You have arrived at DataHaven, where we provide data for community action.
We collect, interpret, and share public data to empower communities to make effective, informed decisions. We provide a public service by working with a wide variety of partners to develop innovative reports, tools, and technical assistance programs that make this information more useful.
We belong to national, statewide, and local efforts to the promote the use of local information in policymaking and community development.
Our website is our headquarters.
If you have not visited before, welcome! Here, we describe local communities, publish our extensive research, share relevant resources from our collaborators, and promote innovation in our field.
If you have used our site in the past, welcome back! You probably noticed that things look a little different.
Since our founding twenty-five years ago, we have cultivated and shared a repository of valuable quality of life indicators. Yet in recent years the amount of accessible public data has dramatically increased. In the past, sites like ours were envisioned as places where you could go to find any data you needed. However, with the exponential growth of available data and with our state and federal government agencies now hosting multiple different websites as open data repositories (including the Connecticut Open Data Portal for certain state government datasets), having a single "data warehouse" is no longer a feasible objective for anyone.
In the Age of Big Data, information is available on nearly everything (even the number of coffee shops in your town), and the amount of it doubles every year. Sifting through tens of thousands of potential data sources for the most relevant, quality data can be daunting.
That’s where we come in. As data stewards, our local, state, and national partners task us with selecting and maintaining the most important information for the communities we serve, and sharing it with you in relevant, useful mediums.
We have designed our new website to do just that -- first, to direct you to the most meaningful information. Second, to serve as a portal in which the general public can easily see what we do and what we have published, and request our help. Ask us for what you need and we will find it or direct you to the source.
The new website renovation will simplify your navigation to the resources you need.
We've reorganized so that the resources from our previous website are easier to find and to use:
- Visit Communities to access key indicators about regions, towns, and neighborhoods in Connecticut, in a friendly new "Community and Town Profile"-type format.
- Our reports, tagged by category, are downloadable and contain in-depth analyses of issues our regions confront.
- On our new Data Resources page, you can explore the breadth of our curated collection of information, which covers many issues in many formats. Depending on your need, you can search this library by issue category, resource type, or community. In addition to our published reports, you will find data sets, including documents from our Community Wellbeing Survey, an indicator map gallery, and links to external resources.
- The Knowledge Center catalogues FAQs, data guides, and miscellaneous information based on public request.
Moving thousands of pieces of information from our old website, established in 2003 as one of the first of its kind in the United States, has taken time and remains a work in progress. Please stay tuned as we gradually re-populate these pages with new data and requests; some of the information that we have archived from 2003 to 2014 will be accessible in the meantime. More than ever, it would be impossible for us to post more than a tiny fraction of the data that we work with, so contact us if we can help.
As always, you can follow news about us and coverage of our work on our Connecticut data blog, or take a minute to learn about DataHaven, our staff and board, and our partners.
If in doubt as you search our website for a specific item or topic, use the top bar to guide you to each of our resource pages or to search the site for what you need. All of our data resources are tagged by category, key terms, and community. And if you still cannot find what you need or if you require more assistance, we encourage you to reach out to us.
We now invite you to explore our new website, discover meaningful information, and apply it. We think you will like the changes!
Thanks for stopping by,
Mark Abraham, Executive Director
Mary Buchanan, Project Manager
