Yale University
Department of Statistics
The City Room at ISPS: Efforts toward Bolstering the Local Information
Economy
Monday, September 16, 1996
Dan Ryan
Coordinator: New Haven City Room for Institution for Social and Policy
Studies
Yale University
Seminar to be held in Room 107, 24 Hillhouse
Within an urban community the production, collection, analysis,
interpretation and use of data are all mediated by multiple levels of
organization and the politics of inter- and intra-organizational relations.
To the researcher, this can appear as noise in the data and obstacles to
obtaining more of it. To the activist it looks like politics as usual, and
to the policymaker it represents the frustration of trying to work in the
``bureaucracy''.
The City Room at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies is a modest
attempt to ``intervene'' in this system by using network technology and
``ethnographic'' level interaction with city government, NPO's, community
groups, and researchers, to raise the baseline of information/data
availability and utilization amoung policymakers, activists and scholars.