Data & Visualizations

Do you love storytelling with data? Are you passionate about open data and health care costs transparency? The California HealthCare Foundation is hosting a data design challenge to seek out engaging presentations that bring to life the story of rising health care costs. The Picture of Health: A Data Design Challenge is offering $10,000 in awards to entries that successfully depict public health data in new and interesting ways.

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending one of Edward Tufte’s one-day courses—Presenting Data & Information. For almost three decades, Tufte has been a leader in the visualization of data and statistical information, a field he refers to as analytic design.

One point that stuck with me was his emphasis on making presentations “not suck.” According to Tufte, the two main ingredients in the recipe for a not-so sucky presentation are:

Data is the new black. These days everyone is releasing it, visualizing it, aggregating it, and mashing it up. And for good reason. Data is so much more than a stack of numbers or a server filled with client outputs. It can justify the work that your organization is doing, help others understand why it is critical, and offer exciting new ways to motivate others to help solve the problems your organization is working on.

Forum One held two roundtable discussions in Seattle in the past couple of weeks on global health web communications as well as data collection, management, and dissemination. As a mid-sized city with a collection of world-class global health organizations, Seattle has a unique opportunity to leverage the power of community and our “proximity advantage” (as one participant put it) to innovate and break down obstacles to success.

I recently attended Transparency Camp, a two-day event organized by the Sunlight Foundation. The event convened almost 300 passionate people, all coming together for a common goal: to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent, accountable and meaningfully accessible to the public.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Aid Information Challenge on Friday at the Word Bank. It was a great discussion that brought together a mix of people from different disciplines interested in open data and transparency's capacity to make aid more effective. Thanks again to the World Bank for hosting, and to the Development Gateway for all they did to make it happen.

Crisis Camp DC participants work hard to develop applications and tools for relief workers in Haiti.

Earlier this week, I introduced a series of blog posts discussing the Good News Story in Haiti.

The Obama Administration released the long anticipated Open Government Directive on Tuesday. It lays out some ambitious steps for executive departments and agencies to take over the relatively near-term to be more transparent, participatory, and accountable, such as:

We're seeing exciting trends in governments making data more available  — and valuable — for the public. Whether on crime, education, or the environment, governments are putting more data on the web. And they're doing it in ways that allow people to build web applications on top of the data. 

This post is a follow-up to my previous post Writing for the Web: A Few Tips, where I focused on more conversational tactics for writing web content. In this post, I want to brief you on a few things you can do to make your web content more usable.

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