Mapping your own data: biggest ever upgrade to Community Insight

Community Insight has just received its biggest upgrade since launch: subscribers can now upload their own data and map it using Community Insight’s easy-to-use tools.

Over the last 18 months, Community Insight has established itself as one of the most popular mapping tools in the housing sector. A major part of this success has been a result of its usability: being built on top of the familiar Google Maps platform means that housing staff are able to start using it with little training and can easily start to see how different indicators vary across their area. To keep the system simple to use yet powerful, we focused first on giving you access to a range of existing national Open Data datasets; with over one hundred indicators present, Community Insight can tell you a lot about your area with just a few clicks of the mouse.

But we have always been ambitious to expand the power of Community Insight further. You told us loud and clear that being able to use Community Insight’s intuitive interface to map your own data was the number one priority for making the system even more useful. And now, we are happy to take the wraps off and release the first version of this functionality. The feature is currently available to all Community Insight subscribers through a testing server and will be rolled out onto the main production server in the coming weeks

As ever, keeping the system easy to use has been at the core of our development brief. Giving everyone easy access to powerful functionality that would previously have required an expert user of a complex Geographical Information System meant solving a whole set of development challenges (more about these in a future blog from the tech team), so we’re really pleased to have the feature up and running. This is the continuation of Community Insight’s mission: having already democratised access to Open Data, now we are levelling the playing field on being able to map your own data.

The feature is currently available to Community Insight subscribers through a testing server and will be rolled out onto the main production server in the coming weeks
Community Insight has already proven its value by allowing you to understand what national statistics say about your neighbourhoods. We are excited to see how the housing sector will get even more value from the system as you combine the insight from Open Data with the power of the data you hold.