The Vermont Data Collaborative (VDC) is a partnership between the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships, the Vermont Research Open-Source Program Office (VERSO) and the Center for Rural Studies (CRS) at the University of Vermont. The VDC seeks to create user-friendly and community-oriented data dashboards that can help community organizations, businesses, non-profits, governments, and more make data-informed decisions. Practically, the VDC is a web platform where federal, state, and university-generated open data about Vermont and its communities is gathered, cleaned to a common standard, kept current through a structured pipeline, and presented through dashboards and visualizations that don’t require any background knowledge on data science to use. In short, anyone can start to utilize data through the VDC platform.
If you are interested in using this platform or learning more about how you can use it, please contact Emma Spett at Emma.Spett@uvm.edu to schedule a live demo session in person or online, and discuss how you might use the Vermont Data Collaborative for you and your organization.
Research on open data has shown that the publication of open data alone doesn’t necessarily lead to use. Most published datasets and tools go unused by public stakeholders regardless of platform or jurisdiction size, and efforts to make data useful often stop being upgraded when funding goes away. Maintaining data governance standards requires stewardship of datasets and coordination of partnerships so that these resources remain useful and relevant. This article provides insights into how the VDC provides direct services to Vermonters, in an effort to make data easier to use and integrate in public processes.
What is unique about the Vermont Data Collaborative?
The sources of data that inform the VDC are federal, state, and university data collected by public officials and University researchers. Primary examples of databases the Vermont Data Collaborative utilizes are the U.S. Census Bureau’s population demographics, the Vermont Open Geodata Portal, and the Vermont Data Portal.
A documented and maintainable pipeline for data reuse is one of the most important elements of the platform, as it gives the VDC an avenue to refine its offerings alongside the release of novel data. There are four overall steps to creating a reusable data pipeline:
- Fetching the data from its original source.
- Making the data compatible with other data sources, which allows it to “talk” to other data sources.
- Creating accessible visualizations of data and indicators that include multiple sources of data.
- Developing back-end processes for regular updates, so that the data published on our platform is as up-to-date as possible.
Making data available does not make it accessible. There is hope to create a VDC website that can be a first point of contact between Vermonters and the information available on Vermont communities. The VDC platform prioritizes an intuitive design with an accessible interface using familiar language so that users of any level of technical expertise can explore and interpret data without specialized methods or software.
Who can use the Vermont Data Collaborative?
The Vermont Data Collaborative is meant to support Vermont communities, whether it be regional planning commissions and development corporations, municipal government staff, state legislators, nonprofits, or any other community stakeholder. Here are some examples of ways the VDC can be useful to different entities in Vermont:
Planning
Vermont’s current regional planning framework was overhauled in 2024, Act 181 setting the standards that regional planning commissions (RPC) must use to coordinate with their municipalities and tying Act 250 requirements to a new tiered system. The state has issued housing targets for 2030 and 2050, publishing a dashboard to track housing development progress. RPCs must optimize their planning to support the addition of new housing along with meeting Act 181 and Act 250 guidelines. Administrative municipal capacity was identified as a crucial constraint on aligning plans with these policies, per the Vermont Planning & Community Investment Survey.
With the Vermont Data Collaborative, towns or planning commissions preparing new plans can go to one place that shows current zone maps, parcel data, floodplains, and population demographics, and also compare themselves to nearby municipalities to put together a detailed picture of their community. When communities can better analyze their challenges, they can approach them in a more efficient way and make up for capacity gaps that affect the planning process in Vermont’s communities. The VDC plans to work with communities to continuously identify relevant and useful data that can be integrated onto the VDC platform.
Municipal operations
Vermont’s 247 municipalities face similar capacity challenges and face the same administrative burdens as planning agencies. In response to data needs, the Vermont League of Cities and Towns has undergone the Vermont Municipal Data Project, surveying and analyzing municipal operations with the intent of documenting the comparative success of policy decisions across cities and towns. In its current state, Vermont’s technical system does not allow municipalities to usefully assess their policy outcomes, a key part of the policy process.
With the Vermont Data Collaborative, comparative and longitudinal tools let a town see its progress next to peer towns on important measures, allowing them to know whether something is working, and for them to prove need for funding opportunities.
Public health
Vermont’s health data is primarily made available through the Vermont Department of Health’s Health Statistics and Vital Records portal. This resource is useful for analyzing health information about Vermont’s communities but is difficult to coalesce with housing, economic, or transportation data that would provide a more holistic understanding of a health issue or policy outcome.
Utilizing the Vermont Data Collaborative, public health advocates may use geographic identifiers that match health data with housing, economic and development data to paint a more detailed and holistic picture of localized health needs.
Emergency management and flood resilience
The July 2023 floods pushed several Vermont rivers past record levels, creating lasting damage to rural infrastructure. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) approved a Local Hazard Mitigation Plan. Such a plan makes a municipality eligible for hazard mitigation funding, and the state-run Emergency Relief Assistance Fund matches funding based on the Hazard Mitigation Plan. Funding that supported the mitigation plan and application opportunities were abruptly stopped in April of 2025, cutting off $2 million in funding for preventative projects in Vermont.
The Vermont Data Collaborative can help planners to view hazard data, parcel data, infrastructure data and demographic data in one place, which can significantly lower the cost and time spent on the analysis that a Hazard Mitigation Plan requires.
Policymaking
Vermont lawmakers have described the data given to them to inform policy decisions as “all over the map,” with Seven Days describing lawmakers' available data as “frequently incomplete or inaccurate”. Legislative sessions are short, and staff capacity is thin for many of Vermont’s lawmakers, raising challenges in the legislature’s ability to find and trust data within a short time frame.
Enabled by the Vermont Data Collaborative, lawmakers, committees, agencies and staffers can engage with a question-based dashboard with documented sources and dates. This provides the legislature with a trusted starting point for assessing Vermont’s need and provides legislative debates with a multi-perspective view of constituent’s conditions.
The value proposition of the Vermont Data Collaborative and what comes next
The vision for the the Vermont Data Collaborative is to create an evolving and growing shared evidence base that towns, agencies, nonprofits and legislators can all make use of in their planning and decision-making. The VDC seeks to center community engagement in it's work, and to prioritize datasets that are most useful to the challenges Vermonters are addressing across scales.
The VDC platform has significant hosting capacity, support from UVM faculty, students and staff, and a desire to continue to develop tools of value to Vermonters. That’s where the VDC needs your help—if you have data, indicators, insights or visualizations that would be useful for your community, reach out. The VDC can collaborate with you to bring tools online that benefit you, and most likely benefit others in the state as well.
If you or your community or organization wants to see what the VDC could do for your work, or if you have a problem that data could help with, please contact Emma Spett Emma.Spett@uvm.edu to schedule a personalized walkthrough of the VDC, where the team will show you the platform and curate its tools for your needs.