Mission   

Provide organizations and communities with facilitation technologies that improve decision making. 

Background   

Many government agencies make data accessible and downloadable through web-based warehouses. Paradoxically, these conventionally compiled and accessed data constrain most organizations' capacity to make decisions and analyze policy. Whereas organizations increasingly rely on data and geographic information technologies to examine the place-based impacts of public policies, they lack the time, expertise or technological infrastructure to make the best use of these resources for decision-making.  

Community Issues Management (CIM) transcends these constraints by providing tools for issues framing, facilitation, decision support, and data integration. CIM allows decision makers to deliberate how best to align resources with organizations, people and place. 

What is CIM?  

CIM is a global web-based system where organizations use data and tools to frame, manage and take action on complex issues. CIM provides a platform for engaging organizations and citizens to consider issues that impact their regional, state, national or global community. The Center for Applied Research and Environmental Systems (CARES) at the University of Missouri and Charter Member Communities are developing "CIM beta" to foster informed collaboration across and between organizations. This development or beta phase will transition to CIM Version 1.0 in January 2009.  

How is the public involved?   

CIM can be employed as a tool either for internal organization use or for community engagement to foster participation in open, transparent, data-informed and collaborative decision making. Any "user" can access local, state, and national data (socio-economic, demographic, health, education, emergency preparedness, and infrastructure data available at various levels) and can map the information for their own area of concern, down to the neighborhood level.  The general public can freely use CIM to visualize, overlay and interact with its large array of data and mapping capabilities and tools to illuminate priority issues in their own back yards.  

How are organizations involved?   

Two types of organization partnerships are currently available and reflect different levels of engagement and cost:  CIM Community Partners, who serve as CIM's primary focus and guide its design and development, and CIM Data Partners, who contribute data to the CIM data warehouse:  

CIM Community Partners* will be able to: 

•  Integrate their organization data and/or other local information into CIM's Data Warehouse to view with a large array of state, national and global datasets

• Access advanced mapping, framing, reporting and data integration tools for internal use and community engagement:

  - Dynamically frame issues for dialogue and deliberation

  - Generate maps, dynamic reports, and scenarios based on the framed issues

  - Dynamically integrate, edit and modify GIS data layers

  - Conduct place-based analyses

•  Access their organization's "CIM Intranet portal" for internal decision making

• Provide content (mapping tools, data, reports) via their public access "CIM Internet portal"  

• Serve as a community convener by engaging other organizations and the public around data and community issues

• Maximize the allocation of community resources to meet community needs

• Identify gaps and strategic collaboration opportunities using social network analysis

• Access expertise who have been trained to link CIM to community processes

 CIM Data Partners** will be able to: 

• Integrate or link organization data to CIM's data warehouse

• Use CIM's Public Access portal to view their data with the wide array of publically available data regularly updated and maintained by CIM

CIM Community Partners can tell sophisticated stories about key issues such as gaps and overlap in service provision at all levels -- local, state, national -- for vulnerable populations, health inequities, workforce retention, emergency preparedness, for example.  CIM Community Partner engagement ensures that the stories they tell -- about people, place and the impact of organizations - are more complete and more accurate. Stories derived using CIM's tools enable policy makers to better align resources with needs.  

Figure 1 illustrates building blocks to making more informed decisions.  The CIM initiative is built on the public good foundation that CARES developed over the past 15 years. At its core, CIM makes public data publically accessible in a meaningful context for decision support. In order to sustain this public good system we continue to seek foundation and public and non-profit sector support to raise the tide of accessibility to all communities. Informed community decision making is realized through the efforts of CIM Community Partners to go beyond the data and tell better stories with CIM's unique tools and facilitation support.  

* Charter Member Partners that have invested in CIM’s initial development are Trident United Way of South Carolina, United Way of Tucson and Southern Arizona, United Way of Southeastern Michigan, and Lehigh Valley Hospital in Pennsylvania. ** CIM Data Partners include the United Way of America.

Figure 1. Community Issues Management Diagram