Sunlight's GoViz Blog

Visualizing the TransparencyCamp Community

I attended TransparencyCamp 2012 earlier this month and, like every other year that I have attended, there were lots of people and good conversations. This year I was particularly amazed at the sheer number and diversity of those in attendance. This got me thinking about the people drawn to this event and the relationships between them. I wondered, “wouldn’t it be neat to see what this community looks like?” So I decided to gather some Twitter data and do a little social network analysis on the #tcamp12 community.

50 Years of Government Spending, In 1 Graph

Of each dollar the federal government spends, how much goes to defense? How much goes to Social Security? How much goes to interest on the debt? And how has this sort of thing changed over time?

Geography of government benefits

I missed this one a while back, but The New York Times had a look at the growth of government benefit programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, in the United States. On the surface, it looks like your standard choropleth map that shows percent of income from government benefits, but there’s a lot going on here that makes the piece really good.

Evolution of money in politics

Here is an interactive timeline of the events that shape money in politics. Click on the dots for more information.

staff:

Tumblr Insights: Election 2012 Report

With the U.S. presidential campaign already off to a roaring start, news from the Republican primary contests has been a major topic across Tumblr. As we near another crescendo in Florida, we were curious how the campaign—from the numerous debates and rallies, to election ads and gaffes—has played out so far in terms of the type and quantity of attention received by each candidate on Tumblr.

The first graph shows how frequently each candidate’s name appeared in posts. The second shows other tags most frequently associated with each candidate. We’re most impressed with the viral power of one creative concept blog: When Rick Perry’s Unpopular Opinions sprang up as a parody of one of Perry’s campaign videos, he easily became the most blogged candidate overnight.

Our Insights team will be bringing you more data as the campaigns progress!

theatlantic:

Where Did All the Workers Go? 60 Years of Economic Change in 1 Graph

President Obama’s State of the Union speech was surprisingly bullish on reviving manufacturing, prompting one very clever person on Twitter to say something along the lines of: “Democrats want the economy of the 1950s, while Republicans just want to live there.”

It got me thinking: What did the economy look like in the 1950s? If you could organize all the jobs into buckets and compare the paper-shuffling professional services bucket to the manufacturing bucket, what would they look like around 1950, and how has the picture changed in the last 60 years? Read more.

[Image: Brian McGill and Peter Bell/National Journal]

staff:

Yesterday we did a historic thing. We generated 87,834 phone calls to U.S. Representatives in a concerted effort to protect the Internet. Extraordinary. There’s no doubt that we’ve been heard.

So just to keep you updated: The well-intentioned, but immensely flawed “Stop Online Piracy Act” is still in the House Judiciary Committee. The hearing was yesterday and now members will debate and bring amendments to the bill. The Committee will reconvene in a few weeks — the date has yet to be scheduled. Nothing has been brought to a final vote. Everything is still very much in play. We’ll keep you posted on what’s going on and what you can do to help. But for now, we want to thank you.

One encouraging thing we heard yesterday:

I don’t believe this bill has any chance on the House floor. I think it’s way too extreme, it infringes on too many areas that our leadership will know is simply too dangerous to do in its current form.

— Representative Darrell Issa

We also want to express our tremendous gratitude to our friends at Mobile Commons who, on 30 minutes notice, hooked us up with their amazing platform (and provided their expertise) to automatically connect callers with their Representatives.

Local government by the numbers

More than two centuries of American democracy have resulted in a profusion of governments at the local level, not only cities and counties but villages and townships, park districts and sanitary districts and a host of others. To those trying desperately to bring a state’s budget into balance, many of these are useless anachronisms incapable of providing any service that could not be provided higher up the governmental chain. But to the tens of thousands of people who hold office in these local entities — and to millions of citizens who live within them — multiple local governments are a crucial piece of evidence that American democracy reaches down to the grassroots level.

Amid Protest Over Closed Philadelphia Redistricting Process, Tech Firm Decides to Start Its Own

A Philadelphia software company hopes to use technology to pry open a crack in the historically closed-door process of dividing up the city into City Council districts.

Cities and states nationwide are in the final throes of redistricting, the decennial aftermath of the U.S. Census in which the country’s political boundaries are redrawn based on shifts of population and, in many cases, the shifting political winds.

grantcuster:

The New York City Tax Receipt I did web design for is now live! Worked with Alec out of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s Office. We took a lot of inspiration from the wonderful White House Federal Taxpayer Receipt. It was a lot of fun to think about how to make all the information approachable (and for a cause I believe in!). Hopefully I’ll post some thoughts on the process in the next few days.

Hey folks, a few quick questions...are you liking the blog? What can I improve? What do you like?

Tools for the Citizen Scientist

As part of the NASA Open Government plan released on April 7, 2010, NASA announced more than 150 milestone related to integrating Open Government into the agencies programs and projects.

We just crossed the 1,000 follower mark! Thanks everyone!

US Debt Clock: All the Relevant Statistics in Real-Time

The US Debt Clock shows how the inverse of a visualization can be as compelling and engaging, as it simply lists a huge collection of rattling statistics related to the US debt in real-time without any graphical translation. Not sure if any useful insight can be made, however.