Meet Projects: A new way to manage research, reports, & engagement in mySidewalk

Our users are urban planners, community development directors, and others who manage or collaborate on a variety of projects at once. We know that for data-driven decisions to prevail throughout each project’s lifecycle, the data must be easy to integrate, analyze, and share on a per project basis.

That’s why today we’re introducing a way to seamlessly manage all your projects from within mySidewalk. It’s called Projects. (We like to keep things simple.) Now, you can create a Project to organize the data-enriched maps, stakeholder reports, and public profiles related to each of your projects.

Here’s a quick overview of what’s new.

A New Home

All your projects live on your organization’s home page. Master plans, corridor studies, housing projects — they’re all here, offering easy access to your work in progress and in the pipeline.

New Home page in mySidewalk where all organization-level assets live.

When you jump into a project, you’ll see three distinct parts, ordered in a way that matches your analysis > reporting> engagement workflow:

Maps are for internal research and analysis.
Dashboards are for external stakeholder reporting.
Public Profiles are for public engagement.

An example of a Project page where all project-related maps, dashboards, and profiles live.

Project Maps

Maps in mySidewalk help you develop a deeper, data-based understanding of a place and its people both at the start of a project and as it progresses. They can be topical (education, transit, crime), place-based (neighborhood, city council district), or both. You can build as many as needed to visualize the on-the-ground conditions that’ll help drive and defend decisions.

While maps have always been core to the mySidewalk experience, now they can be built out, organized, and managed on a project-by-project basis.

An example of a map you can create to get a better understanding of conditions relevant to your project.

Project Dashboards

Share insights from the most compelling maps by creating Dashboards that use interactive maps, charts, and graphs to tell a data-driven story. They can replace or just enhance existing reports. Either way, as stakeholders explore places in the context of their demographic and socioeconomic attributes, their understanding will expand — and their ideas will, too.

Creating and sharing Dashboards is the same experience as always, but now, like maps, they can be built out, shared, and managed on a per-project basis.

An example of a Dashboard you can create to share with external stakeholders to give updates on your project.

Project Public Profiles

And you can capture those ideas directly on the Dashboard or by setting up a Public Profile. Public Profiles are a great way to communicate with the general public about a project of interest to them. Ask questions, share images, make announcements, and take polls all from one place. We even include built-in tools, like social share and widgets, to help promote it.

While Public Profiles work much the same as they always have, now you can create a profile for each project and, if you’d like, multiple profiles for the same project—for different stakeholder audiences, for example.

An example of a Public Profile you can use to share information and collect feedback on your project.

Today’s redesign represents another step in the journey toward radically simplifying how you work with public and private data so you can get to quicker insights and more confident decisions.

Ready to get started with Projects?

Sign in to mySidewalk or visit our website to request a demo of the tool that’s making it easier than ever for city leaders and experts to make data-driven decisions by improving access to and analysis of public data.