The Place Database Contest

Update: The submission deadline has been extended to March 25, 2019.

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and PolicyMap are pleased to announce the launch of The Place Database Contest. Data can often be inaccessible, hard to locate, or just plain difficult to use. Using the PolicyMap platform and data expertise, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy created The Place Database to make important data about our communities, cities, and states more accessible, easier to use, and visually compelling.

The goal of this competition is to encourage researchers, policymakers, academics, and public officials to use The Place Database to tell stories about places using a technique beyond simple charts or pure numbers. We believe that visualizing data on a map will help people tell a story in a more interesting way. In turn, we hope this will motivate others to take action to address identified problems or learn from policies that produced positive results.

The Lincoln Institute will award $1,500 each to five authors of submissions who create the most compelling stories through maps using The Place Database. The selected authors will turn their ideas into a one to two-page written narrative about their map’s data.

What is The Place Database?

The Place Database is a national mapping platform for visualizing the latest available data for dozens of indicators relating to land policy, including data about housing affordability, brownfield sites, the property tax, and federal government spending. Many datasets in this data visualization tool, which uses the PolicyMap platform, include several years’ worth of data, so the user can see how things have changed over time. The user can zoom out to see certain data at the state level or zoom in to see data as close as the parcel level. The datasets in the tool come from a wide variety of resources including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service, and the National Conservation Easement Database. Other datasets in the tool include zoning maps for 105 cities, and detailed fiscal information for the 150 cities in the Lincoln Institute’s Fiscally Standardized Cities database (FiSC).

More information, including how to apply, is available here. Submissions will be accepted until March 25, 2019 at 11:59pm Eastern Time and must be submitted via the application form.