The Corporation for National and Community Service is a federal agency that encourages US citizens to volunteer, particularly for federal programs like AmeriCorps. They also have an excellent data site that provides statistics on civic engagement. We used their data extraction tool to pull a few datasets, which are posted on the Library’s data repository. Here is … Read more
Cities thrive when citizens get directly involved in working for their city. Not only do engaged residents solve problems and guide development, but the fact they got involved makes them love their city more, and encourages the people they socialize with to also care more about their city. Because loving something and watching it grow just feels good, creating … Read more
Last week I showed a wonderful heat map of crime from Trulia, that made it more clear where crimes were actually occurring. Unfortunately, the map does not really have much information; anyone who lives in the area already knows where the crime is. To illustrate, compare the crime map: To this map: Suspiciously similar? The second … Read more
This is, unfortunately, how data sharing actually works.
UXBlog has a wonderful guide to making fake maps in Excel. The technique involves putting values from a dataset into bins by rounding latitude and longitude, so that each cell in the spreadsheet represents one degree of lat/lon. If the color of the cell is computed from the number of datapoints that fall into each cell, the … Read more
As part of working with the City of San Diego to develop an Open Data Policy, I and others have proposed that the city create a position for a Chief Innovation Officer, a person dedicated to identifying and developing new ways for the City to accomplish it’s job. To get a better idea of what … Read more
A heat map is a way of presenting data that makes it much easier to understand the density of a variable. Rather than just plotting each pont on a map, a point on a heatmap adds a bit of ‘temperature’ to a location, so a lot of points close together make an area “hotter”. There … Read more