Institutional and Organizational Barriers to Effective Use of GIS by Community-Based Organizations

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Communities across the United States are undergoing rapid changes in land use, demographic, socioeconomic, and infrastructure conditions. Identification, visualization, monitoring, and evaluation of these changes and trends can be enhanced using geographic information systems (GIS) and online data and mapping technologies. and related technologies can also be used to inform and assess land-(re)development projects and to develop comprehensive strategies in community redevelopment and affordable housing. Community-based organizations (CBOs), community development corporations (CDCs), neighborhood associations (NAs), and related coalitions (collectively referred to as community-based organizations in this paper), can take advantage of these technologies to mobilize assets that benefit communities (Greenstein 2006) and to (re)-create quality-of-life communities and regions. In an ideal setting, these organizations can work with the same data and technological capabilities that many public and private agencies use. National examples and case studies that highlight how community-based organizations have used for community change have been published (Boyd and Chan 2002, LISC and PolicyLink 2000); participatory planning processes and public participation have served as a framework for many projects (Talen 2000, Al-Kodmany 2000, Craig et al. 2002); national online resources such as Data Place (http://www. dataplace.org) and Social Explorer (http://www.socialexplorer. com) are becoming commonplace; Web-GIS applications such as Neighborhood Knowledge California are being used in novel and unanticipated ways by community users (Rattray 2006); and there are greater efforts on the part of cities to make parcel data more accessible to the public via integrated parcel-based information systems (Chandler et al. 2006). In June of 2003, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy held a GIS for CBOs planning meeting that sparked the development of a workshop on that topic. As of 2007, the institute has held four such workshops: one in Cambridge, Massachusetts; two in Tampa, Florida; and one in Atlanta, Georgia (see the Appendix). To help community-based organizations keep up with rapidly changing technology while maintaining their mission, the customized workshops have focused on providing them with information about the functions and applications of GIS, general strategies for successful CBO-university-city government collaborative projects, capacity building and implementation, and case studies on the types of land-development projects and analyses that can be enhanced with mapping and analysis. It is not clear, however, that community-based organizations use effectively for community and land-redevelopment initiatives even when software, hardware, training, data, formal partnership agreements, and access to services are all in place. Overall, there seems to be a general disconnect between the ease of access to data repositories and GIS/Web-GIS applications and the effective use of the technology for community planning and development. The assessment that community-based organizations have made great strides toward revitalizing distressed communities but have given insufficient attention to organizational capacity building and good organizational practices (Rodriguez and Herzog 2004, Glickman et al. 2004) might hold some clues to fleshing out this potential disconnect between access and effectiveness. This paper begins with a condensed review of literature on institutional and organizational barriers and constraints that community-based organizations generally face, as well as background information about the survey sample pool. This is followed by findings on organizations' staffing, day-to-day activities, geographic scopes, capacity, application, and perceived barriers to the effective use of GIS. Concluding thoughts, as well as implications for professional development and related capacity-building initiatives, are offered in the final section. …

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