Black Arcs Helps Communities Do Things Like Decide Where Schools Are Built
FREDERICTON — A Fredericton startup has developed software that helps communities and organizations explore complex issues in an engaging and interactive way, helping them figure out things like where to build schools, measure the impacts of cultural industries on a region’s economy, and maybe even contain the community spread of a virus such as Covid-19.
Black Arcs was founded by tech entrepreneur and engineer Jake Arsenault about five years ago. Having previously founded Inversa Systems, a pioneer of gamma-ray imaging for infrastructure, he and his business partners were looking to build something new that could help benefit the larger community.
“After dozens and dozens of conversations with people in government and the non-profit sector, they got to the root issue that a lot of organizations have, which is how do you communicate a complex issue to a wide pool of stakeholders, with varying amount of knowledge about how those things work?” says Luke Robertson, Black Arcs’ director of operations.
“How do we explain to people things that are complex matters and are important and worth during the hard work on?”
Black Arcs software uses data to give a professional analysis in a way that’s both informative and entertaining. It lets users visualize possibilities and test-drive how decisions shape outcomes.
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“We settled mostly around land use issues, so things that relate to cities, neighbourhoods, et cetera,” says Robertson. “With a software tool, we could look at different aspects of the data that’s all around us and how people live in and use their cities.”
One of the company’s first projects was the Town of Sackville, where they wanted to look at levels of greenhouse gas emissions and how they relate to school locations. Black Arc used GIS road data, measurements from the provinces along with population data to build an accurate digital map of the town. People were then able to see how different school locations could impact emissions.
“We built a digital version of Sackville and let people move the schools around and see that was likely to impact greenhouse gas emissions based on how school buses would have to adjust their routes, to how walkable the schools would be,” says Robertson.
“That really opened a lot of eyes to people as to how interconnected every issue in the city is because if you move one thing, it affects a hundred other things.”
Up until recently, Black Arc’s clients have been municipalities or regional governments such as the City of Moncton and Regional Commission 7. The company has also been reaching out to cities across North America.
“We’ve been in discussions with pretty much every city in New Brunswick, as well as Halifax, folks in Massachusetts, Toronto, other parts of Ontario, Ottawa, Atlanta, Georgia more recently, Las Vegas,” says Robertson.
“And what we found is that every city has the same issues when you get to the root problem, and it’s that issue of communicating complexity. It’s really hard to get stakeholders on board with an idea they don’t understand.”
But for one of its upcoming projects, Black Arcs is working with non-profit Artslink NB on a map that will show the economic spin-off of the province’s music venues in various communities. The project is in the early stages and follows a report Artlink recently released about the province’s cultural workforce.
“I don’t think a lot of people realize the spinoffs that come out of investing in arts and culture. We’re aiming to give Artslink a flexible tool that lets them look at all sorts of different aspects of the music sector and how it relates to the province of New Brunswick and cities within it,” says Robertson.
“How do venues contribute to the local economies? What are the spin-offs? How does bringing a bunch of people to an event impact just the downtown of a city? We know that venues are not just a place where people go see a show and leave.”
Though non-profits are not Black Arc’s target market, Robertson says the project will show how their software can be used in a variety of sectors.
“What we’re really doing by building something that looks at the economics of the culture sector is building a tool that can flexibly look at the economics of any aspect of the city,” he says. “This helps us bring our software a little further along and bring in new interesting sectors.”
The company has also built a working prototype of their software that could help track community spread of Covid-19. They’re currently looking for the right partners and investors to help bring it to market.
“Like most companies, when things started getting shut down a couple of months ago, we had a conversation about what could we do that could contribute to this in some way,” says Robertson.
“Since we already have software built that looks at cities and mobility within [them], we had the idea that community transmission is something that’s going to start happening and if we have ways that could model how that could work, maybe we could provide tools to communities to play with options for how they could limit community transmission in the future.”
Like most other businesses, Covid-19 has made Black Arc adjust its plans for 2020. Before the crisis, it was in the middle of raising a $2-million funding round. That’s a little bit difficult to do now with team stuck in Fredericton, but their outlook for the rest of the year is positive.
“Our revenue is actually looking pretty good in comparison to some of our peers and we think this might be our year to really make a go at turning this into a great company,” says Robertson.
“Our goal is to be the most flexible, visual calculator for looking at almost any aspect of the community. We’re talking to developers. We’re talking to government, we’re talking to other private groups and what we’re finding is they tend to agree with the direction we’re going in and that these issues are important to them too.”