Community-Engaged Operations Research: Trends, New Frontiers And Current Applications, Michael P. Johnson Jr.
Nov 2017
Community-Engaged Operations Research: Trends, New Frontiers And Current Applications, Michael P. Johnson Jr.
Michael P. Johnson
Community-engaged operations research is an extension of multiple OR/MS traditions to support participatory scholarship, localized impact and social change. It applies critical thinking, evidence-based policy analysis, community participation and decision modeling to local interventions. It emphasizes the needs, voices and values of disadvantaged and marginalized populations. Through a survey of current scholarship in two complementary areas of inquiry, ‘community operational research’ (referring to work by primarily UK-based researchers) and ‘community-based operations research’ (referring to work by primarily US-based researchers), we develop principles for community-engaged OR, present critical questions that represent opportunities to expand the impact of this work, and discuss …
Improving Decision-Making Skills Of Nonprofit Professionals, Michael P. Johnson Jr., George Chichirau, Jason Wright
Oct 2017
Improving Decision-Making Skills Of Nonprofit Professionals, Michael P. Johnson Jr., George Chichirau, Jason Wright
Michael P. Johnson
Nonprofits face gaps in organizational capacity, including program design and evaluation, but previous research suggests that capacity-building exercises have a positive effect. We describe a data analytics training workshop with staff from Boston-area nonprofits reflecting a wide range of sectors. Through analysis of participant work on case studies provided by the instructor, we examine how participants made sense of training materials, the various strategies employed by participants to solve three case study problems, and participant feedback about the session. Our findings provide a basis for novel interventions in community based operations research.
Food Justice Youth Development: Using Photovoice To Study Urban School Food Systems, Krista Harper, Catherine Sands, Diego Angarita, Molly Totman, Monica Maitin, Jonell Sostre Rosado, Jazmin Colon, Nick Alger
Sep 2017
Food Justice Youth Development: Using Photovoice To Study Urban School Food Systems, Krista Harper, Catherine Sands, Diego Angarita, Molly Totman, Monica Maitin, Jonell Sostre Rosado, Jazmin Colon, Nick Alger
Catherine Sands
How do youth learn through participation in efforts to study and change the school food system? Through our participatory youth action research (YPAR) project, we move beyond the "youth as consumer" frame to a food justice youth development approach. We track how a group of youth learned about food and the public policy process through their efforts to transform their own school food systems by conducting a participatory evaluation of farm-to-school efforts in collaboration with university and community partners. We used the Photovoice research method, placing cameras in the hands of young people so that they themselves could document and …
Decision Modeling For Housing And Community Development: A Methodology For Evidence-Based Urban And Regional Planning, Michael P. Johnson Jr.
Aug 2017
Decision Modeling For Housing And Community Development: A Methodology For Evidence-Based Urban And Regional Planning, Michael P. Johnson Jr.
Michael P. Johnson
Urban community development corporations and other local institutions routinely face challenging problems in housing and economic development that require substantial expertise in data analytics and decision modeling. Recent research, inspired by local responses to the housing foreclosure crisis, and developed in cooperation with Boston-area CDCs, has resulted in a collection of applications that can assist CDCs and similar organizations to design local interventions for acquisition and redevelopment of housing. This paper describes these applications. The first of these is values and objective design, i.e. the process of identifying decision opportunities. The second of these is data analytics, or …
Environmental Advocacy: Insights From East Asia, Mary Alice Haddad
Jul 2017
Environmental Advocacy: Insights From East Asia, Mary Alice Haddad
Mary Alice Haddad
Environmental advocacy in East Asia takes place in a context where there are few well-funded professional advocacy organisations, no viable green parties, and governments that are highly pro-business. In this advocacy-hostile environment, what strategies are environmental organizations using to promote better environmental outcomes? Using an original database of environmental organizations and interviews with activists and officials throughout the region, this paper investigates which strategies are most common and compares them to the advocacy strategies found in the United States. It finds, perhaps surprisingly, that (a) environmental organizations across East Asia employ similar advocacy strategies even though they are operating in …
Ppol-G 746 Geographic Information Systems For Public Policy, Michael P. Johnson Jr.
Jun 2017
Ppol-G 746 Geographic Information Systems For Public Policy, Michael P. Johnson Jr.
Michael P. Johnson
The purpose of this course is to learn principles and applications of GIS to support doctoral-level research and master’s-level research and analysis in public policy and related disciplines, such as public management, gerontology and urban and regional planning. This course has a particular focus on spatial data collection and analysis for urbanized regions within the greater Boston area. We will address basic geographic and mapping concepts. These include: world coordinate system and projections, map topology, tiled and layered maps, standard computer map file formats, data processing and data analysis, including Web-enabled GIS. We will also study advanced methods suitable for …
Course Syllabus: Ppol-G 630 Research Methods I, Michael P. Johnson Jr.
Jun 2017
Course Syllabus: Ppol-G 630 Research Methods I, Michael P. Johnson Jr.
Michael P. Johnson
This course offers an introduction to research methods and design primarily from a social science perspective. The primary objective is to improve students’ ability to become better producers and consumers of public policy research by providing an introduction to an array of methodological issues and approaches to policy research. Within a social science framework, our discussions will include topics like: How do we find/develop research questions and testable hypotheses? What is the nature of “explanation” – or how do we know if we’ve found the “answer” to our research question/problem? What determines the method we choose to collect data to …
Super Roundtable, “From Data To Decisions At Your Nonprofit”: Event Description And Assessment, Michael P. Johnson Jr.
Jun 2017
Super Roundtable, “From Data To Decisions At Your Nonprofit”: Event Description And Assessment, Michael P. Johnson Jr.
Michael P. Johnson
On April 28, 2017, Tech Networks of Boston hosted an extended roundtable event to give nonprofit professionals an introduction to storytelling and decision-making with data, allowing the notion of ‘data’ (qualitative and quantitative), ‘storytelling’ (descriptive and explorative analysis through words, numbers and pictures) and ‘decision-making’ (identifying decision opportunities, quantifying values, generating alternatives and choosing most-preferred courses of action) to be understood as broadly as possible. This document summarizes the event, presents some event feedback and discusses next steps in the area of nonprofit and community data analytics and decision science.
I Share, Therefore It's Mine, Donald J. Kochan
Apr 2017
I Share, Therefore It's Mine, Donald J. Kochan
Donald J. Kochan
Uniquely interconnecting lessons from law, psychology, and economics, this article aims to provide a more enriched understanding of what it means to “share” property in the sharing economy. It explains that there is an “ownership prerequisite” to the sharing of property, drawing in part from the findings of research in the psychology of child development to show when and why children start to share. They do so only after developing what psychologists call “ownership understanding.” What the psychological research reveals, then, is that the property system is well suited to create recognizable and enforceable ownership norms that include the rights …
From Data To Decisions At Your Nonprofit, Michael P. Johnson Jr., George Chichirau, Jason Wright
Apr 2017
From Data To Decisions At Your Nonprofit, Michael P. Johnson Jr., George Chichirau, Jason Wright
Michael P. Johnson
In recent years, discussions about ‘data analytics,' ‘big data’ and ‘performance management’ have tended to focus on organizations’ needs to collect, store, analyze, and make productive use of mostly-quantitative data to ensure that their activities are best-aligned with their missions. Without minimizing the importance of training, software and hardware selection, and organization design, there is also a need for organizations to make the best decisions they can using all data that are available – including qualitative data that may be hard to capture in information systems.
The goal of this Super Roundtable is to enable organizations to improve their …
How Can School Districts In Shrinking Regions Remake Themselves To Support Their Communities? Policy And Operations Analysis For A Massachusetts School District, Michael P. Johnson Jr.
Feb 2017
How Can School Districts In Shrinking Regions Remake Themselves To Support Their Communities? Policy And Operations Analysis For A Massachusetts School District, Michael P. Johnson Jr.
Michael P. Johnson
School districts in towns and regions facing long-term demographic and financial challenges are under intense
pressure to make difficult decisions so that they may continue to provide a quality education and enhance the vitality of the communities they serve. Such decisions may address: funding sources, education and non-education expenditures, facility utilization and community engagement. A recent engagement with Massachusetts towns by the Collins Center for Public Management has generated a case study in small-town school district revitalization. In this talk I will present results of community conversations that have enabled analysts, working with school district stakeholders, to propose a range …
Jefferson Village Downtown District Plan, Wendy A. Kellogg, Kirby Date, Richard Klein, James Wyles, Alicia Dyer, Tim Kobie, Christine Zuniga
Jan 2017
Jefferson Village Downtown District Plan, Wendy A. Kellogg, Kirby Date, Richard Klein, James Wyles, Alicia Dyer, Tim Kobie, Christine Zuniga
James Wyles
Jefferson Village is an incorporated municipality in Northeastern Ohio, with a population in 2000 of about 4000 residents. Originally founded in 1803 and incorporated in 1836, the Village has been the county seat for Ashtabula County since 1807. The Village is centrally located in Ashtabula County, 10 miles south of Lake Erie, and 10 miles west of the Pennsylvania border. Interstate highway 90 runs parallel to the lake shore, about 6 miles north of the village; and State Route 11 is a major north-south connector located about 2 miles east of the village. The primary employment locations in the Village …
Health And Safety Overregulation, Michael Lewyn
Jan 2017
Health And Safety Overregulation, Michael Lewyn
Michael E Lewyn
Anti-jaywalking laws are designed to protect the safety of pedestrians. Similarly, police and child protection officials punish parents who allow their children to walk to school, in the name of child safety. This speech criticizes these policies and their justifications.
Robocar Risks, Michael Lewyn
Dec 2016
Robocar Risks, Michael Lewyn
Michael E Lewyn
Suggests that policymakers should not widen roads or stringently enforce anti-jaywalking laws in order to accommodate autonomous vehicles.
