Dynamic Collaborative Visualization of the United Nations

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Creating an SDG Dashboard

for Reporting and Best Practice Sharing

Kathleen Campbell Garwood, David Steingard and Marcello Balduccini

Saint Joseph’s University, 5600 City Avenue, Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A.

Keywords: Collaborative Visualization, Sustainability, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Interactive

Visualization, Dynamic Collaborative Visualization, Collaborative Dashboard.

Abstract: Dynamic data visualization is a collaborative dashboarding methodology used to identify trends and insights

in data while revealing changes in activity and work progress. This paper introduces a dashboard technique

that collects, reports, and shares global business schools’ fulfillment of the United Nations Sustainable

Development Goals (SDGs)--the SDG Dashboard. With this tool, business schools can share experiences

with the goal of promoting sustainable change and advancing the work (e.g. research papers, partnerships,

and syllabi) being done internationally within schools. By revealing patterns and trends that may not be

evident when reading individual school level accounts of SDG alignment, this dashboard was created to

promote inter-school collaboration while highlighting best practices. Overall, it can be used as a high-level

assessment tool to highlight areas of greatest impact on the SDGs as well as opportunities for growth. The

SDG Dashboard allows users to drill down into the data, revealing patterns of global impact, while also

highlighting the breadth of work that is being done. This dynamic dashboard is an agent for collaborations in

all topics outlined in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which are: sustainable economic

growth, responsible consumption and production, availability for decent work, poverty eradication, cleaner

energy, environmental conservation, and the foray of issues concerning overall inequality and quality

education.

1 INTRODUCTION

This paper introduces a dynamic dashboard

visualization technique with a primary focus on

fostering collaboration. The dashboard itself is

dynamic in two respects. First, the end goal of

interacting with the data is to provide academics

worldwide with information that stimulates change or

advances progress as to how SDGS are taught,

studied, and processed and second the drill down

feature allows for a changing view of the data

depending on the focus of the viewer. In this paper

the term collaborative means working with a variety

of schools and faculty, the dashboard represents the

shared use of computer-supported, (interactive)

visual representations of data by more than one

person with the common goal of contribution to joint

information processing activities (as defined by

Isenberg et. al., 2011). To be truly collaborative, the

goal is to concisely share best practices to promote

change in the world. The use of a dashboard as the

method of sharing the data was chosen as the

graphical interface allows at-a-glance key

information while also providing drill down

functionality allowing for both broad and narrow

information retrieval. Before explicating the

technique, it is important to establish some

background on the context for its application. Our

work is both an exploration of an innovative

visualization technique, as well as a solution to the

particular problem of usefully communicating and

analyzing large amounts of data referencing social

and environmental transformation promoted by the

United Nations.

On the heels of the successful 2000 campaign to

address Millennium Development Goals, the United

Nations generated a new set of 17 Sustainable

Development Goals (SDGs) to be realized by 2030.

The SDGs include some of the same goals as the

Millennium Goals, but their reach extends into an

even wider range of transformative social and

environmental objectives like promoting decent work

294

Garwood, K., Steingard, D. and Balduccini, M.

Dynamic Collaborative Visualization of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Creating an SDG Dashboard for Reporting and Best Practice Sharing.

DOI: 10.5220/0009172302940300

In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theor y and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2020) - Volume 3: IVAPP, pages

294-300

ISBN: 978-989-758-402-2; ISSN: 2184-4321

and economic growth; advancing sustainable

industry, innovation, and infrastructure; stewarding

life below water and on land; and collaborating to

foster peace, justice, and strong institutions. Since

their launch, the SDGs have become strategically

adopted in many sectors: nation-states, corporations,

non-governmental organizations, and higher

education institutions.

All of these sectors share a common problem of

performance reporting, how to thoughtfully “manage

what they measure” in terms of fulfilling these goals;

the SDG Dashboard was developed as a pilot for the

global business school membership organization

Principles for Responsible Management (PRME).

The initial goal was to collect and share data about

how schools are teaching, researching, and partnering

with other institutions to influence change related to

the SDGs. Participating business schools pledged to

collect information on how they participated as

teachers, researchers, and practitioners in

understanding methods to address their goals. These

reports aim to communicate each school’s

effectiveness in addressing SDGs and provide best

practices. Through an iterative and open discussion

collaboration, the SDG Dashboard was created to

expand the work being done globally, and collect and

disseminate this data in one location with input from

multiple institutions, academics, and students.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

Simple data visualizations have been used as a tool to

monitor and report SDGs in many studies. Clements,

Sarkar, & Wei (2014) considered satellite photos

visualized in grid space to identify vegetation

changes in South Africa to address food scarcity

(SDG 2: Zero Hunger) and WattDepot (Brewer, Lee,

and Johnson, 2011) provided enterprise-level

collection, storage, analysis, and visualization of

energy data (SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy)

to effect behavior change and energy literacy.

Individuals have done work to assess metrically and

visually how they have been able to impact needs for

a specific goal or a set of goals and prepare great

interactive dashboards to display their efforts. There

is value in these individual dashboards to inform

users about SDG impact data as there is value in the

papers being done by academic researchers, and in

the partnerships being forged by institutions with in

need communities. Our collaborative dashboard

provides an opportunity to present all work being

done from various sources in one location creating a

resource that can provide computer supported

cooperative work (CSCW) as multiple schools share

data and insights that enable the dashboard to grow

while also being open to adapting the dashboard to

the needs of the users. The term computer supported

cooperative work, first coined by Greif and Cashman

in 1984, considers the depth to which we use

technology to support people in their work (Grudin

1994). As stated by Iseberg et al. (2011) traditional

visualization and visual analytics tools are typically

designed for a single user interacting with a

visualization application on a standard desktop

computer. However, extending these tools to include

support for collaboration clearly goes a long way

towards increasing the scope and applicability of

visualization in the real world (Isenberg et al 2011).

This dashboard can be used to allow the work being

done by universities to grow collaboratively with the

dashboard as a central focus.

Taking the time to incorporate multitudes of work

that can be viewed when considering only an

individual school (using the drop down list) or the

culmination of all reporting schools provides end-

users with control of scope. Meanwhile the display

provides a broad view where one can consider all 17

SDGs by impact area to quickly identify areas where

a plethora of work is being done and where more

work is still needed. Moreover, if someone had a

specific goal and impact area in mind (for example,

planning to teach a course addressing one or more

goals like ending poverty and hunger), a person could

narrow down the dashboard focus to only the exact

works available providing insights, information and

feasible opportunities for collaboration. The SDGs as

set forth by the United Nations are by design intended

to be considered as an amalgamated and

interdependent set of goals and this tool is meant to

provide a platform that encourages school interaction,

promotes cooperation, and gives access to work for

future partnerships.

This collaborative visualization addresses the

need for a tool that can share data and grow with the

feedback of those who provide the source data as has

been done iteratively since its inception. Ultimately

it offers a robust and effective technique to enhance

SDG impact performance. The goals have been

adopted as strategically and operationally important

objectives in higher education, where there is a need

for collaborative SDG visualization similar to what is

being done at the country level. Globally, efforts are

being made to assess how well countries are meeting

the SDGs and move forward with best practices. For

example, island countries like Indonesia have sought

to explore the benefits of data visualization in SDG

monitoring (Pulse Lab, 2018) with a “mission to

Dynamic Collaborative Visualization of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Creating an SDG Dashboard for

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accelerate the discovery and adoption of data

innovation for sustainable development and

humanitarian action.” The United Nations itself

offers a variety of official platforms to assess human

progress towards fulfilling these goals. A further

example, Schmidt-Traub et al., (2017) present the

SDG Index and Dashboards (released

annually),which explore differences in countries'

performance, considers the empirical relationship to

subjective wellbeing (SWB), and discusses how

remaining gaps in data and analysis can be filled.

This came in the wake of Bertelsmann Stiftung and

the Sustainable Development Solutions Network

(SDSN) jointly releasing their first SDG Index and

Dashboards (SDG Index and Dashboards) in July

2016, with data covering 149 of 193 UN member

states.

This Dashboard provides the type of visualization

most aligned with information sharing through

collaboration. Through many iterations, the current

dashboard exists due to feedback and open

conversation with schools who have shared their data,

information and best practices while asking

meaningful questions that have allowed for updates

and adaptations as well as informative discussions at

several presentations globally. Between its inception,

continued collection with constant interaction with all

participating schools, and final goal of helping to

share out best sources or data and encouragement of

future partnerships, the dashboard is at its core

created to be a collaborative tool. It is dedicated to

sharing and reporting best SDG practices in global

higher education (not comparing and ranking) using

a drill down visualization. There is a need to begin to

characterize the increasingly diverse audience for

visualization technology and map out the design

space for new creative and collaborative tools to

support these users (Heer et al., 2008). We propose

this dynamic dashboard that can be used to connect

professors, students, and institutions to collaborate on

projects, research, and teaching to help a new

generation of students prepare to be socially

responsible citizens and corporate employees

working for change in accord with the SDGs.

3 METHODOLOGY AND

DEVELOPMENT OF

COLLABORATIVE

VISUALIZATION IN THE SDG

DASHBOARD

Our team set out to determine a creative method of

reporting and sharing data across institutions in an

accessible reporting tool that considered SDG by

impact area. The reporting tool was developed with

an ability to discern activity quickly, which led to a

tool that drills down into the reported data revealing

usable information at the broad SDG level through a

heatmap and key performance indicators (KPI).

Drilling down (as seen in Figure 1), the dashboard can

portray just the data reported by a single SDG

(column view), or it can highlight only work being

done in one specific impact area like teaching (row

view), or it can be narrowed down in scope to only

consider one SDG across one impact area. In all

cases, the drilled down data can be viewed and

interacted with at the finite level promulgating titles,

abstracts and links connecting the user to the data

source shared within the dashboard. The creation of

the final product requires data collection, cleaning,

organization, and visualization of the aggregated

sustainability data.

3.1 Survey Tool Created in Order to

Perform Data Collection

In order to collect the data for aggregation, an initial

compilation tool using SurveyMonkey.com was

introduced, which asked hundreds of questions in

order to ascertain SDG detailed data at the impact

area and target levels. According to PRME partners,

this collection was bulky and cumbersome, which led

to immediate modifications. To reduce time and

effort for the user, the collection, Qualtrics.com

replaced SurveyMonkey.com because of the

powerful survey flow logic option and was then tested

and updated with several pilot schools across the

globe participating and providing insights.

The Qualtrics survey was developed to aggregate

information and control flow components were

placed within each question level to allow for a more

concise, targeted collection tool. The current tool

considers data down to the SDG and impact levels. It

allows respondents from schools to upload portions

of data at varying times. This puts the power of data

selection, control, and evaluation into the users’

hands.

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Built-in logic allows respondents to view only

questions that pertain to their current data. The set-

up is as follows:

● Each school using the survey chooses which of

the 17 SDGs they are interested in uploading data

(See Appendix Figure A1).

● Once SDGs are chosen, the survey asks users

which impact areas they would like to report (see

Appendix Figure A2).

● Finally, the survey requests data within the SDG

where the user reports the number of activities

being uploaded (see Appendix Figure A3).

The collected data generates a report that allows for

aggregation and reporting within the dashboard. The

report consists of a list of items describing the data

type under that SDG (e.g., a course, a research paper,

or a project).

3.2 Data Cleaning and Organization

for Dissemination

It took multiple iterations of collection and cleaning,

as well as discussions with pilot schools, and

feedback form PRME presentations before the final

product, this collaborative dynamic dashboard, was

produced. From a data design perspective, it is

important that a clear and whole picture is available

displaying the SDGs met and the areas of impact. To

learn more about any specific activity within an SDG,

the tool will concisely report the most important

findings, actions, or partnerships. The Dashboard

uses live web links to provide users with current

information (e.g., research papers or partnership

documents), providing future collaboration at a finite

level.

The current process of collection and cleaning has

expedited the time between data upload and

dashboard integration using consistent variables.

Each school can upload data that is then exported into

an excel document, formatted for visualization, and

then forwarded to the initial stakeholder to assure

accuracy. Fields that are required for best use are:

● Year of impact

● SDG and Impact Area an activity meets

● Title of the activity

● Short description (e.g. abstract, course description

for classes)

● City and country impacted

● Link to related information (e.g. doi for papers, a

website for partnerships)

4 SDG DASHBOARD

The final product is the SDG Dashboard, an

interactive tool created to allow end users

opportunities for collaboration and best practices

within the academic realm of SDG teaching, research,

partnerships, dialogue, and organizational practices.

Figure 1 represents the broad design, which provides

a pictorial view of which school is being considered

if it is one individual school under consideration. The

top row of data provides the key performance

indicators (KPIs), specifically, how many SDGs have

been reported on (out of the 17), how many distinct

activities are available to view, and how many

countries have been impacted by these activities.

Below the KPIs is a broad view heatmap portraying

all 17 goals and what was reported by a school within

the SDG and impact area level using color where

more shade is indicates increased activity. The right,

side and bottom contain bar charts which provide

total counts of all activities by SDG as well as by

impact area. The bottom-left area shows a world map

and again uses color to denote which global areas are

being impacted by the activities provided. On the

bottom right, a drop-down chart provides a detailed

list of all activities reported. A user can click on a

specific SDG to dig deeper into the data which can be

viewed in figure 2. Here, SDG 16 (Peace, Justice, and

Strong Institutions) is highlighted which updates the

KPIs, map and list on the bottom right. In this case,

a specific title for a research paper is being hovered

over to reveal the abstract that is available in order to

get a better understanding of the paper. If openly

available, the paper itself is simple a click away, as

the titles have embedded links. This can also be done

within a singular impact and are considered across

one or more SDGs. Users hover over each activity

for detailed descriptions and a simple click links the

user directly to the pertinent research, partnerships, or

syllabi (see Figure 2).

This dynamic dashboard allows for views of

school efforts being made on specific SDGs while

also allowing for a drill-down view and immediate

access to the most recent activities and papers for best

practices and collaboration.

Dynamic Collaborative Visualization of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Creating an SDG Dashboard for

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Figure 1: View of a singular school data, where KPI represent overall performance, top visual represents activities shared across

all SDGs and impact areas, the map Bottom left shows coordinates of where work is being done, and the text box on right allows

for list of individual activities.

Figure 2: View of a singular school data, where KPI represent overall performance, top visual represents activities shared across

all SDGs and impact areas but with drill down on SDG 16. The map (bottom left) shows coordinates of where work is being

done, and the text box on right shows top 10 activities. First research paper title is hovered over revealing the abstract and a

double click would lead to access to paper if publicly available.

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5 CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE

OF DYNAMIC

COLLABORATIVE

VISUALIZATION

This project aims to achieve two objectives. First, it

proposes a framework for this dynamic dashboard

visualization. Much of the theory, models, and

application of dashboard visualizations in the

literature are limited in their power to communicate

with a variety of stakeholders and persuade people to

take action using the data (basic goals of data

visualization). The sustainable issues faced globally

as reflected in the sustainable development goals are

being addressed by ever-changing and integrated

techniques that require nimble data collection and

reporting. Collaboration from diverse sources over

time is a critical factor in successfully providing

current, shareable, and actionable data to advance the

fulfillment of sustainability. Dynamic Collaborative

Visualization addresses these limitations by offering

access to multiple scale data generated by the actual

users who share their data and are partners in the

changes made to both the data collection and final

visualization. The second objective is the application

of this dashboard in one particular domain, a case

study, of the United Nations 17 Sustainable

Development Goals (SDGs) in higher education

institutions. The SDGs outline an inspiring,

implementable, and measurable plan for humanity to

manifest a more prosperous, equitable, and

sustainable future. This SDG Dashboard provides

opportunities for growth and expansion of current

SDG practices within business schools and

universities across the globe. This visualization

technique provides a solution to a particular problem,

that of usefully communicating large amounts of data

about social and environmental transformation

promoted by the United Nations.

By revealing useful information, assessing areas

of high impact, as well as areas where there are

opportunities for growth, the Dashboard features

reveal patterns of global impact (breadth) and activity

title and description (depth) while also providing

direct links to the overall activity where viable. The

application in the form of the SDG Dashboard,

advances data-driven best practices while enhancing

global business schools’ performance on the SDGs

and techniques to continue visualization

collaboration. Goals moving forward include the

ability to provide analytical insights as far as growth

for individual schools and address areas where more

needs to be done (example Life Below Water, SDG

14, has very little activity).

Future work will require further theoretical

development and differentiation from the existing

literature. This project provides a platform to

showcase the dashboards communicative power in a

novel context, reinforcing its value as a powerful tool

for data visualization, analysis, and application.

Overall, the dashboard provides quick access and

opportunities for organizations and institutions

working together to solve complex problems and

address challenges. At the center of the shared data

is easy access, which in this case is done through

visualization.

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Reporting and Best Practice Sharing

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APPENDIX

Figure A1: First page of Qualtrics survey allows user to

check each SDG that they would like to report on.

Figure A2: Screen shot of next survey level for SDG 13,

specifically, which impact areas will be reported on.

Figure A3: Screen shot of detail level reporting page for SDG 13, impact area teaching. Respondent is asked to tell how

many items will be reported on and then upload a link of the combined sheets representing these actions.

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