Civic Atlas updates

The Civic Atlas has evolved again.

It began as a way of finding out what civic activity is happening where in Birmingham. It can now do something more ambitious: look across that activity and explore what might connect it.

That means the Atlas is no longer just a way of finding organisations or understanding individual places. It can help spot relationships, gaps and possibilities that may be difficult to see when looking at organisations or activities one at a time.

From evidence to Discoveries

The process starts with evidence.

The Atlas brings together information from different sources about organisations, places and activities, and examines it for things that may be worth noticing or exploring further.

These are Discoveries.

There are two levels of Discovery: Observations and Patterns.

Observations are things the Atlas notices directly in the available evidence. They might tell us something about an organisation, a group of organisations, a place or an activity.

Patterns emerge when those Discoveries are considered together. They can reveal connections or relationships that aren't obvious from any one Observation on its own.

And Patterns can build on Patterns too. As the Atlas accumulates more Discoveries, it can look at what it has already found in new combinations and ask what else might become visible.

So the process is:

Evidence → Discoveries (Observations → Patterns)

The important thing is that the Atlas isn't producing conclusions. A Discovery is a proposition to explore, supported by evidence but not presented as a proven fact. You can see the evidence behind it, understand how the Discovery was developed, and see what remains uncertain.

What this means in practice

For someone developing public policy, this can provide another way of looking at a complex issue.

You might already know which organisations work in a particular area, or what services are available in a particular place. The Atlas can now help you ask a different question:

What might become visible if we look across those activities together?

That could mean noticing that organisations working on apparently different issues are encountering the same underlying challenge. It could reveal activity that appears to complement other provision, suggest a potential gap, or point towards a relationship that might be worth investigating further.

For a small charity or CIC, the same capability can offer a different kind of value.

You might recognise your own work in one of the Atlas's Observations, but see something new when that Observation is considered alongside others. A Pattern might suggest a potential partnership, highlight activity elsewhere that is relevant to your work, or give you a new way of describing an issue you've been encountering yourself.

The Atlas isn't trying to make those decisions for you. It's trying to give you something interesting to investigate.

There is much more underneath the public Atlas

v0.9 also marks a change in how the Atlas itself is presented.

The Atlas's research process produces far more Discoveries than are published. There are already more than 4,500 Observations, which could illuminate an untold number of Patterns.

The public Atlas doesn't attempt to show all of them.

Instead, it is a curated publication. I select Patterns that I think offer useful or interesting ways of understanding connections between different civic activities, and publish them together with the Observations from which they were derived.

That means what you see on the Atlas is deliberately a selection from a much larger body of research.

An Observation or Pattern that isn't currently published hasn't necessarily been rejected – it may simply not have been selected for publication. And as the Atlas's body of Discoveries grows, a new Pattern may sometimes offer a better or more useful way of understanding something that has already been explored.

An Atlas that can keep discovering

That's perhaps the biggest change in v0.9.

The Atlas isn't just getting better at finding things. It can now build on what it has already found.

Observations provide new things to consider. Patterns connect those Discoveries. New Patterns can then be considered alongside earlier ones, opening up further possibilities.

The result is an Atlas that can keep developing its understanding of the civic landscape (Birmingham's, for now) as its body of evidence and Discoveries grows.

Evidence → Observations → Patterns → new questions.

That's what v0.9 makes possible.