ABSTRACT
Since 2009, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), in partnership with the United Way Winnipeg (UWW) in Manitoba, Canada, has been managing Peg, an online community indicator system (CIS) that tracks the well-being of Winnipeggers. While Peg’s first online platform was technologically advanced for its time, the original site became increasingly burdensome and costly to manage as it aged.
In 2018, the IISD undertook an overhaul of the platform used to run Peg. As the IISD embarked on developing a new platform for Peg, it became apparent that many other communities and governments were facing similar difficulties collecting, managing, and communicating their data online as it can be difficult and expensive especially for small and mid-sized cities with few affordable and tailored resources. In response, instead of developing a platform just for Peg, the IISD developed an open-source tool, known as Tracking-Progress, that could be used by communities of any size.
This chapter explores how the IISD developed Tracking-Progress based on its experiences with Peg, provides insight into how a growing network of platforms is expanding the tool’s functionality, and shares how the Tracking-Progress tool is providing communities globally with the resources required to localize the United Nation’s sustainable development goals (SDGs).
