Decide on Initial Project Scope

[bfreeds]

By the end of Codeswitch, we were working with the idea that we would be making a Community Profile web app for the entire State of Minnesota.

I would like to discuss whether or not we want to limit the initial scope of our project to a smaller area/jurisdiction.

A couple challenges of doing the entire state:

1. Limiting to a City-scope would make it more useful for local decision makers (the target audience we discussed of this project). For example, having an app for just Saint Paul would open the door for it to be used by policy makers to see the relative CVI's within their jurisdiction and determine which communities to focus resources.
2. It will be easier for us to work with one agencies' open data to create a "Community Assets" section. Open Data will vary across governments, and limiting to one would let us do a deeper dive into what is available and possible. As a proof of concept I think that we could go farther by doing something really interesting with a single government's open data, rather than putting our time and energy into figuring out how to merge datasets across multiple governments (see Find Open, Local Datasets to Create "Community Assets" Section #5).
3. Smaller project scope = smaller datasets (to use my Carto account it everything we pull in has to be <250mb)

I would propose we start out with a "Saint Paul Community Profiles" or a "Minneapolis Community Profiles."

I like the idea of doing Saint Paul since we have contacts there from Codeswitch, and because they put in the time and energy to host the hackathon that this project came out of. One benefit of doing Minneapolis would be there is a better "Neighborhood" dataset, so we could replicate what the original project uses for geographies (Community Districts). That would be a better storytelling unit than just "Census Tracts."