Durham Neighborhood Compass

The Durham Neighborhood Compass builds data access and visualization tools which put access to data in the hands of residents. It is a mobile-friendly, bilingual tool which allows residents to do anything from exploring the impact of racism, environmental stress & food access on chronic health in their neighborhood, to estimating the number of children served by a proposed new playground. RAD coordinates development, design and maintenance of the Compass for DataWorks NC, a 501 c 3 serving neighbors, neighborhoods, nonprofits and local governments.

RAD’s work on the Compass project has included:

• Refactoring and modernizing code into a pre-rendered single-page Vue application, to ensure that language and topic-specific URLs are easily shareable and searchable
• Building new “geography switcher” functionality to allow users to look at datasets at both the Tract and Blockgroup data
• Building a customizable report feature for budget delegates in Durham’s 2019 Participatory Budgeting process to use to create customized reports about the impact of particular participatory budgeting proposals
• Working with DataWorks NC to develop a visual component inventory to help create consistent & standard visual design elements across all of their web properties
• Coordinating the development of bilingual functionality, with translations provided by tilde Language Justice Cooperative
• Co-coordinating user testing and implementing on-going UI/UX improvements based on user testing results