Mind-benders from others

 Four Corners Community Foundation (FCCF)

As discussed here, FCCF worked with sciGaia on Hydrologic (aka H2O Tools) as part of its work to protect and preserve the environment and to enhance quality of life in the Four Corners area of Gallatin County, Montana. Hydrologic is an innovative, stakeholder driven, online tool that helps us evaluate the options by assigning a value to our decisions - be it an economic value, a social value, a human value, or an environmental value. It is now being developed as the Gallatin River Conservation Education Platform.

Opportunity insights

Its mission is to develop scalable policy solutions that will empower families throughout the United States to rise out of poverty and achieve better life outcomes. It is a treasure trove of empirical evidence relevant to OconEco's MLA, notably its Surrogate Index: Combining Short-Term Proxies to Estimate Long-Term Treatment Effects More Rapidly and Precisely and its Unified Welfare Analysis of Government Policies.

OECD Regional Well-Being Index

This map-based website explores how life is across OECD regions and lets users find places with well-being similar to where they are live and work, down to US States and equivalents elsewhere. It suggests, for example, Kentucky is similar to Saskatchewan Canada and Yorkshire UK. Each region is measured in eleven topics important for well-being. The values of the indicators are expressed as a score between 0 and 10. A high score indicates better performance relative to the other regions. 

It is loosely linked to OECD's nation-level Better Life Index, which collects user views about the relative importance of essentially the same topics as the Well-Being Index. Worldwide responses now top 100,000; about a quarter coming from the US.