Building Capacity for Data-Driven Governance: Creating a New Foundation for Democracy

Abstract

Existing data flows at the local level, public and administrative records, geospatial data, social media, and surveys are ubiquitous in our everyday life. The Community Learning Data-Driven Discovery (CLD3) process liberates, integrates, and makes these data available to government leaders and researchers to tell their community's story. These narratives can be used to build an equitable and sustainable social transformation within and across communities to address their most pressing needs. CLD3 is scalable to every city and county across the United States through an existing infrastructure maintained by collaboration between U.S. Public and Land Grant Universities and federal, state, and local governments. The CLD3 process starts with asking local leaders to identify questions they cannot answer and the potential data sources that may provide insights. The data sources are profiled, cleaned, transformed, linked, and translated into a narrative using statistical and geospatial learning along with the communities' collective knowledge. These insights are used to inform policy decisions and to develop, deploy, and evaluate intervention strategies based on scientifically based principles. CLD3 is a continuous, sustainable, and controlled feedback loop.