Forum One Launches County Sin Rankings: Fun Riff on Community Health Data

We're thrilled to announce the launch of County Sin Rankings, our entry in the Sunlight Labs' Design for America contest. The new site is accessible at www.CountySinRankings.org.

Using publicly-available data, the site enables you to visualize your county's health according to the seven deadly sin indexes and compare its vices to other counties in the same state.

For instance, you can see how your county scores on our "pride" scale (high school drop-out rate). Or you can see how it performs on our "wrath" scale (violent crime rate).

The site is a fun twist on CountyHealthRankings.org, a terrific site we helped produce for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. The "sins" are actually the health factors researchers used to assess the health of populations in individual U.S. counties. But to be clear, those organizations provided no funding nor advice on County Sin Rankings. We alone are responsible for this irreverent riff on their research.

We initially thought we might sit this contest out. Our previous two entries to Sunlight Labs' contests, Legistalker.org and DataMasher.org, were awarded second place and first place, respectively, and were feeling that it might be difficult to repeat those successes. But then we heard that Health and Human Services was getting involved and that they were releasing our beloved county health data into the wild as part of their Community Health Data Initiative. At that point, we knew we had to dive in and create something interesting.

A crack team was frantically assembled, and the entire site was completed — from brainstorm to launch — in just over two weeks. We think this showscases our ability to clearly transform complex data into something engaging and accessible.

Congratulations to the team that made it happen:

Andrew Cohen, advisor
Courtney Clark, information architect
Dan Crowder, developer
Tim Deegan, visual designer
William Hurley, developer
Corey Lafferty, interface engineer

Special thanks to Norman Bucknor and Kyle Keller for the mathematics consultation which helped us quantify each transgression.

We hope you enjoy it!