Above: A previous Matter Demo Day. Photo credit: Vignesh Ramachandran.

Alicia Rouault is CEO and founder of LocalData, a winner of the 2012 Knight News Challenge: Data.

This May, LocalData, a mapping platform that supports decisions with dynamic data, has joined the third cohort of the Matter.vc accelerator program to help drive informed and empowered communities across the globe.

Since founding LocalData in 2012, we’ve successfully proven a hypothesis that governments, nonprofits and researchers need better ways to gather and understand data in real time. Matter will help us scale this vision toward a sustainable, healthy business guided by empowerment and quality of information.

Community engagement and quantitative data analysis don’t usually end up in the same sentence. By improving both the format and quality of information gathered by local institutions, we support the seamless flow of information between communities and decision-makers. As cities push to get smarter, LocalData will power that effort from the bottom up.

Rapid industrialization in global megacities present new challenges, such as mobility, making room for higher density and the need for new infrastructure. Simultaneously, unprecedented swaths of deteriorating infrastructure plague places such as Detroit, Baltimore and Syracuse, NY. Decision-makers in and outside of government are forced to make tough choices on allocating funds to improve places by building better or demolishing decaying property. Further, foundations and agencies that support these efforts are under pressure to document how their work has sustained impact.

We started our work to help city leaders make better decisions. Our platform allows data to be quickly generated and shared on a map. Collected with mobile devices by local experts, LocalData-powered projects are run by public-private partnerships bridging the gap between community-based organizations and more traditional decision-making institutions. User-generated data is applied to build deep narratives about place using maps and qualitative and quantitative analysis. These important—and often overlooked—stories and graphics help leaders understand the places they will change, supported by the work and knowledge of community-based organizations. The quality of the data captured can be integrated with existing systems without losing that important local, human aspect.

Since our humble beginnings at Code for America, we’ve deployed LocalData in 20 cities on projects ranging in scope from understanding vacancy and blighted buildings, to site selection for future transportation hubs, to mapping supply chain logistics and understanding distribution patterns in Mexico City.

Historically, LocalData focused on geospatial tools at the hyperlocal level; that means helping produce and understand information on things such as buildings, transportation infrastructure, playgrounds and other community assets, open space, or crime. As we push forward, LocalData will scale both in product offerings and experimentation with new verticals such as health and education data. Moving beyond traditional environmental data (images and statistics), we will integrate with alternative data sources that measure things like air quality, noise pollution, transit data and other dynamic forms of information that can provide deeper understanding of place.

Better data makes better cities, and LocalData bridges the gap between the data cities have today and the smarter cities of tomorrow.

LocalData is a Matter 3 company and was designed at Code for America. Learn more at localdata.com.

Related story: “Abandoned buildings and the need for good data”