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Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

This would be really powerful if it provided access to the original data sources.

Imagine if you could analyze the results of public policy, with clean and detailed data, independently curated, without political or bureaucratic distortions.

The US has 3,000 counties and 20,000 towns and cities, each one a petri dish of experiments in governance. Imagine what we could learn!

From the NYT [1]:

  Want to know how many police officers are employed in various
  parts of the country and compare that against crime rates?

  Want to know how much revenue is brought in from parking tickets
  and the cost to collect?

  Want to know what percentage of Americans suffer from diagnosed
  depression and how much the government spends on it?

  That’s in there. You can slice the numbers in all sorts of ways.

Unfortunately, I'm not seeing source data on the site. There are high-level charts and PDF reports so far.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/business/dealbook/steve-b...

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If you drill down to any individual metric, e.g. http://usafacts.org/metrics/12892 it says "Sources for this data are coming soon" & "Download coming soon". Give them some time, they just launched.

thats pretty important... The entire point of this thing is to be transparent.

Thats the creator's presentation of the purpose of it.

Snarky? yes, but an important distinction. A truly objective point of view doesn't exist as far as we know.

Well it is, but I wasn't planning on taking their numbers and running with them today, so I think its okay if their MVP is "here's some numbers, we'll tell you how we got them next week".

All that level of detail is necessary to make things actionable, but if they're gathering data no one cares about---that's pretty important, and you can't know that before launch.

Considering that this site isn't really involved with any of the organizations providing the data, it's not really "transparent" in the sense that it should be. Even if they provide the data for download, there's no way to verify that it hasn't been tampered or transformed since its initial collection. They would need to link to the actual sources directly and I don't think that's going to happen.

Given that I'm just now writing a professional development series for using R in the classroom, these data sources would be really useful. Having a broad source of things we could analyze would be rad.

Whimsical suggestion

https://www.ons.gov.uk/

Use some examples from the above for the class presentations, then homework is to replicate with US data.

PS: if you decide to publish your presentations/course materials freely, do post the location to HN

This is exactly the kind of frustration I feel almost all the time when I see some nice data visualizations on the internet! And that's why I began working on https://thegamma.net. Now I just need to convince Mr. Ballmer to use it...

Government Finance data can be downloaded here: http://willamette.edu/mba/research_impact/public_datasets/in...

>Imagine if you could analyze the results of public policy, with clean and detailed data, independently curated, without political or bureaucratic distortions.

I would not be so sure. There's no such thing as a point of view from nowhere.

Bias can influence the collection and computation of data just as easily as it can influence its presentation and framing. The old saying is "never trust a statistic you haven't faked yourself."

In some ways, presenting as neutral means that neither group is going to trust you. I'm not sure if it actually accomplishes anything.

https://app.enigma.io/search

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