Three team members, each familiar with one of our three sources,compiled and drew insights from available forms of evidence for their cases. Available forms of evidence included: direct observations based on personal conversations, leadership involvement, general participation,and a host of physical materials such as documents, reports,
websites, data management platforms, photographs, news articles,and more (Yin, 2013). We created a shared spreadsheet including information about how the project self-describes, the project purpose, and any impacts observed in the materials. Team members then coded these materials independently with regard to intent for data to be
used to inform decisions, whether data were used, and the degree to which they leveraged the power of place as evidenced by our five place dimensions (Table 2). For each project, we asked: ‘Does the project intend to inform decision making?’, ‘Does the project generate data used in decision making?’, and ‘To what degree does the project leverage the power of place based on our five place dimensions in their materials?’ We coded materials for these variables based on an ordinal scale of 0 to 2 (0 = no intent/use; 1 = some intent/use; 2 = high degree of intent/use). We then calculated binary ‘intent’ and ‘use’ variables as yes/no where 0 = no intent/use and either a 1 or 2 = intent/use in decision making. We also calculated the total number of dimensions evident by summing the number of dimensions coded as either a 1 or 2 (Table 2) to capture the breadth of place imensions leveraged. To gain consistent interpretations of materials, we triangulated our observations through iterative verbal and written discussions and discussed emergent themes stemming from our analysis (Lindlof and Taylor,2002; Patton, 2002; Yin, 2013)