Community Change: Engaging Through Data

At the Big Data Fest in March 2015, D3's director, Erica Raleigh, presented the case for the value of data to communities. There are ample data sets available to the analyst. The problem is not just finding the data sources, but being able to identify the best sources and synthesizing the data from these sources.  Sometimes it is necessary to develop new data sets.  Ms. Raleigh used the Motor City Mapping (MCM) project to illustrate Data Driven Detroit's development of a massive data set that evaluated the condition and occupancy of every property in the city of Detroit and incorporated data from more than 30 third-party data sets.  She concluded by describing how the findings from the MCM project are used to actively engage members of a variety of communities..