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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Urban Studies and Planning
Community-Engaged Operations Research: Trends, New Frontiers And Current Applications, Michael P. Johnson Jr.
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
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.
Decision Modeling For Housing And Community Development: A Methodology For Evidence-Based Urban And Regional Planning, Michael P. Johnson Jr.
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 …
Ppol-G 746 Geographic Information Systems For Public Policy, Michael P. Johnson Jr.
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.
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.
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.
From Data To Decisions At Your Nonprofit, Michael P. Johnson Jr., George Chichirau, Jason Wright
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.
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 …
Community Data Analytics: Localized Data Analysis And Decision Modeling In The Era Of ‘Big Data’ And ‘Smart Cities’, Michael P. Johnson Jr.
Community Data Analytics: Localized Data Analysis And Decision Modeling In The Era Of ‘Big Data’ And ‘Smart Cities’, Michael P. Johnson Jr.
Michael P. Johnson
Community-based organizations use data for program design, services provision and strategic planning. However, CBOs often have limited ability to identify, access and apply these data. Thus, CBOs may make decisions on the basis of inadequate data, or limited understanding of the local environment, or limited ability to generate mission-aligned solutions.Community data analytics (CDA) uses local know-how and clearly-articulated values in order to transform data into action. CDA is rooted in principles of operations research and management science for public benefi#12;t. These principles include: active participation by local stakeholders to identify problems of interest; a critical perspective on issues of problem …