Noyce Conference Room
Workshop
  US Mountain Time
 

Our campus is closed to the public for this event.

We are planning to host an international meeting on the challenges of scaling up data collection, organization and analysis by local communities for neighborhood development.  Such data is essential for developing better science and policy of cities anywhere. However, in developing countries statistical agencies’ collections are still poor or non-existent, especially in slum neighborhoods, with the consequence that many efforts have been started by non-profits and neighborhood communities to collect information about their condition as a means to promote a dialogue with cities and service providers. Unfortunately, such data has been collected primarily with a local view in mind, is not standardized and is not even organized so that it can serve as a basis for learning towards science and policy. While our current project at SFI with Slum Dwellers International (SDI) is dedicated to addressing these issues, much more needs to be done. Through our research we have also observed that, in addition to non-profits and city, national and international agencies, there is also a growing contingent of open-source software developers working in the area of development and data gathering and analysis. In some cases these new tools have enabled significant improvements in processes of data collection and analysis in specific contexts. However, the relationships between these open-source developers and organizations such as SDI, the Word Bank, and researchers have not yet been established on a global scale.

Thus, the main aim of the conference is to introduce leading stakeholders in all these areas (researchers, community organizations and NGOs, open-source software developers, UN, World Bank, philanthropic Foundations) to each other and together address the challenge of collecting neighborhood level data in cities worldwide with a view not only of local uses but also towards general learning for science and policy.  We feel that the technology and the motivation to create a global effort around this issue already exists, but has not yet been fulfilled. The main objective of the meeting is to create such a strategy and coordinate action across many levels of agency and knowledge.

Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grant No. OPP1076282 and Jeanne and Michael L. Klein.

Purpose: 
Research Collaboration
SFI Host: 
Luis Bettencourt, Joe Hand, and Jose Lobo

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