Citistates Group

Indicators of city and region progress sound great, and the number (and variety) of projects keeps expanding — to at least several dozen now — across the U.S.

Measured by communications impact, Boston’s (a project of the Boston Foundation) may just have made the biggest 21st century stride yet. The foundation has taken its Indicators Report, begun with broad consultation of citizen groups from 1997 onward, and translated it onto the Internet with lively text and summaries and extraordinarily useful where-to-look tips and links (www.bostonindicators.org)

Each of the Boston topics — on 10 major topic areas ranging from civic health to the environment to technology — describe the salient trends and provide opportunities to get deep into the figures. The computer screen has filters to underscore cross-cutting connections, too: how bad health plays out in poor school performance, for example, or school scores impact economic outcomes.

The Boston Foundation’s Charlotte Kahn, who’s been the will and wizard behind the project, attributes part of its breadth to a data-driven, analytic decision-making culture that first flowered with the city’s police reforms under William Bratton in the early ’90s. Equally important, the foundation held series of meetings with citizens and agencies, asking their ideas and input on potential indicators, from 1997 onward. In addition to gauges of well-known problems, the participants had a chance to name unconventional measures focused on community assets — for example the ratios of kids to computers in schools, the swimmability of the area’s waterways, the extent of tree cover by neighborhood.

The overall result is an impressively full look at Boston and its suburbs. Though predictably, some less measurable elements get less attention: for example the effectiveness of civic leadership, the impact of government fragmentation or patronage patterns, or the adequacy and quality of media coverage.

What especially impressed me, as a news person, is the way the website draws attention, from its opening screen onward, to critical emerging trends. Example: an apparently serious brain drain, as metro Boston (partly because of sky-high housing prices) lost 21 percent of its 20-to-24 year-olds, and 13 percent of its 25-to-34 year-olds, during the ’90s. Any region losing its talented youth faces a challenge — and especially a citistate, like Boston, historically dependent on strong economic innovation. Few politicos are likely to advertise such a problem, but indicators connected to citizen activists can light sparks, lead to corrective action.

The Boston effort is just one example of the virtual flood of indicators-type projects that have been flowering around the country, from Silicon Valley to the Twin Cities, Chicago to the Bay Area, Portland to South Florida.

The U.S. General Accounting Office reports it’s surveying indicators from across the nation as part of its preparation for a set of USA-wide measures of economic, social, environmental health. More cross-fertilization of indicator efforts is underway at the Brookings Institution, home to a National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership that’s grown from six model efforts to 20, spread geographically from Providence to Denver to Seattle.

My test for all the indicator studies (on which I’d like to write a column soon) is not just how many pretty number tables they produce. The critical issues are (1) how accessible they are by any curious and educated person, and (2) potential impact on policy making and region-wide civic action. Boston seems to me a breakthrough. But maybe you have other or different examples. Let me know!