CANA Designs War Room, A Place to Coordinate Austin Revitalization Efforts

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The CANA Think Tank has begun to explore and plan for a “War Room” .. a place where all efforts can be coordinated and managed for the long term community revitalization efforts. This permanent place will  house all the tools and project management for the many organizations and individuals who want to work toward serious improvement of our neighborhood.  Tools like a central web-site that manages the many disparate efforts, resources, and projects with a goal of better utilization of resources and manpower. This site and place will contain a library of resources and a history of past efforts and results. Capturing “best practices’ will better steer future efforts toward what is effective.  Our goal is to provide a real time on-line dashboard of all the critical measures of our communities holistic health. We will take advantage of 2010 Census data, public records such as crime statistics, camera footage, 911 call data,  summarized health stats as well as targeted surveys.  We can also measure the profile of a “healthy neighborhood” and overlay ours with an eye toward identifying Gaps. We can even include measure such as number of grocery stores, fast food restaurants, bars, student achievement scores, festivals, community events, signs advertising negative products or services, number of computers, transmission towers, housing density, Leed certified buildings,  businesses by type,  tax revenue,  number of police officers,  outside investment, grants, average gas bills, average electric bills, etc. This unique view of our community will be used by all to create targeted and preemptive responses to prioritized problems.  We are also looking to use a touch enabled smart board similar to the devices being used on Cable News (  http://theweek.com/article/index/102860/video-cnns-magic-wall-an-inside-look  ) stations to visually summarize and drill down to detailed information. We hope the visual management of data will allow us to better understand our problems and solutions as well as track progress.