Category Archives: Presentations

Education, Politics, Presentations

Data Visualization for West Lafayette 2015 City Budget

(You can also access the full page for the City of West Lafayette 2015 Preliminary Budget with information from 2014-08-04.)

Tomorrow’s August City Council meeting will include Ordinance No. 25-14,  An Ordinance Setting The 2015 City Budget And Setting The 2015 Tax Levy On Property And Tax Rate.

This data is usually contained within a database and exported as a table.  The budget forms are online in this format on the City’s web site.

WL-Budget-PDF-2014-08-03

As we know, looking at tables doesn’t always provide the clearest picture.

Over the past several months, I have been learning more and more about various civic hacking projects around the globe.  One that I found incredibly exciting was Open Budget Oakland.

I thought they used their own software, created under the Code for America group, however, upon further investigation, I learned that their lovely tree map visualizations were provided by OpenSpending.

With this recent budget announcement, I decided to get the City’s data online and accessible in this format.  Sadly, the only data that is on the City’s web site is in PDF form.  Upon doing some more research, I learned about an amazing piece of FLOSS called Tabula. As their web site states, Tabula is a tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files.  And liberate it did.

Tabula-2014-08-03 ScreenshotAfter exporting the data from Tabula, I made a few corrections (column headers contained extra spaces which caused problems in OpenSpending) and we were all set to go.

The result is at the top of this post.

Sadly, there currently isn’t a way to backup the navigation on the tree map, but it appears that Open Budget Oakland has this worked out and we are in communication as to how they made that happen. In the meantime, please refresh your browser.

We plan on having a public dialogue about the budget process using these new data visualizations at the West Lafayette Public Library in the coming months. Please check back for more details.

Education, Ideas, Libraries, Participatory Culture, Politics, Presentations

MyIGA Hackathon 2014-03-22, a Success

MyIGA-Hackathon-2014-03-22

I want to thank everyone who came out to yesterday’s MyIGA Hackathon at the West Lafayette Public Library.  Great people, wonderful ideas, and some good starts to solving some problems for the community.

Here is a copy of the presentation in PDF.  It contains some great links to other civic hacking projects and gives you an idea of how the day was structured.

MyIGA Hackathon – 2014-03-22 – Presentation

Our current focus project is an application that will allow a user to examine the differences in bill versions. Currently, you can see bills, as introduced, each amendment, and then each subsequent version.  You cannot compare bill versions to each other.

This should also be scalable to compare amendments to one another.

Once we get settled, we will be uploading the code to GitHub.

In coordination with other area technology groups, we plan on having a civic hacking presence for the community to participate in and enjoy.

I heard rumors there might be something going on downtown for the National Day of Civic Hacking.

Libraries, Presentations

ILF 2012 Conference Panel: Digital Content

Just got back from presenting at the Indiana Library Federation Conference in Indianapolis regarding Digital Content. The presentation in front of 100+ attendees went wonderful. I did rush myself a bit so we could get to the Q&A and was thankful that I did because we had some good questions. I hope to post the audio soon.

The big takeaways were:

  • Libraries should embrace the communities that support and encourage sharing (public domain, copyleft, copyfree)
  • A hardware/software solution needs to be implemented to help patrons interface with these resources (e.g. Archive.org) similar to the Freedom Toaster
  • The cost to libraries for digital content is roughly the same for paper content

You can download a copy of the ILF Conference 2012 handout here.

If you want to continue reading about the movement that encourages engagement vs. passivity please check out these books (free downloads):