Data that describe places like Vermont influence the decisions of the institutions and people that lead them.
The systems that host and provide this critical data are fragmented and inaccessible, creating barriers to usability in rural communities. Leveraging this data for the benefit of rural populations means working with stakeholders across scales and curating what the data can do for them to amplify their potential impact on community.
These challenges don’t just manifest in data itself. The way data is collected, organized, stored, and understood within and across institutions at all levels creates fragmentation. Challenges with data use are not isolated to rural areas. The federal statistical system is split across 16 agencies federally and countless more across state and municipal governments. Each agency manages its data differently, yet their data is used by each other, states, and municipalities across the nation. This data, with all its presented challenges, informs the daily operations of government across scales. The asymmetry of data governance practices creates data sharing challenges that limit the usability of government data for all actors, especially in rural communities. You can read more about the challenges of rural data in the first article from this series.
Accounting for these challenges, the federal government often supports collaborative data programs used across government agencies that combine state and federal data.
- The Local Area Unemployment Statistics program (LAUS) is a state-federal cooperative program that publishes labor data estimates, which are important indicators of local economic conditions. Source data for the Vermont LAUS program comes from the Vermont Department of Labor in cooperation with the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- The Federal-State Cooperative for Population Estimates creates cooperative offices at the state level that work alongside the Census Bureau’s Program Branches to produce population estimates that are informed by state and local administrative data. The estimates produced by the state data centers in collaboration with the Census is used to distribute trillions of dollars of federal funds and determine eligibility into federal funding programs. Vermont’s State Data Center is housed at UVM at the Center for Rural Studies (CRS).
Collaborations like these are useful and effective, but single-issue programs like these do not fix the problem. The fragmented system still limits what community leaders can do with their data.
It will require more than top-down federal solutions to solve the challenges of fragmentation. Many in state government, higher education, and other community organizations have stepped up to build their part of the vision for a new data infrastructure. Programs from Purdue and California exemplify what accessible and usable data might look like:
- In Indiana, The Purdue Center for Regional Development has developed a website called Rural Indiana Stats, an open data portal that provides in-depth reports, dashboards and maps on communities in Indiana, making the most important insights for the public decision-making process publicly available to any user.
- California’s Health and Human Services (CHHS) Open Data Portal contains data tools that provide the user with a one-stop website for all of the CHHS departments’ data. The CHHS’s portal is dedicated to maintaining vigorous quality and accessibility standards for the open data model.
What is possible for Vermont, then, is a version of a partnership-based open data platform that enables the widespread use of public data in rural communities. Online open data platforms like Rural Indiana Stats and the CHHS Open Data Portal provide an accessible model, and leaders at UVM have created a similar platform called the Vermont Data Collaborative (VDC). The VDC exists to make accessible all publicly available information that might be relevant to any Vermonter’s work. If a legislator, business owner or nonprofit leader needs information about housing, population demographics, employment metrics, climate and weather data, or anything else, they can visit the Vermont Data Collaborative and utilize the available tools, curating the data to best inform their work.
Read on to learn about how this kind of data infrastructure can be built and how collaboration can be leveraged to extend the benefits of data to rural Vermonters.
The process of building an accessible data infrastructure
Once a platform like the Vermont Data Collaborative is established, the work towards an accessible data infrastructure is not done. In building an accessible data infrastructure, standards for data governance build the foundation for a continued process of making data valuable for everyone. The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship is a good example of open data standards that support widespread public use of data in a world where the volume, complexity and creation speed of data often accelerates faster than rural systems can keep up with. The FAIR Guiding Principles establish four pillars of data governance: Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse.
The Vermont Data Collaborative is dedicated to similar principles and processes for sustained data stewardship. The Vermont Data Collaborative primarily uses public data, cleans it up into an interoperable and reusable format, and focuses the user experience on accessibility. -Braden Lynn '27, co-founder of UVM's Vermont Policy Institute.
A deeper dive into how the VDC team is working through the data published on the VDC is provided below.
- Public Data. The process of making data beneficial for the public begins with public data itself. This data can go through standardized cleaning processes to make it interoperable, or able to integrate with other datasets. Things like variables are coded, renamed, geographic identifiers and data types are standardized, or missing values handled. This Metadata, or the details or context that describes a piece of data, should also be consistently documented to preserve a description of the data, units, sources, and update schedules. Good metadata establishes credibility and clarifies what it’s showing. Because public datasets are often published using different standards, this transformation step is what allows information from multiple agencies to work together on a single platform. This process creates a strong foundation for integrating data from multiple sources.
- Consolidation. After this cleaning process, the data can be consolidated. Anyone looking for public data must visit dozens of inaccessible websites, many of which are dead ends, haven’t been updated in years, or have been shut down. Putting all the clean data in one space removes most of the burden from the user who often has little time, resources or professional training for in-depth research.
- Accessible User Experience. The last barrier to creating value from public data lies in user experience. Making data publicly available does not make it accessible. Effective data systems present information through intuitive search, filtering, interactive maps, visualizations, and documentation that allow users with all levels of technical ability to explore and interpret data without specialized software or programming knowledge.
Building accessible public data systems means transforming hard-to-use data into standardized, interoperable formats so they can engage with data from other sources. Developing this system means rethinking the way that the average government official or community leader thinks about data and how it can work for them.
The collaborative community work behind a public data infrastructure
Important processes like appropriating funds, laying out zoning plans, or deciding housing policy are dependent on institutions collaborating with one another to share the information needed to do the job correctly. Collaboration can bring prosperity and growth for rural communities that face challenges handling complex problems on their own. Systems that let people and data work together are built across sectors with varying strengths and weaknesses. Many of the challenges faced by government organizations in a modern digitized world are characterized by their interdependence and complexity. Rural communities, including those in Vermont, also have limited capacity to manage increasingly complex community challenges.
Applying these dimensions to the concept of a platform like the Vermont Data Collaborative allows us to create a vision of usable, accessible data systems for rural communities. Vermont has existing collaboration in the open data sphere and is a fitting image of the other conditions necessary for a data collaborative to be successful. These are the considerations we’re considering as we build out the VDC:
Institutional Environment. An institutional environment must create the space in which collaboration occurs. This means that governments, institutions of higher education, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) create precedents for sharing data and collaborative work.
- The state government has expressed long-term plans for improving Vermont’s technological and data ecosystems, including the creation and distribution of useful data tools like the Vermont Open Geodata Portal.
- Important institutions in the state, like UVM, have a decades-long history of providing data services to local communities. Nonprofit organizations like the Vermont Futures Project and the Vermont Housing Finance Agency also provide data tools that public organizations of all kinds may use to inform their practices.
Shared Motivation. Supported by a forward-facing institutional environment, Vermont’s organizations have a shared motivation to leverage data for their practices. Together, rural areas face many of the same data problems – small population, limited capacity, and a lack of interoperability between the systems that house federal, state, and local data. No single rural actor or community will be able to take up enough space to drive a single solution, and therefore, their common problems leave the space for shared motivation to drive a collaborative effort.
Technological Capacity. The state of Vermont’s technological systems can hinder its capacity to take on responsibilities of a government’s digital systems. The Center for Rural Studies’ Vermont Evaluation of Rural Technical Assistance (VERTA) project found that while Vermont’s communities lack technical capacity that matches with modern governance demands, the systems that exist are ones that Vermonters fundamentally rely on.
Importantly, this research identified the notable strength of coordination and collaboration in Vermont. Vermont’s technological systems are connecting communities to collaborate on efforts that are too demanding or widespread for one to take on. VERTA notes that government agencies work well with one another, complementing relative strengths and weaknesses even more importantly during crises like recent flooding and pandemic-era challenges. So, while Vermont’s technical systems lack capacity for communities to tackle problems alone, a collaborative environment already exists in the municipal technical assistance system.
Rural data infrastructure for Vermont
No single institution is provisioning statewide public data infrastructure. In Vermont, the work is done by public servants and community leaders across the state in state government, nonprofits, public agencies, and volunteer projects, who are each maintaining their part of the data landscape.
Accessibility. Many community partners are making progress in building an accessible data ecosystem that works for the people. Nonprofit organizations across the state publish data reports across sectors. The Vermont Futures Project runs the Vermont Competitiveness Dashboard, presenting economic data and meant to serve as a basis for comparative analysis. The Public Assets Institute generates analyses on tax, budget, and economic data with a focus on tax and budget equity. The Vermont Housing Finance Agency, a public organization created by the legislature, maintains community housing data profiles and several data tools that allow any user to gain insights on Vermont’s housing conditions. Vermont’s nonprofit organization for municipalities, the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, has begun the Vermont Municipal Data Project to collect and analyze municipal operations and help towns strengthen their capacity. Organizations across the state are positioned to collaborate across domains for the public good.
Standardization and Interoperability. Vermont does lack a standardized and interoperable data ecosystem, but this does not mean that the data we have isn’t useful. Examples from across Vermont and the U.S. tell us stories of how the public was able to utilize a fragmented data ecosystem for their benefit.
Virginia has taken the possible benefits of a more open data ecosystem to some of the nation’s most pressing issues. In 2015, a data sharing program was implemented with the express goal of reducing the number of homeless veterans. Ultimately, Virginia became the first state to ‘functionally’ end veteran homelessness according to research from Pew. Evidence from Washington, Indiana and Massachusetts shows that data-sharing practices can make public services more effective and improve records of public health crises like the opioid epidemic. Data-use stories from numerous other states tell us that when collaboration on data governance and use is supported, benefits extend. Education, housing, public safety and health, direct assistance programs, consumer protection programs and the general daily operations of public institutions all depend on the availability and usability of data.
One example of a comprehensive and long-term open data project is the Connecticut Data Collaborative (CTData). CTData is a nonprofit that takes government-produced data and turns it into clear visualizations and data profiles that support informed public decision-making in Connecticut. Operating under the recognition that access alone does not make data useful, they launched CTData Academy in 2017 to train people in technical data skills.
How UVM fits in
From Burlington, the University of Vermont’s resources can be directed to assist and uplift the problem solvers in the state by providing data evidence that supports collaborators’ needs. For decades, the Center for Rural Studies (CRS) has provided data briefs, needs assessments, and other reports to Regional Planning Commissions, while also maintaining the Vermont State Data Center. The Vermont State Data Center, part of the Census Bureau’s State Data Center Program, is housed at the CRS and provides data and training to communities across the state. The Vermont Research Open Source Program Office (VERSO) is dedicated to cultivating an open science ecosystem, partly through open data initiatives such as the Vermont Zoning Atlas, to paint a more accurate picture of Vermont’s zoning policies, a critical tool for any town planner or developer concerned with real estate.
UVM’s Office of Engagement (OOE) identified the need for modernized data infrastructure in Vermont as an important goal through discussions with community leadership across the state. Across all sectors and 14 counties the OOE coordinated with, access to data that could help support planning, decision-making, law-making, and grants came up as a critical barrier to rural development. Since 2021, the OOE, and now the Leahy Institute, have provided data support to a wide variety of community partners, including the Regional Development Corporations and Regional Planning Commissions of Vermont. The Office’s programming is expanding to leverage open federal, state, and university-generated data to make data use easier and more accessible to organizations across the state. Within the Office of Engagement, the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships is bringing together university and community leaders to develop the Vermont Data Collaborative.
The Vermont Data Collaborative is an open-source data access and visualization platform that seeks to create public value by enabling Vermonters to use open data to make their decision-making process easier. While the VDC can’t improve the accuracy of federal data, it ensures that the current data Vermont possesses can reach the people who need it in a format they can use. The Vermont Data Collaborative’s mission is to serve the greater Vermont community by increasing access and expertise while breaking down barriers to technology and data evidence.