Georgian College

Thanks to a collaboration between two academic programs at Georgian College, the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) have access to a new tool to assess neighbourhood safety. The Orillia detachment of the OPP approached Dr. Eleanor Gittens, a faculty member in Human Services and Community Safety at the Orillia Campus, to look at improving the paper-based neighbourhood assessment form used to track issues that could lead to criminal activity. Dr. Gittens led a 10-student team from her Research Methods class in an evaluation. The students recorded issues such as overgrown hedges, garbage, derelict cars, and broken windows in various neighbourhoods. These issues, if resolved, could minimize the opportunity for criminal activity. "We took the OPP paper-based assessment and we revamped it and created our own," explains Dr. Gittens. "While the former system had everything we wanted, it wasn't very user-friendly because on one street alone you went from having no issues to many. We realized immediately that the paper-based form could not possibly record all the information collected." Dr. Gittens reached out to Georgian's Research Advisory Council about having the assessment form re-created as a web application for greater usability. She was connected with Rich Freeman, a faculty member of the Interactive Media Design – Web program, who agreed to use the idea as a project for second-year students. Dr. Gittens and her team attended Freeman's class to explain their requirements to the students. "It provided the Computer Studies students with an opportunity to face a real client with real-world needs and to try to use both their analytical skills and their technical skills to plan and build a solution to meet the client's needs," says Freeman. Teams of four students then planned, designed and built application prototypes. At the end of the term, they presented their ideas to Dr. Gittens, her research team and an OPP sergeant who collectively chose a GPS-enabled interactive mapping tool that allows officers to use a mobile device to identify an individual neighbourhood and describe the problem. Students who worked on the successful application have since been involved in further discussions with the research team and the OPP about the possibility of rolling out the pilot program and potentially looking at other uses of the technology. "We've realized that not only are there synergies between college areas, but also the potential, when we're working across programs, to do larger scale Neighbourhood assessment tool shows promise Collaboration between academic programs at Georgian and the Ontario Provincial Police brings more expertise to research projects. Dr. Eleanor Gittens, faculty, Human Services and Community Safety (centre) with two students who helped with the new neighbourhood assessment tool. SOCIAL INNOVATION 10 GeorgianCollege.ca/CARI

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