Now that some of us in the nonprofit sector are getting excited about free and easy access to geographic information systems (GIS) through Google Earth, I also want to call attention to a powerful and effective tool that ought to be widely replicated.

Let's say that you are an activist or advocate in Massachusetts, and you want to understand (and teach others about) trends that affect the issues and communities that you care about.  You can download this free tool to your computer's desktop, and make use of its rich data sets and graphical capabilities - even if you do not have formal training in statistical analysis or the visual display of information. This makes it ideal for grassroots groups that are working for positive change in their communities, but that lack the financial and human resources to create surveys of their own. 

BRRK includes data from the Greater Boston Social Survey, the Boston Indicators Project, and the U.S. Census.  It is very simple to select the area that you serve, and set up cross-tabulations of variables such as age, sex, ethnicity, education level, household type, and employment status, and then convert the results into visually appealing charts that can be added to web sites, annual reports, or other presentations.  In this way, your organization can educate itself, its stakeholders, and its potential funders about realities that are sometimes counter-intuitive or difficult to grasp without a visual display. 

BRRK was created by Barry Bluestone of Northeastern University's Center for Urban and Regional Policy, Barbara Hamilton of Hamilton Analytics, and some other first-rate collaborators.  I hope that some day nonprofit, grass-roots, and other mission-based organizations in every region will have a tool as wonderful as the Boston Renaissance Resource Kit.  And since the technological infrastructure has already been built, and new regional data can be (at least in theory) be dropped into it, this far from an impossible dream.

A few caveats:     

I have found that the BRRK download page doesn't show the relevant link when viewed with Mozilla Firefox.  I haven't figured out why this is the case, but had no trouble downloading BRRK while using Microsoft Internet Explorer.  (I hate to mention this, because I greatly prefer Firefox to Explorer - but the truth must be served.)

Once you have downloaded BRRK, it resides entirely on your computer's desktop and does not make use of online connectivity.  It is therefore a tool that has all the strengths and weaknesses of a self-contained resource rather than one that is updated via the internet.

BRRK takes up a lot of storage on your hard drive.  The installation file alone is 51.5 MB.