Community Economic Development launches new pilot Data Dashboard

The City of Revelstoke’s Community Economic Development Department launched its new Data Dashboard pilot project on June 14th.

The public will now have access to key community economic development data through the community economic development dashboard, an interactive, online information management tool used to track, analyze, and display relevant community metrics and data points.

The pilot project was initiated in early 2021 by the Revelstoke Economic Development Commission of the City of Revelstoke & CSRD Area B sub-committee to empower local organizations and businesses across sectors with access to accurate, timely data, and to inform economic and social policy decisions at the municipal level.

“In the process of assessing the viability of the data dashboard pilot, the sub-committee looked at open data initiatives implemented by comparable Canadian municipalities. The Squamish Open Data Catalogue stood out to us as an excellent example of what’s possible,” says Dylan Hardy, Revelstoke Economic Development Commission sub-committee member.

“Like Squamish, Revelstoke is managing significant change, and accessing accurate data to inform decisions is an ongoing challenge for our municipal leaders, employers, community organizations, residents and prospective investors.”

The team researched practical options to build and maintain a solution using data already available, and after determining the most useful metrics in consultation with community representatives, engaged data visualization specialists, HelpSeeker, to bring the dashboard to life.

The completed dashboard presents business development, transportation and tourism, population, housing and food security data metrics in an accessible, interactive format, putting the community’s challenges and opportunities on the table for conversations about system coordination, and cross-sector understanding and collaboration.

“Data grounds conversations in evidence: it gives us the foundation from which we can start optimizing and transforming systems in a strategic, measurable way,” says Community Economic Development Director, Ingrid Bron.

“Some practical applications of dashboard data in the tourism industry, for example, might be assessing the local labour demand in a particular sector, predicting tourist volume, or assessing the market and resources for business development.”

The sub-committee will run a free information session for the community via Zoom on Wednesday 22nd June at 12 noon. The Zoom meeting access link is here.

The Community Economic Development Data Dashboard can be viewed here. The data is current to the end of 2021.

Dylan Hardy explains that “the sub-committee deems this a pilot project, with a goal of engaging the community in a conversation around data. We have identified opportunities to refine the dashboard further but we want to hear from the community and partners first to see what they think. We invite discussion and feedback on how we could make this better.”