Explicitly or implicitly, the end game for most Community Indicators projects (CIPs) is to help bring about a noticeable improvement in the quality of life that residents experience. Consequently, CIPs that begin by measuring community well-being often evolve into a phase of mobilizing community stakeholders to attempt to change policy, resources and social capital that will make the CIP that people have rallied around change for the better. In this presentation I focus on the issue of using community indicators to help drive community collaboration and explore some of the common pitfalls including looking at data at too large a scale and data at too small a scale. I then focus on promising practices that have been developing at the meso level in which partners share their data on the census tract level.
