Durham Neighborhood Compass

As disruptive technologies reshape transportation, food access, healthcare, and housing, who has access to and fluency in information is one of the major challenges facing democracy in the 21st century.

The Durham Neighborhood Compass builds data access and visualization tools which put access to data in the hands of residents. Our mobile-friendly, bilingual tools allow residents to do anything from exploring the impact of racism, environmental stress & food access on chronic health in their neighborhood, to estimating the number of children served by a proposed new playground.

The Compass tools are already used by a core group of committed changemakers to gather the data they need to advocate. But we see massive growth potential, first to increase the user base in our own city, and then to partner with peer municipalities and mentor them in deploying open-source technology and participatory design processes in developing their own data platforms.

The rise of data in urban decision-making has the potential to increase equity and access. But many of the worst urban policies of the past century were data-driven, from the redlining metrics which established differential access to home loans to siting algorithms which established food deserts. It's clear that when white elites in cities use information about the lives of Black residents and lower-income residents to make decisions, without the input and control of those communities, deep harm tends to result. Correcting for this past harm means centering people’s lives & experiences in the ways we represent data.

In order to heal from past wounds and address current challenges, we need to build new models for gathering, storing, accessing & acting on data at the local level which put those residents and neighborhoods experiencing exclusion, eviction and displacement in direct control of data which, after all, is theirs to begin with.

The Durham Neighborhood Compass project aims to serve all city residents, but we have two main focuses.

The first is to directly and meaningfully engage in building leadership in neighborhoods who have historically been subjects of rather than actors in city policy. In Durham, that works out to about 1/3 of the 300,000 city residents, primarily Black and Latinx residents living in underserved neighborhoods some of which were historically redlined, which are facing high rates of eviction and chronic health conditions. The Neighborhood Compass project targets outreach events and trainings in partnership with community institutions in these neighborhoods such as churches and neighborhood associations, and we also act as a resource to support resident leaders in using data to move policy change.

The second focus is young people across the city; and with the support of MIT Solve we hope to expand our work with young people by developing curriculum and conducting workshops in the public schools to use the Neighborhood Compass to help build data literacy among Durham's future leaders.

The Durham Neighborhood Compass project combines a set of innovative and easy to use data visualization tools with outreach activities and policy workshops to shift who has access to and fluency with neighborhood data.

Iterative participatory design is at the heart of our process. Our community outreach events most often start with a "data gallery" in which we present snapshot visualizations of data around a given theme (such as chronic health conditions or evictions), and ask participants to assess both how usable and accessible the visualization techniques are as well as to what degree their lived experience agrees with or might raise questions about the statistical picture we've gathered to-date. By putting data visualizations and lived experience on a level playing field, we center the expertise of everyone in the room while also providing common reference points to contextualize a solution-oriented conversation. Workshops use Technology of Participation (®) methods to collectively answer questions like "What factors most impact health in your neighborhood?" and the outputs of those discussions feed back, on a regular basis, into determining the kinds of indicators  will be included in our public-facing data tools and what features belong in a user interface design.

The counterpart to our in-person workshops are our public-facing data tools, the Durham Neighborhood Compass itself and the Durham Community Health Indicators Project. Both of these are mobile-friendly progressive web apps built using VueJS, a reactive javascript front-end framework, in combination with a PostGIS data store. One of the most exciting things about our data tools is that they are able to combine national datasets like the US Census with local data, much of which DataWorks curates and houses, including some of the only locally-generated neighborhood-level data on chronic health outcomes available in the United States.

While the Durham Neighborhood Compass is a general-use data tool which allows users to query different parts of the city and create customized reports as well as printable or embeddable maps, the Community Health Indicators Project focuses specifically on neighborhood-level determinants of chronic health, and uses algorithmically-generated prose text & comic-style illustrations to create a custom portrait of each neighborhood in the city which speaks to residents at a wide range of literacy levels (and in both English & Spanish).

Our process of developing data tools places data and technology in service to relationship building. By first ensuring our data tools are responsive to community conversations and then designing them to be intuitive and digestible to a variety of users - younger, older, English and Spanish speaking - we are creating a transaction of power for advocates and organizers. Our partners and community residents are given influence over what the outcome looks like, but also over how the stories of community change get told. We learn as much as our collaborators do and we show up as partners rather than as experts.

This relationship-oriented approach means we are accountable as data and technology partners, growing with our community collaborators over time. This makes us able to build much broader impact than would be possible within the brief time frame of a single technology project. As we grow, protecting our relationships is one of the goals we care about most.

Our solution is built on user-friendly, data-driven progressive web applications which combine maps, data visualizations, illustrations and narrative, combined with facilitation and process technologies from a participatory design approach. Continuous integration and deployment is also core to our approach.

Internally, we use PostGIS databases and R scripting to combine information from Census APIs with some of the unique datasets which we curate. Synthesized data outputs are stored in a GitHub repository, and our various data tools then consume that single repository. We generally build public-facing data tools using VueJS in combination with the MapboxGL mapping library. These tools are served as single-page applications from static file storage (Amazon S3 & Azure blob storage), which keeps our maintenance overhead low. We use continuous integration tools to automate deployment, which means that staff can add or update new data layers easily by just pushing changes to the data repository.

Lastly, technologies of participatory design are core to our approach. We bring data visualizations and participatory design approaches together with facilitation methods like consensus workshops and action planning to open up spaces in which neighborhood residents can collectively review & react to data trends around issues of interest. This is an area that Research Action Design (RAD), one of the partners on the project, has deep experience in, and both RAD and DataWorks NC have worked hard to develop facilitation methods which center resident experiences while also bringing quantitative data into the conversation.

People given space to be the experts in their issue area become powerful. This is doubly true when they use data to clarify and reinforce their narratives.

We currently reach 50-100 residents yearly through direct participation in face-to-face workshops, and our data tools serve another 400-500 users/month. In one year, and with the help of MIT Solve, we plan to use a combination of increased in-person events and a social & earned media outreach strategy to (at least) double our monthly web user base to over 1,000 (reaching 4-5% of Durham’s population in a given year), and to engage 200 residents through in-person events. 

It’s important to note that sustained, deep person-to-person relationships are one key part of our model, and so while we do hope to scale our in-person engagement, we also have a commitment to doing that in a way that maintains the quality of data and strategy support which we’re able to provide currently to our core neighborhood partners. By scaling our web user base through media, we hope to increase the number of people who can benefit from the Compass without direct in-person engagement.

In 5 years, we hope to sustain & build our Durham user base as population grows here (reaching 5% of the population), but we also hope to build relationships with 2-3 peer cities of similar size and demographics, with who we will work to adapt the Compass’ core technologies to serve their communities, thus reaching around 50,000 people yearly in total.

One year from now, we will have:

• Hosted five interns from local universities and the community, with a focus on STEM training for underserved young people;
• Built four new collaborative partnerships with neighborhoods to help them use data to achieve their goals;
• Refined the compass interface in partnership with Spanish-speaking residents and people with disabilities to ensure that our tools are accessible to both those communities;
• Hosted a monthly "research pod" meeting to provide a space for city residents to dig deeper into topics impacting housing and evictions;
• Released a new data tool focused on housing and evictions;
• Produced a series of YouTube video tutorials for the Compass tools and built a stronger social media following; and
• Played a key role in the roll-out of Durham's new equitable engagement initiative, as part of our partnership with City Government

Next year we’ll also begin planning for how to integrate 2020 Census data into the Compass tools, and continue to examine how best to incorporate qualitative & subjective neighborhood boundaries into our tools.

In the next five years, we hope to increase the reach of the Compass by partnering with other communities who would benefit from our open-source tools. We’ll work to document best practices & provide how-to guides, as well as developing a small number of more intensive partnerships with peer cities. At the end of five years, we also will have integrated new ways for residents to share stories and experiences alongside exploring quantitative data.

Our team combines two organizations: DataWorks NC and Research Action Design. DataWorks, a nonprofit, was founded around the Neighborhood Compass project, and has a team of 2 full-time and one part-time members, in addition to student interns who contribute to projects and often lead exploratory phases of new work. Research Action Design (RAD) is a worker cooperative which specializes in participatory design of research and technology. RAD manages technical implementation & maintenance of the Compass and has three full-time staff, two of whom work on the Compass project. Both organizations employ contractors to support illustration, front-end design and translation.

We are best-positioned to deliver this solution, because we are the sole provider of these resources locally. We are a community data provider which manages a City/County supported data platform and our mandate is to make data resources meaningful to community groups that have traditionally been left out of community decision-making. DataWorks’ team skills are both technical (programming, web development, GIS and statistics, urban planning, geography, non-fiction writing, and epidemiology) and community-engaged (meeting facilitation, participation processes and communications). DataWorks and RAD each benefit from  deeper experience, history and relationships in Durham’s communities while thoughtfully incorporating fresh perspectives as well.

Research Action Design has been working with communities across the US and world in community-based research and participatory design of technology for over five years. The RAD team brings skills in participatory design, facilitation, qualitative and policy research, and web development. RAD’s role in engaging with many different communities facing similar issues around data democratization makes them uniquely positioned as a partner to help bring best practices (in community engagement and research as well as technology development) to the Compass project.

In our work we connect with a broad range of local organizations, from housing policy advocates with strong ties to City Hall to grassroots organizers working with tenants and people personally experiencing housing instability. Our provision of data is in service to these relationships, and our web-based tools are informed by the stories and experiences shared with us. But we also convene these residents and organizations, offering opportunities to develop common knowledge and language about our city, where we’ve been and what we’re going through together.  These experiences are the gallery walk-led sessions described in greater detail above.

Our key customers are Durham residents and organizations working to advance racial and economic equity across our neighborhoods. These partners include residents and organizers from historically disinvested communities, community-rooted organizations supporting them, and key participants from our City and County governments. What we provide are data access, via web-based tools and in-person gallery walk experiences, and convened opportunities to grow knowledge through interpreting data together. These two products (data access and community convenings) are intended to cyclically improve one another as well, with community knowledge driving what data are presented and how they are described. The ultimate value added to the community from this work is deeper collective knowledge, shared truths that can help transform power and protect communities from harm.

Our aim is to continue providing relevant and transformative civic knowledge processes that are of deep importance to City and County government - worthy of their continued investment. By focusing and deepening our partnerships with key government offices whose work and values overlap with ours we can continue making our value clear. The Compass project itself is currently financially sustainable based on this funding stream.

Additional revenue to support increased outreach and engagement will continue to come from grants supporting specific projects and we hope to structure some of that revenue as jointly-funded collaborations with community partners. 

We are applying to Solve because we are poised to enter a growth phase, and think that the Solve network is well-positioned to help us maximize our impact & success in growth.

In our most recent action plan, we identified two key factors which will be necessary for our growth and where outside mentorship & expertise would be catalytic. The first is publicity, outreach and marketing. Our core organizational methods are built on deep, one-on-one relationships with community members and stakeholders, but in order for the tools resulting from those relationships to maximize their potential for impact, we need to build a user base across the broader community. This will require an effective marketing and outreach plan, and we could benefit from support in building that out.

Secondly, one of the threats facing our growth is that we become unable to sustain the quality of relationships and the commitment to core values which have made our work so impactful to date. With the Solve network, we hope to learn from other teams who have successfully scaled social enterprises about how they’ve maintained their core organizational values through that growth, and how they’re able to build ladders of engagement to bring people into the work at multiple levels.

Along with collaborative design and knowledge building, one of Dataworks’ core program areas is mentoring and leadership. We believe this leads directly to greater social mobility through helping young people build STEM skills, particularly in big data, geospatial analysis, user interface design and urban planning.

The GM Prize on Community-Driven Innovation would allow us to devote more resources to increasing internship opportunities for underserved young people and towards curriculum development and workshops in high school classrooms throughout the area.