Measure for Change
Newsletter
of the Community Indicators Consortium
2006, Volume II
Measure for Change
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Conference registration: Conference registration information
is now available online. To register today, go to
www.communityindicators.net/events.html
Membership renewal: Join CIC, support the work, and receive conference discounts.
Available at www.communityindicators.net/joincic.html
Indicator projects list: Is your organization listed? Is someone missing?
Check out the list at
www.communityindicators.net/indicatorefforts.html and tell us who we need
to add.
Many of
you participated in the conference sessions in
Others
have used GASB’s work in developing your own indicators reports or working to bridge
community indicators and government performance benchmarks.
The Governmental
Accounting Standards Board (GASB) will be receiving a staff recommendation in coming
weeks to put on its current technical agenda a project to develop voluntary reporting
guidance for state and local governments’ performance reports. Before that
occurs, the GASB Chairman will be discussing the issue of Service Efforts and Accomplishments
(SEA) Performance Reporting with the Trustees of the Financial Accounting Foundation
who have been contacted by some organizations that assert such SEA performance reporting
is not within the mission or role of the GASB.
(see
http://www.governing.com/manage/pm/perf0806.htm
for more information.)
If you
would like to weigh in on the issue, please send your comments to:
Mr. Robert
H. Attmore
Chairman
Governmental
Accounting Standards Board
401 Merritt
7
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A copy should be sent to:
Mr. Robert
J. DeSantis
President
and Chief Operating Officer
Financial
Accounting Foundation
401 Merritt
7
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The letter to Robert Attmore should be sent by mail or, if after
November 15, by fax to 203-849-9714
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The copy to Robert DeSantis should be sent by mail or, if after
November 15, by fax to 203-956-5241
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ALL LETTERS MUST BE RECEIVED BY GASB NO LATER THAN NOVEMBER
22, 2006
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National
Infrastructure for Community Statistics and the Urban Markets Initiative at the
Brookings Institution held an interesting roundtable this past week to discuss
the current status and future directions for web-based data exchanges and intermediaries.
The link
to the presentations from the meeting is below.
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The Variable
Name Index for the American Housing Survey has been updated to cover the 2005 AHS.
You can download the new version from the HUD USER web site, http://www.huduser.org/datasets/ahs/ahsprev.html
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Dear friends and supporters of the Community
Indicators Consortium,
We are excited about the upcoming conference,
Connections: Building Bridges and Communities of
Practice, March 7-9, 2007, in
We appreciate all those who have supported
CIC with their individual and organizational memberships. If you haven’t done
so already, we invite you to renew your membership (or join us for the first time!)
by visiting www.communityindicators.net.
We’ve added discounted membership rates for our friends in developing countries,
and look to all our members to share their experiences in creating a supportive
and vibrant learning network.
In recent conversations with some of our
friends in
Thank you for all you do. Let’s make
our efforts stronger and more effective by working together, sharing what we’ve
learned through good experiences and bad, and help advance the art and science of
community indicators.
CIC was established as a
501(c) 3 in 2006 as an active learning network and community of practice among persons
engaged in the fields of indicators and performance measures. It is CIC’s mission
to advance the art and science of community indicators. It facilitates the exchange
of knowledge about indicators and performance measures and encourages their global
development and effective use. For more information on CIC please visit
http://www.communityindicators.net/
Tools Marketplace: The Start of Easier Access to Data and Tools
The National
Infrastructure for Community Statistics (NICS) recently launched a Tools Marketplace
and they are looking for comments, suggestions, and ideas on how to improve and
enhance the Tools Marketplace. This Marketplace has the potential of being
a primary source for easy access to data for indicator systems. According
to NICS, the goal of the Tools Marketplace is to improve the capacity for data collection,
analysis, transformation and distribution among data users and providers.
The Tools
Marketplace consists of three Web pages—(1) “Data Exchange”, (2) “Ready To Go Data
Tools”, and (3) “Build Your Own Data Tools”. The “Data Exchange” page
is in its interim stage and as such, provides access to a limited number of data
sets (e.g., Data Ferret) and data intermediaries (e.g., DataPlace). The ultimate
goal of this page is for data users and providers to share their data sets in exchange
for data sets in use elsewhere across the country.
The “Ready
to Go Data Tools” page offers a substantial list of tools that currently exist that
can make data users and providers’ work with data easier. The categories of
tools included on this page are: primary data collection, metadata, statistical
and analytical, data input and manipulation, and mapping.
The “Build
Your Own Data Tools” page is arranged in a typology of data tool components.
The intent of this page is to provide the tool components so users can customize
a comprehensive data tool workbench that fits the requirements of their project.
According to NICS, the tool components listed on this page allow developers of varying
skill levels to build their own comprehensive data tools, custom-designed according
to their data requirements. The tool components include metadata tools, data
integration tools, extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) tools, and data
mapping and visualization tools classification guides.
NICS wants
and needs your input! Please review, use, analyze, and assess the Tools Marketplace
and provide your input to
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