MegHolden has been contributing to the research for Vancouver Foundation’s Vital Signs for 4 years with the Regional Vancouver Urban Observatory (RVu) at SFU and is a key figure in bringing all of the research together for our staff and advisory groups. Meg is talented in explaining data in everyday language and has a critical eye for highlighting information that matters. This is her post on the research that has happened behind the scenes for this year’s Vital Signs. We’re 20 days away from the release of this report – Oct. 5th. Let us know here if you’d like us to share the report with you when it’s released.
I’m going to have to find a new spreadsheet to play with! Our 6 month effort to collect, analyze, chart, and compare statistical trends for Vital Signs for Metro Vancouver has now wrapped up. The scoping, framing, consultation, research, writing and designing process for this report has been monumental. The result is exciting, an inspiring resource for planners, advocates, and agitators in our region, and innovative at an international scale.
We get report cards and performance reviews at school and work each year, new employment figures are released weekly, air quality indices get updated daily, key market indices are updated every minute during the working day. We also use tiny blips of strategic information to gauge the big picture – we all have looked at a temperature reading and guessed the weather, or, in another context, our own body’s health. But in key areas, we know we’re using the wrong “blips” as indicators of things all day. GDP is perhaps the clearest example. GDP is a measure of economic output, but isn’t ameasure of societal progress. The trouble is, we don’t have any really good gauges of societal progress (well, with deference to the Canadian Index of Wellbeing project, not yet!). At the scale of our community, where community vitality hits home and “doing well” versus “going to pot” affects us most directly, we need to bootstrap, extrapolate, and pull from a thousand different points of focus to make the trends appear. Because it is in our community, and not in any particular perspective on what constitutes progress or vitality, Vital Signs begins to capture the wealth of information that lies with groups and individuals throughout metro Vancouver and further afield. In reaching out to these groups and individuals, tapping into their knowledge, connections, and understanding of our home place, enriches our regional knowledge base and allows a richer story to come into focus.
Another new thing the Vital Signs figures do is take these strategic blips and put them in a bigger picture, tracing a story line between them, and inviting us all to read into them. The Community Indicators Consortium, an international organization of indicators practitioners and researchers (numbers wonks from all walks of life!) refer to it as a question of “integration.” Integration is needed so that we don’t merely have an explosion of different kinds of data and information for different groups with different specific needs – in health outcomes, housing and economic trends, staff and organizational performance, social justice advocacy, environmental indicators. Rather, what we need is a better understanding of how core trends and sectors relate to one another, at different scales, with different pressure points and suggest areas where common action can make a big difference overall. Vital Signs begins to serve this role for our region.
Perhaps the most significant innovation to be found in Vital Signs for Metro Vancouver 2010 is that it has all the knowledge of a statistical trends report, but it looks nothing like any statistical report you have ever seen! Instead, Vital Signs goes out on a limb to put the numbers together with images, stories, animation, and an array of media to make the messages behind the numbers ring truer to a wider audience: to start a richer conversation. Data visualization (“infoviz”?) pioneer Hans Rosling calls this “unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view.” Communications gurus, nudge theorists, perhaps, see it instead as smart, purposeful and persuasive messaging. The multimedia’s point of entry to the Vital Signs story is both these things, and more. Our research teams have been engaged in also creating a digital story, a multi-media representation for this year’s Vital Signs which will show real-life examples of residents’ experiences of life in metro Vancouver. This image below is part of that video.
In the past, I have worked with an organization called Sustainable Seattle (S2), a pioneer in community indicators work. When this volunteer group of Seattle citizens who became S2 came together in 1990 to begin an indicators project for the future of their region, they were starting from scratch. It took five years to generate enough information to put out the report, Indicators of Sustainable Community, covering 40 key trends. In 2005, when the organization regrouped to figure out what their report should look like in this new millennium, they looked around and found a surfeit of over 1,000 measurable sustainability indicators for possible inclusion. That’s not even counting the key factors that resist being counted (their new project, the B-Sustainable Information Commons, attempts to tackle these as well). Our count is 238 – the number of indicators for which you will find deep data in this year’s Vital Signs for metro Vancouver. That doesn’t include the additional ream of data from the public opinion survey, nor the dozens of additional indicators that wound up on the cutting room floor. The efforts of the research team, Vital Signs advisory groups, Community Foundations of Canada, and Vancouver Foundation staff, to put all this data together have been formidable. But that’s just the beginning of the story.
*written by Meg Holden, Director, Regional Vancouver Urban Observatory, Urban Studies Program, Simon Fraser University
Photograph by John Goldsmith
