CIVIC-PG Track B: Legacy Building Toolset

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The Legacy Building Toolset (LBT) is a digital platform, centered on interactive data visualizations, that allows community members to collectively explore identity, the meaning of place, and create and engage with community assets. Currently such tools and methods are underexplored, which is concerning because public policy is often based on how policymakers perceive the meaning of place from the perspective of residents. As a result, residents often find it challenging to collect and organize community information to present to policy makers or face exclusion when their interpretations of the built form remain unrecognized. The LBT aims to realize community-accessible tools for creating community-driven interpretations of meaning in the built form at a large scale, in real time, and with an overlay of culture and identity. The tool will be developed in Northeast Oklahoma City, a disadvantaged and predominantly Black community, and the knowledge gained will be disseminated for use by other communities across the United States. The development and deployment of the Legacy Building Toolset (LBT) through the envisioned Stage 2 pilot project will combine successful engagement methods of photovoice and storytelling with scalability via crowdsourced data editing and viewing directly inside maps, timelines, and other data visualizations. The LBT will include a collection of intuitively interactive, visualization-centric, in-browser data editing and viewing applications supported by a web services database backend. The applications will support entry of information about people, places, times, and other details through interactive gesturing directly in the visualizations themselves. This includes opportunities to annotate locations, regions, and times with photos, video, or audio. The applications will also support organization of information into stories that integrate text, visualizations, and multimedia annotations. Existing photovoice and storytelling methods often require an in-person expert who organizes and leads the process. Through visualization-centric user interfaces, the LBT will provide less centralized methods of collecting, organizing, and curating community information. The community will be able to develop and use stories more independently of experts. Many urban design and planning projects may still benefit from or even require expert involvement, but the community will be able to identify needs through the LBT and call upon experts internal or external to the community as needed. The broader impacts will be to make participation in community collaboration projects involving sharing of data more accessible, usable, and scalable, especially in historically disadvantaged communities, and broaden the user base for both data sharing and projects built on it. This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program—Track B. Bridging the gap between essential resources and services & community needs—and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.