Looking for Feeds & Widgets for Social Health Indicators

Here's a question you don't ask everyday: how many people are the victims of human trafficking in the Boston area?

This came up in a small interest group I met with this evening; our consensus was that this was a largely invisible issue amongst our professional peers. I only supposed that the occasional Law & Order episode isn't enough to raise people's consciences. Data is needed: regular, reliable, & ready data.

These questions are what we can call Social Health Indicators: foreclosed houses: violent crime rate; high school drop out rate, number of shelter beds available etc. Some of these stats are generally collected by the government, and shared with advocacy agencies, who publish reports and release them, and the general press writes an article around that. And then people remember some salient statistic, or not, and it goes out of date.

Here's what I have in mind. For a given social health indicator:

• Guide users to form the right question
• Have a feed which provides that data on demand
• Have a widget, Facebook app, or iPhone app render that data

There's an existing precedent. I would venture to say that the most prolific producer of data in the country bar none is the National Weather Service. And their National Digital Forecast Database provides a full suite of SOAP interfaces for any of this data to be automatically fed. You may have a weather forecaster on your desktop, browser toolbar, or certainly your favorite portal, and that's all because the NWS is committed to getting that information out in the most reliable & efficient way possible.