ryanwold.net - Civic Tech, Bitcoin, and Open Government Innovation

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I have been thinking about "telling the story" around data, and am curious as to what you're thinking.  
On our last call w/ Rick, we set out a couple of rough rules for DC data:
a)  Enough data to make searching interesting.
b)  A dataset that will make an interesting story.
c) Data that is on the Live Data Feeds list.
Candidates:
Crime incidents
Purchase Orders
311 Service Requests

So, when you suggest a "story" around those datasets, what do you mean?  A story w/ a series of actions or events, w/ characters, a plot, a climax, a point or a moral?  Or do you mean something simpler, like pointing out interesting dimensions of the data?  Or some discovery?

Blake and I have been kicking this around, and have begun developing the idea of a sort of graphic story, kind of like a graphical novel, w/ text and line-drawings.  Something on the line of "Arthur is an executive in Chicago.  His daughter Chloe has just finished her first year at Georgetown and wants to move into an apartment w/ three of her friends.  Arthur and Maeve, his wife, are concerned - to the point of panicking, with the risks that might befall Chloe.  So Arthur starts searching the crime and 311 reports in various Georgetown neighborhoods in order to choose a safe apartment."

You get the idea.  Is that what you're working on?  Using the data as a platform or context for a story?

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