Community Indicators work in Truckee Meadows, NV

[cross-posted from the main Sustainable Seattle blog]

The Community Indicators Consortium has been hosting a series of webinars about community indicators and performance measures. The overall arc has been about how some local governments have successfully integrated community indicator work into how they measure their own performance, which is of interest to us because we hope to achieve the same with b-Sustainable. I've listened to the first two and would recommend them to anyone else interested in this kind of work; they've also been kind enough to make recordings available online.

Yesterday's was a case study from Truckee Meadows Tomorrow. I took some notes, which reflect my own biases and interests but may be worth sharing:

• The big impetus for starting their indicator work was a 1990s forecast of enormous population growth for the region - not unlike what PSRC is supposed to be preparing us for here
• The first round of indicator development was done by giving participants monopoly money to "buy" indicators with, as a way of prioritising the most valued n indicators. Apparently they don't use that procedure any more, but it sounds better to me than the more standard focus groups they've switched to, because it gives the meekest person in the room as much of a voice as the loudest. I'd be interested to hear why they switched.
• They're down to 33 indicators now, and even with those they have 10 quality-of-life categories that group things together, and they get feedback that the 10 categories are much easier to get a handle on than the 33 indicators.
• The categories are: Arts & Cultural Vitality - Civic Engagement - Economic Wellbeing - Education & Lifelong Learning - Enrichment - Health & Wellness - Innovation - Land use & Infrastructure - Natural Environment - Public Wellbeing
• In the past 5 years, they've made a special effort to reach "unusual suspects" - identifying communities not represented in the earlier focus group work and specifically recruiting them to add input.
• Washoe County uses the QoL indicators to track its own performance.
• A lot of the work they do on the basis of these indicators is done by partners of the counties - either volunteerism or compacts with companies - http://www.truckeemeadowstomorrow.org/collaborate/100

If this sounds interesting to you, I'd strongly recommend downloading the webinar from their site: http://www.communityindicators.net/post/events,cic-webinars-archive,truckee-meadows-tomorrow-and-washoe-county

Townsville Scorecard

The Townsville Region of North Queensland, Australia has a set of sustainability indicators, the Townsville Scorecard, along similar lines to Sustainable Seattle's own b-Sustainable project. Like b-Sustainable, it uses indicators to try to objectively assess whether sustainability trends in their region are improving, it takes a comprehensive view of sustainability, and it makes explicit the interlinked nature of the indicators.

It is a good deal simpler than our project, with 33 indicators as compared to our list of almost 200 (create a free account and log in to see the full list). This is both an advantage and drawback, in that a shorter list must necessarily leave things out, but is also much easier to maintain and describe. And on the description front, Townsville has done a good job of presenting quickly comprehensible summaries of the indicators (here's an example) along with concise commentary that adds a lot of value. b-Sustainable is a work in progress, and you can expect to see us take inspiration from some of these ideas as we improve its interface over the coming months.

We believe that every region should have a set of indicators broadly along these lines, because measuring what really matters is a crucial first step towards improving it and properly assessing the effectiveness of sustainability efforts. One of our long term goals for b-Sustainable is to package both the indicators themselves and the software to display and analyse them as an open source project that sustainability advocates and organisations elsewhere can use as a starting point for their own. Until we have that ready, projects like the Townsville Scorecard show how it can be done independently.