Data Driven Detroit is an organization which shows the power of analytics at the community level. Its director, Kurt Metzger, seems to be a staunch advocate of sharing as much data as possible to harness a true “enterprise” look at what is going on. As Detroit goes under its post industrial transformation the details from the data prove to be interesting.
From the website-
In 2008, The Skillman Foundation and The Kresge Foundation awarded City Connect Detroit a $ 1.85 M planning and implementation grant to incubate Data Driven Detroit (originally named the Detroit-Area Community Information System). The charge for the newly-formed agency was to become a nonprofit, independent data center that would promote positive community change by:
- Tracking neighborhood-level social, economic and environmental indicators for the local initiatives of key foundations;
- Creating greater community access to and utilization of community data and information; and
- Building a community data warehouse of comprehensive, reliable, relevant information relating to social, economic and environmental indicators.