Everyone here belongs to community. Whether large or small, rural to urban.
And while each community is unique, you all face common challenges. For the past
decade, my colleagues and I have been working with municipalities of all sizes
across the world to learn what makes a smart community. Last year, Los Angeles
launched GeoHub: a configuration of ArcGIS that enabled the public to
discover, explore and download open data. But citizens want more than just open
data. They want to be empowered to make informed decisions to improve their
neighborhoods and the government wants the community to align with official
policies. So we're excited to show you ArcGIS Hub, a new product enables everyone to
start building their smart community. ArcGIS Hub supports governments
prioritizing and managing initiatives. These are policy-driven goals connected
to standardized data indicators and brought to life through tools and
analytics, which measure outcomes. ArcGIS Hub also gives every resident community
identity, so they can gather new data, explore and analyze information and
share insights to the community and back to the government. So I'd like to
introduce Courtney Claessens, an engineer with the ArcGIS Hub team, to
share how we're working with the city of South Bend, Indiana, to use ArcGIS Hub to
accomplish their blight reduction initiative. Courtney? There are neighborhoods in
South Bend where almost 25% of the lots are vacant. The mayor's been focusing
efforts on rehabilitation and revitalization, and the Vacant to
Value initiative helped bring these efforts to life with the homepage, data
and solutions all configured using ArcGIS Hub. The initiative homepage
outlines the need for the initiative: government's vision, plans of action, and
helps clarify why this is important for the residents of South Bend. They can
view this homepage on the web, or in the city's Hub Mobile application. Here,
residents can view quick facts and maps powered by open data about the state of
blight and vacancy in South Bend, and can interact with them to gather more
information. Initiatives package focused tools for
engaging the community. Participants can explore and search for open data,
and explore the different applications that are part of this initiative. And
there are points of entry for the public to get involved.
Each resident can have a named identity, follow the initiative to receive updates
and notifications, register for events and leverage community features for
their advocacy. They can even perform spatial and statistical analyses to
generate their own insights using ArcGIS applications. Now, this might surprise you
but configuring and publishing this entire initiative takes just 30 minutes
using ArcGIS Hub. So how do we do it? Starting at the ArcGIS Hub homepage,
we sign in with the city's Hub account, and the Initiative Manager is going to
show us all the different initiatives that Sound Bend has been working on. Let's
dive in to see what comprises the Vacant to Value initiative. The
Initiative Editor guides us through three steps for solutions. First, inform the
public with story maps and websites. Second, listen to the public with surveys
and crowdsourcing tools. And third, monitor progress using applications like
dashboards to help communicate status of issues to the public and city officials.
All of these solutions are a part of this initiative template, and they come
to life when Sound Bend connects their data with the applications. Cities
publish initiatives to help create focused community engagement, and a
unique feature of ArcGIS Hub is the new way the cities can view the public's
efforts. And we do this in the Community Manager. City officials have oversight on
their outreach by measuring the reach and engagement, and it can also view the
different pieces of content that participants are creating within South
Bend's initiatives, so beyond simple crowdsourcing, participants can present
real solutions, powered by GIS, which represent the
geographic diversity in the city let's take a look at this community-created
page. A group of community participants have analyzed the results from the
vacant lot inventory survey and they're focusing on their own neighborhood in
South Bend. They've compared these results with the
city's community gardens dataset and we can see the notable lack of community
gardens in their particular area of interest. The city has augmented their
data with Esri's rich demographic data, which these community participants have
used to generate this infographic, getting more information and detail about their
neighborhood. So all together, this creates a written narrative advocating
for the need for revitalization and transformation of these vacant lots into
community gardens, which directly aligns with the city's goals. South Bend's
100,000 residents can now collaborate with their government. Thanks,
Courtney. ArcGIS hub creates digital public spaces that connect the
government directly with the communities they serve. Every resident becomes a full,
named user of ArcGIS with the ability to create meaningful products and work
alongside government on these initiatives. Reduced play is just one
initiative. ArcGIS Hub includes a growing network of initiative templates that
organizations can adopt, configure and even extend, to share best practices with
one another. These first initiatives we created in close collaboration with
early adopters and we hope you'll join us in designing and evolving new
initiatives. Solving the community's most complex problems will require the
ingenuity and efforts of everybody working in close collaboration. We
believe that ArcGIS Hub takes community engagement to this next stage. Thank you
very much. Thank you, Andrew, very wonderful. Really.
You guys get this idea that communities around the world are just going to
extend. Take the next step beyond open data, actually get real with engagement.
Organize about around real initiatives. I mean, Andrew and his team's work, I think,
just takes my breath away because I always thought it was going to be GIS
for society. No. It's going to be quite practically done by organizations who
want to engage and engage around real stuff and make things happen, so I
really love Andrew. He and his team are just amazing, amazing engineers.