Citizen Dan: Community Indicators for Local Communities

Citizen Dan is a free, open source system available to any community and its citizens to measure and track indicators of local well being (see further about). It is available for use now, but is also undergoing active development with support from a number of innovative cities.

Citizen Dan is an exemplar instance of Structured Dynamics' open semantic framework (OSF), a generalized framework for deploying semantic platforms for any domain.  By changing its guiding ontologies and source content and data, what appears for Citizen Dan can be adopted for virtually any subject area.

Go to the Concept ExplorerAs configured, the Citizen Dan OSF instance is a:

  • Appliance for filtering and analyzing data specific to local community indicators
  • Means to visualize local data over time or by neighborhood
  • Meeting place for the public to upload and share local data and information
  • Web data portal that can be individually tailored by any local community
  • Potential node in a global network of communities across which to compare indicators of community well-being.

This site is a combination of both information and a working portal, using Iowa City (IA) data and stories as its test bed. This site contains many cool widgets and components in such areas as dynamic browsing, mapping, story tagging, charts, slicing-and-dicing, exports and so forth. As a public site open to all, some potential functionality has been turned off in the current demo.

This site also has links to the ontology (MUNI) and knowledge base (DocWiki) that accompanies the Citizen Dan software, as well as pointers to how to download and install it.

Enjoy! And please do contact us if you'd like to learn more about the project, investigate funding or sponsorship opportunities, or contribute to development. Thanks!