To develop an interactive dashboard for Memphis and Shelby County citizens that can be used to map neighborhood assets and analyze sustainability indicators and metrics.

Lessons learned about tools and tactics through the project that other sustainability directors could use to advance their work.

The initial concept for the community indicators dashboard was a portal that would allow users to do more than access data, but actually assist communities to facilitate visioning and decision making toward community plans. This was a lofty goal of the partners, and the process of understanding how a data portal can facilitate decisions led to engaging exercises and discussions among partners and community representatives. These exercises and discussions helped the partners to think about how the platform communicates multiple sets of data to the public for the purpose of analysis and decision making, rather than simple data querying.

Lessons for developing a collaborative process between a local government sustainability director and local place-based foundation(s).

The evolution of the community indicators dashboard to take on a greater function through the linkage of three platforms (community indicators, donor giving, and open data) was largely a function of the collaboration among local place-based foundations and the Office of Sustainability. Partners in the process came to the project with varying priorities that, through collaboration, were able to all be encompassed into the platforms so that a network of community information was seamlessly connected and rolled out to the public simultaneously.