Dashboards for Reporting

NICAR 2013

Aaron Bycoffe - @bycoffe
Jacob Harris - @harrisj
Derek Willis - @derekwillis

Managing Real-Time Data

• Watching the Flow
• Finding Details
• Notifications

Watching the Flow

Watching the Flow

Finding Details

Notifications

Notifications

Notifications

Heads-up Displays

Intelligent Filtering

• Personal Explanations
• Vote Slices
• Comparisons

Personal Explanations

Vote Slices

Comparisons

Good Candidates

• Data via API/feeds/mobile apps
• Data with scheduled updates
• Data you need to check for changes
• Public search sites with bad UI
• Anything people ask for more than twice

Build Your Own

Build Your Own

Is there an API?

• New York Times
  (Congress, campaign finance, event listings, movie reviews, etc.)
• Sunlight Labs
  (State legislation, Congressional Record, etc.)
• NPR
  (Stories, stations, transcripts, etc.)
• HuffPost Pollster
  (Polling)

Build Your Own

Is there an API?

• Federal Communications Commission
  (Public inspection files, licenses, broadband, etc.)
• National Institutes of Health
  (Chemical names, directories, genetics
• Department of Labor
  (Health & safety, summer jobs, BLS data, etc.)

            $.ajax({
            });
          

            $.ajax({
              dataType: "jsonp",
              url: apiUrl,
            });
          

              $.ajax({
                dataType: 'jsonp',
                url: apiUrl,
                success: function(data) {
                  doSomething(data);
                }
              });
          

Build Your Own

Make it look nice

Build Your Own

Make it look nice

Build Your Own

Where to put it

• Github Pages - Free; publicly accessible; good for static pages.
• Amazon S3 - Free tier; good for static pages.
• Heroku - Free basic plan; good if you need a database.
• Localhost - Free; good if you're the only one using it.

Links, etc.

This presentation

FEC Filings Dashboard

Paper of Record