Building a housing knowledge collaborative

Draft thoughts

We need an open knowledge collaborative for gathering and sharing data about homelessness, its causes and impacts, successful approaches to ending or preventing it and projects for supporting the homeless around the world.

Meta: What organizations are already collecting data like this?

Questions to answer

• What’s the raw cost of housing?  Different approaches.  Different distances from city centers.

• What existing spaces are unused?  Beds in units, u. In bldgs, b. In spaces, s. In regions.

• What existing types of land are unused?  By type, urb,

• What land-categories are maintained on long term leases by cities, counties, states?

• What can developers, regulators, mayors do?  What can students, designers do?

• Catalog: what templates have different [cities] adopted?  Is this mainly city-level planning? 

Data: A registry for related datasets

a) standardize context for data that is already shared online, 
b) have a shared space for identifying challenges, 
c) collectively develop sources, schemas, properties, mappings, tools and workflows
d) provide encouragement to publish unpublished data that would help solve public problems.

Projects: A catalog of initiatives, successful and not

Communities: A lens for each city and their responses