The GICH program, a partnership between the Housing and Demographics Research Center, the Georgia Municipal Association and Georgia's Department of Community Affairs, assists small to moderately sized towns in Georgia with their planning for future housing needs. We have provided communities by developing tools for online data collection using a variety of tools: OpenDataKit, Shiny, and Fulcrum. We have also assisted in analysis of changing demographics in towns and visualization of housing patterns within communities.

• To date, we have assisted 10 communities with their local housing assessments.
  
• A guide for housing assessments created through this project is posted on the HDRC's Applied Research page: link
  
• In summer 2017, sponsored by a UGA CURO grant, Geography major Grace Barrett completed a project examining current and projected need for assisted living facilities in Madison and Monroe counties. Read a summary of her findings.
• Dr. Shannon, along with a co-author, published an about the use of open source tools in International Journal of Geographic Information Science (link)