Seriously, I’m going to get back to posting regularly now that this project is complete.
On Monday, I submitted Recovery Review for the Sunlight Foundation’s Design for America contest. (The project requires the installation of Silverlight if you don’t already have it installed.)
Recovery Review allows users to search and visualize stimulus data. It also allows user to flag data that they think is inaccurate. I think it’s a pretty cool little project, although I have a small list of things I’d like to improve about it. (The list isn’t comprehensive, but it’s a start.)
I’ve also started a blog for Recovery Review to go along with the project. Right now, the blog has some discussion of design decisions and the stimulus data.
One of my biggest frustrations is the fact that the data was updated on the Recovery.gov website when I was right in the middle of my project. As a result, I’m running the project (at least until the judging is complete) on the old data, which represents everything up to 2009, Q4.
What is strange to me is that it looks like the data updates are a little frustrating. Anything about a particular project can change in the updates, from the amount of money awarded to the project to the date the project was started to the number of jobs the project “saved or created”. Sometimes these changes make sense. Sometimes they make no damn sense at all.
It looks like I picked a hell of a complex data set to work with.
Your link to the recovery review blog actually takes you to http://www.politicalmathblog.com/recovery... which doesn’t work. Not a big deal, I think folks can figure it out, but just so you know.
Thank you for pulling this all together. I have never been able to find the information in a format that was easily accessible. I was amazed by the information available through your Recovery Review. I didn’t look at each and every enumerated project, but was astounded at the average salaries for those who were hired through the stimulus money. Each one was quite substantial; many were 6 digit salaries and many of the jobs, it seemed, were bureaucratic in nature. It seems that if jobs creation was the goal, many more jobs could have been created if given to businesses that work in the real world.
SVG+javascript > silverlight
just sayin’