In-person and Online: Chicago Community Dashboard #696

Presenter: DataMade & Robert R. McCormick Foundation Topic: Chicago Community Dashboard

Description:

While Chicagoans organize around community areas, local political geographies, and service areas that no agency has drawn a boundary for, public data is often organized by Census tract. The Chicago Community Dashboard (CCDB) is built on an ETL pipeline that bridges the gap: it can aggregate tracts to anything. It handles medians that can’t be averaged, counts that need reweighting, and margins of error that have to be propagated. Give it a boundary, and get a data profile.

Powered by this flexible pipeline, CCDB publishes a decade of data for 80+ indicators across population demographics, health & safety, economic vitality, and education for all 77 community areas, 50 wards, and 20 school board districts. By centering trends, it situates communities in dynamic context: whether something is getting better or worse, how fast, and how similar or different trends are from peer communities and the city overall. Official boundaries are only the beginning. Authorized users can combine official geographies or draw their own shapes to produce custom data profiles for the unofficial areas in which they work. And CCDB lets everyone go deeper: segment indicators by race/ethnicity, gender, and age; compare two geographies side by side; or export any chart and its underlying data for reuse in other projects.

This talk will cover the pipeline’s architecture and the design decisions that followed from treating change over time as the primary unit of analysis. It will also discuss how DataMade built CCDB iteratively with careful integration of community feedback, originally to support grantmaking at the Robert R. McCormick Foundation and now as a public resource for anyone who seeks to improve this beautiful, complicated city. Have questions, suggestions, or other feedback? Feedback is greatly appreciated! Take the survey, or reach out at dashboard@rrmf.org.

This event will be in person, but you can also tune in via livestream. Doors open at 6pm. The livestream and announcements will start around 6:30pm CDT.

In-person: i.c.stars, 750 N Orleans, Suite 500 (5th floor), Chicago IL.

For more information on our in-person events, please see our COVID Policy.

RSVP In-person attendees should RSVP beforehand. As occupancy limits permit, walk-ins will be allowed to enter.

There will be food! We will be serving Costa Rican empanadas, chicken casado and rice from Irazu!