A keystroke from West Philadelphia

Thanks to a Penn team, a new information-packed website was recently created to help people looking for data on West Philadelphia.

The InfoResources website, a repository of public data, and data developed by Penn faculty, students and West Philadelphia residents, was launched on July 16 to assist city planners in condensing information in a single, easy-to-use source.

The site features a variety of information about West Philadelphia, including census, crime, poverty, education and housing information.

"If we can all share and exchange data, we can have a better world," said City and Regional Planning professor Sidney Wong, InfoR's project director.

The project, funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, was a collaboration between the Penn library, various Penn laboratories, the City and Regional Planning Department and the Center for Community Partnerships.

According to Wong, the site will help serve several purposes.

First, the multitude of socio-economic and political data available makes it an easy place for researchers to obtain data for grant-writing.

Second, the data will help specific community development corporations work on different community projects, such as public housing and blight.

Third, the site will be a resource for researchers and students as a linking network to other useful West Philadelphia sites.

Aside from its usefulness to the outside community, Penn will be able to benefit from the site as well, since the University is engaged in numerous projects within West Philadelphia.

Influenced by other similar sites in cities such as St. Louis, Cleveland and Atlanta, InfoR aims to "massage the data in a easy to understand fashion," Wong said.

Furthermore, another objective of the site is to make the data freely available to whoever wishes to access it.

According to Wong, he and his team believed in a "data democracy," since the "data should belong to the people."

The road leading up to the unveiling of the site was a long one. City and Regional Planning Chairwoman Eugenie Birch developed the idea of an interactive data website a few years ago.

When Wong came to Penn last year, he was appointed head of the project. Because of resource limitations in terms of technology, the project was scaled back to its present form.

West Philadelphia has a population of over 130,000 people, making the project incredibly complex.

Members of the University community were impressed with the potential benefits for both Penn and the community.

"It's a wonderful resource for faculty and student research projects," said Ira Harkavy, director of the Center for Community Partnerships. "In addition, it also will improve the community's ability to understand what is going on in the neighborhood so as to improve it."

Because of the potential impact, Harkavy also saw the site as a model for other universities to adopt.

"It's a model for other universities to serve as centers for community data, strengthening relationships between themselves and the surrounding community.

The site, however, is far from being finished.

A listserv of users will be created so as to ease communication between those interested in the endeavor and the website will be updated with additional data as it becomes available.

In its present form, the site will also offer individuals the opportunity to contribute the data that they have gathered.

In addition, the site seeks to expand the information scope to create a fort of data archive, where professors and other researchers will be able to share the data with one another.

The site can be found at the following address: http://westphillydata.library.upenn.edu.

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