Sustainable Development Goals

Stanford's Sustainable Urban Systems Initiative

The Situation

The Sustainable Development Goals are a set of priorities the United Nations has set for global progress. Some national governments have created web applications to allow stakeholders (governments, nonprofits, and others) to view progress towards said goals at the national level. However, tracking progress on a national level often does not provide enough granularity to help stakeholders identify geographic disparities that could be inhibiting progress; localized progress tracking would be more informative.


The Project

In partnership with Stanford’s Sustainable Urban Systems Initiative, develop a web application to visualize U.S. cities’ progress on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). You will base these visualizations on publicly available datasets such as The Census as well as metrics and goals that individual city stakeholders set.

Level 1:

Identify relevant Census statistics to use to track progress on SDGs.

Create a dashboard to allow users to query for a city and track progress on SDGs for that city as a function of both time and location.

Set up account management system to allow admins and stakeholders to create accounts and input information.

Level 2:

Set up a database to store Census data, data derived from the Census data, and local datasets that stakeholders may add for individual cities.

Allow admins and stakeholders to update databases of interest.

Level 3:

Perform analytics on data for each city, including combining scores of different metrics for aggregate scores.

Open-source and fully document code on Github

Recommended Skills:

Web development (HTML, CSS, Javascript)

Data visualization background (nice to have)

Database skills (nice to have)