Regional data portal launched for Hampshire and Hampden counties

The Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, along with other regional entities in Hampden and Hampshire counties, is promoting a recently developed demographic-data site.

The site (www.pioneervalleydata.org) provides data that is difficult to obtain, according to its developers. U.S. Census figures and other widely available sources of information are not included.

“This is really a tool that is designed for our core partner organizations to have access to a database that we maintain ourselves for the use of the organization,” said Molly Goren-Watts, the principal planner and manager at the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission’s Regional Information and Policy Center.

The data, she said, ranges from income and poverty levels to community recycling rates.

The Pioneer Valley Regional Data Portal grew out of “The State of the People of the Pioneer Valley,” a lengthy report published a few years ago. Goren-Watts said the idea originated from discussions among staff of the regional planning commission, the Economic Development Council of Western Massachusetts, and the Regional Employment Board of Hampden County.

“Between the three of us, we found that we were responding to a lot of very similar data requests,” Goren-Watts said. “When we thought about it, we realized that we were really using up a lot of at least two people’s time collecting the same data separately.”

The separate entities pooled their resources, Goren-Watts said, and a consultant was hired to build the portal. It was also necessary to upgrade the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission’s database.

The data reside on remote servers.

“It occurred to us that cloud-based technology could allow us to be a little more efficient in that work,” Goren-Watts said.

The data portal was developed by an entity that goes by the acronym ROADS (Regional Organizations. Advanced Data Sharing). The project cost was around $10,000, according to Goren-Watts.