, Chicago and Portland. More cross-fertilization of indicator efforts is under way at the Brookings Institution, home to a National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership that’s grown from six model efforts to 20, spread geographically from Providence to Denver to Seattle.

Maybe what we need, says Chris Hoenig, the General Accounting Office’s director for strategic issues, is a set of national performance indicators, ideally using measures that can be scaled down to the state and local level. The GAO convened a national forum Feb. 26 to debate precisely that issue.

But like the best local efforts, says Hoenig, the best indicators aren’t handed down by government–they’re identified through a learning process that draws in multiple partners, public and private, involved in a collaborative learning process to see where data are good or poor, to identify which issues are well known and which aren’t.

"Process is as important as substance," he says. "No one institution can carry the weight."

Kahn argues this is, though, the perfect moment to move indicators forward. "With people swinging so much b.s. on media like talk show radio," she says, "we need good information." So it’s serendipitous that advanced computer techniques are making it possible, as never before, to "democratize data and measurement, so we don’t need to be so much at the mercy of ideology, politics and anecdotes."

Fair enough, one thinks–if we have the smarts to use the techniques that can actually make us smarter.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail address is [email protected].

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