Future Melbourne Community Plan is the City of Melbourne’s premier planning document. It outlines a plan to grow Melbourne as a global, liveable, and sustainable city. The City of Melbourne accepted responsibility for monitoring the Future Melbourne indicators over the ten years from 2008 and reporting outcomes to Melbourne City Council, the public and City of Melbourne administration. City of Melbourne has commenced a review of the Future Melbourne 2008 plan this year with a view to writing a renewed Future Melbourne 2016-26 plan.

To be able to track Melbourne’s progress according to the aims set out in the Future Melbourne 2008 Plan, City of Melbourne developed and indicators framework including indicators for personal wellbeing and social connection, derived from the Australian Unity wellbeing survey. Australian Unity and the Australian Centre on Quality of Life at Deakin University have conducted national bi-annual population surveys for the last ten years and created an index of perceived wellbeing for the Australian population, including the population of Melbourne. Both organisations support the Index being used and developed as a scientific tool and encourage investigations into the usefulness of the Index by others.

City of Melbourne annually collects data on the personal wellbeing, social connection, self-reported health, volunteering behaviour, food security, acceptance of diverse cultures; engagement in decision making and arts and cultural activities of residents in Melbourne Local Government Area. To achieve this City of Melbourne commissioned a survey of 400 respondents.

The World Council on City Data (WCCD) awarded the City of Melbourne a platinum designation for its compliance with ISO 37120 (http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail?csnumber=62436), the world’s first international standard for city indicators. Reporting to the standard allows cities to compare their service delivery and quality of life to other cities globally. The City of Melbourne was one on 20 cities to, globally to help pilot this program and is one of sixteen cities to receive the highest level of accreditation (platinum).
Having an international standard methodology to measure city performance allows the City of Melbourne to share data about practices in service delivery, learn from other global cities, rank its results relative to those cities, and address common challenges through more informed decision making.
Indicators include: Fire and emergency response; Governance; Health; Recreation; Safety; Shelter; Solid Waste; Telecommunications and Innovation; Transportation; Urban Planning; Wastewater; Water and Sanitation; Economy; Education; Energy; Environment; and Finance.
City of Melbourne also submitted an application for accreditation, on behalf of ‘Greater Melbourne’, to the World Council on City Data and this resulted in an ‘Aspirational’ accreditation awarded to wider Melbourne.
A summary of Melbourne's results is available here (http://open.dataforcities.org/). Visit the World Council on City Data’s Open Data Portal to compare our results to other cities from around the world.