Crowdsourced usage help and observations for data visualizations

This is my pitch for the Media Ideation Fellowship.

Project Description

This project would provide a platform for user-contributed usage instructions (“move the slider to the right to see the data for different years” or observations (“wow, DC has so many charter schools”) for web and print-based data visualizations. The project would help make data visualizations and their insights more accessible and provide a body of feedback for developers and journalists to create more usable visualizations. Through a public API for web applications and QR codes and short URLs for print, journalists and developers can integrate the platform into their visualizations.

What problem or issue are you trying to address with this project?

We live in a culture which increasingly fetishizes policy decisions that are “data-driven”.  From the future of publicly-funded education in Chicago to the disconnection of residents from city infrastructure in Detroit, data fills a prominent role in the discourse around issues that profoundly impact our lives. Certainly, data has always driven decision-making by policy makers and evaluation of proposals by the public, and it’s an important part of civic process. The danger is for data to take on a magical quality instead of being framed as a tool that can be used, and abused, in the service of civic problem solving. If publics are to leverage data, we must be empowered consumers of this information.

Background

While researching information about the Chicago teachers strike, I came upon this data visualization about the growth in charter schools, I came upon this visualization:

While a careful reading of the instructions could have told me that this was a map of the US and that moving the slider shows the change in the number of charter schools over time, I just wanted to dive in and was confused. Having more human instructions that say “Hey, this is a map of the US” or “move the slider” and observations like “look how charter schools grew in D.C.  That documentary Waiting for Superman talked a lot about that” seemed like something that should exist.

More Chicago teacher strike context

Why the U.S. is not Finland with regard to education policy:

http://blackagendareport.com/content/why-us-can%E2%80%99t-compete-educationally

Disconnect from wealthy funders of anti-teacher union candidates and largely low-income public school students:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/09/american-teachers.html#ixzz26iDsyahX

Culture of “teacher bashing”:

http://www.otherwords.org/articles/chicago_and_the_psychology_of_teacher_bashing

Infographic on growth of charter schools:

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2012/sep/17/educating-tomorrow-k-12/

New metrics

A friend posted an image on Facebook related to the Chicago Teacher Strike that said:

Legislators want teachers to be paid according to their effectiveness as evaluated by student test scores.

How about paying legislators according to their effectiveness — as evaluated by job creation and economic growth?

To unpack this a little, I’d say that job creation and economic growth suck as metrics for whether governance is working as much as test scores work as metrics for thriving schools. The problem with the debate over teacher evaluation is both in tying pay to performance in a really punitive way, but in a larger sense, the very metrics used to gauge performance.

I like things working well. I like accountability for the foundational institutions of our culture. What I don’t like is a data-driven world where the metrics most directly reflect the needs of corporations and not working and middle class people. When we talk about test scores or jobs or GDP, we’re talking about numbers, not the livable reality that we actually want.

A job or economic growth could look like a private prison, or a deregulated industry devastating the environment where its workers live, or a crazy tax deal (at the expense of worker rights) for a corporation to attract them to a state. These are the moves that legislators are making now either in an earnest failure or a cynical charade to be accountable to their constituents.

I’m not anti-metric, but as people most affected by public schools or job creation, we need to think about the metrics we really want and not just accept the ones being offered to us. Off the top of my head, these are some ones that reflect measurable outcomes in a world I’d like to live in:

  • Number of high school students who vote or otherwise engage in some civic process
  • Average number of paid family sick days and vacation
  • Number of people with health insurance or other access to health care
  • Number of years a household is able to stay in the same dwelling
  • Racial and income dissimilarity index for a neighborhood

Chicago Teachers Strike Context

I’m trying to compile articles that describe why the teachers are striking because CPS and the mayor’s talking points tend to collapse those reasons and miss a lot of important reasons. As much as teachers are fighting to be able to make a living practicing their profession, they’re also fighting for a vision of education that’s a civic good and not controlled by corporations.

  • Training Teachers to Embrace Reform
    Other trajectories for relationships with unions than what we’re seeing in Chicago.
  • Teacher X: Why I’m striking, JCB

    When you take 18-25 days out of the school year for high stakes testing that is not even scientifically applicable for many of our students, that hurts our kids.

    When you spend millions on your pet programs, but there’s no money for school level repairs, so the roof leaks on my students at their desks when it rains, that hurts our kids.

    When you unilaterally institute a longer school day, insult us by calling it a “full school day” and then provide no implementation support, throwing our schools into chaos, that hurts our kids.

    When you support Mayor Emanuel’s TIF program in diverting hundreds of millions of dollars of school funds into to the pockets of wealthy developers like billionaire member of your school board, Penny Pritzker so she can build more hotels, that not only hurts kids, but somebody should be going to jail.

    When you close and turnaround schools disrupting thousands of kids’ lives and educations and often plunging them into violence and have no data to support your practice, that hurts our kids.

  • Chicago teachers strike: In ’31, school board just stopped paying teachersI feel strongly that teachers feel like they need to stand their ground because of being undervalued in Chicago, and in the United States in general. This goes way back, apparently.

    If the Chicago teachers strike, now in its second day, seems contentious, perhaps it’s worth looking back to the summer of 1931.

    That’s when the school board stopped paying teachers in cash, defaulted on 24 payrolls and offered to pay teachers in scrip instead.

Hinged

Hinged is a band that I play in with Daniel Wescott, Jeff Jablonski and Rawny Semba. We started playing during the summer of 2012.

Past Shows

  • July 7, 2012 – Chicago, IL @ Deagan Music w/ Secret Lover and Emme and the Moon
  • July 30, 2012 – Chicago, IL @ Gnarnia w/ Acidic Tree, Al Scorch and the Country Soul Ensemble, Ramshackle Glory

Lyrics

The Ending

When I slipped these earthly grips, I swear I can’t remember a moment of decision,
nor icy streets or rubber slick, just collision of position careening across the boulevard.
And all the same, what comes has came.
Was it in my power, for this ending, this outcome to not be the same?

I don’t remember losing count of the cells that mark the line between the living and the dying.
Still I feel I’m holding out, tethered by my anger at this stupid situation.
I move through space ephemeral and nurse my empty glass in the corner of the bar.
Haunted by how small the sound and range of all my motions, when they could be more tangible.

I am wind, I’m as dust.
I am anger without potency, I am feeling without touch.
I am steel, turned to rust,
clinging to this world I loved so much but not enough.

Reframing civic hacking

I’m moderating a panel titled Civic Hacking for Self Governance at this summer’s Allied Media Conference .

The idea for this session originally started with Matt Hampel and other members of the 2012 Code for America team working in Detroit.

Matt originally wanted to work on a session bringing together people looking at technological interventions in the civic space that help facilitate government institutions in civic process.  While this is an exciting space, I felt it was important to look at non-technical interventions that still felt like “hacks” as well as interventions, technical and social, that worked as part of governance though perhaps without the sanction of government institutions.

I’m excited about how this framing of “civic hacking” has shaped up and the panel now also includes Joshua Breitbart who works with the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation and is going to talk, if I can do a good job of paraphrasing this, about community self-governance through the lens of mesh wifi networks. Also on the panel will be Maria Hadden of the Participatory Budgeting Project who comes from working on less technical interventions that still feel like they incorporate a lot of the iterative and collaborative elements that are familiar to me in open source technologies.

In trying to come up with a framing that unifies civic interventions that range from technical and non-technical approaches

  • What makes something hacking?
  • What is the different between government and governance?
  • Can we use technical metaphors to describe civic engagement and governance?

 

I’m going to be writing about these questions on this blog as I prepare for this session at the end of June.