Recognizing the need for improved access to data vital for addressing vexing community challenges, Iowa State University Extension and Outreach’s Community and Economic Development (CED) unit developed the Community Indicators Program in 2013 and the Data Science for Public Good (DSPG) Young Scholars summer outreach program (https://dspg.iastate.edu/) in 2020. These programs have been successful at producing and sharing demographic, economic and other state data through the curation of meaningful and timely data and informative publications and dashboards. The programs have also worked with communities to utilize the Community Learning through Data Driven Discovery (CLD3) https://cld3.org/our-approach/ framework to address local issues and provide local stakeholders with the ability to make data-supported decisions.

While these efforts have been a good start to improve issue awareness and decision-making in smaller and rural communities, many of the indicators that are informative measures in larger communities are not readily available or are at a granularity that is not suitable for local decision-making. Additionally, access to software and the skills to operate this software can be a barrier to working with this data once it is identified.

To address this issue, a program focused on Science Education and Workforce Development was piloted in 2024. This program prioritized 1) increasing local capacity for data literacy 2) increasing technical skills to access data 3) increasing ability to share local data. The program developers recognized the need for utilizing Free and Open-Source software to limit the cost and access barriers to visualizing and sharing local data with the community. Software skills are developed though hands-on-training using local data examples. The current suite of free and open-source software is accessible and scalable to meet the needs of many small communities. The software included in the program consists of QGIS, GeoJSON.io, Google Sheets, GitHub, and Tableau Public. Used together, this software allows participants to easily make their local community data publicly available at little to no cost.

Examples of some of the data projects include: the number of recurring community events, use frequency of park shelter rentals, number of volunteer organizations, number of youth/adult parks and recreation participants, attendance rates at council/supervisor meetings, number of permits for home improvements, library check outs, or even the number and spatial location of trees planted by the city. During this presentation, the presenter will share several of these examples demonstrating how this software can be used by those new to data science or geospatial technology. Additionally, the presentation will include some techniques that can be used to increase the utility and delivery of spatial data visualizations created with these tools.