Bar graphs?

[stvnrlly]

Somebody suggested that clicking on one of the stats could show that line of stats as a bar graph. I think this could be a good feature, especially for stats where the top or bottom ANCs are vastly different than the others.

I spent a few minutes looking at ways to do this in Javascript, but it seems like that's probably overly complicating things. This would happen in views.py, if we wanted to do it, right?

[JoshData]

Not sure a bar graph is a good way to show this. (40 skinny bars?) But yeah something along those lines would be an improvement.

There's some style, which isn't usually effective but maybe we'd be the first, is to have it laid out kind of like we have it (but with actual axes) and with lines connecting each ANC from its position on each row to the next. You might be able to see that some ANCs tend to group at one end of the stats or another. Assuming the stats are all positively correlated.

Or maybe we just put horizontal axes & numeric labels through each row the way we have it now.

[stvnrlly]

On a non-mobile screen, bars seem like they'd be okay. I think I understand the connection-visualization idea, and it sounds interesting. Both options might tell a good story.

[mcwhittemore]

On a side note, it might be interesting to let users search for ANCs via these stats. A Kayak for ANCs so to speak.

[stvnrlly]

How do you see that working? Is it something like "Show all ANCs with more than X and/or less than Y residents"?

[mcwhittemore]

Yea. I'm thinking a left panel with a bunch of min/max sliders and than a filter process that hides/shows map overlays for each ANC.

[mcwhittemore]

How are we getting all these stats?

Is having them on the anc page the right place? The stats are interesting, but I'm not sure how they help me get involved with my anc?

I guess I can see a reason for no-insight stats on a DC wide ANC stats page (which is sort of what I was trying to get at with the search feature above) but maybe the general problem with the stats tab is that knowing your ANC made 247 311 requests doesn't really tell you anything. Sure I can note that that is a lot of 311 calls and guess that my ANC is going through gentrification, but if thats what I'm supposed to get from that stat its not very clear.

Any other thoughts on the purpose of this tab and how it can help people get involved?

[stvnrlly]

The idea is that the stats can give you an idea of what the ANC is like and what issues it may face, since there's no real correlation between ANCs and the neighborhoods with which people are more familiar. Most of the stats are put together through the Census API, but liquor licenses, building permits, and 311 requests are pulled from DC sources. The Census one happens in update_anc_database.py, but the rest have their own scripts in the scripts folder that you can check out.

I agree that the 311 request information is not currently very useful, which is because I didn't spend the time to make it useful. The 311 data actually includes the specifics of the request made, so we could find useful categories and present them. The issue is that the categories are sometimes written differently, and I didn't spend the time to go through and see if this is an easy or hard issue. The API also includes when a request is resolved, and how it is resolved, so we could consider showing which ANCs get more prompt attention from DC or something like that.

Finally, in terms of exploring DC through ANC data, we had considered doing something like that with our big map (I think we were going to show ANC data on mouseover). If you're still interested in a Kayak for ANCs, that could be a good place to implement that.

[mcwhittemore]

Yea. I like the idea of the stats. I like stats :). I'm just trying to think about how to help people make sense of them. I'll take a look at the 311, liquor and building data before the next meetup and try to think of what we could do with it.

Can we note which neighborhoods are in which ANC?

Just noting my to dos.

• [ ] review 311 data
• [ ] review liquor data
• [ ] review building data

[stvnrlly]

Cool. We do note the neighborhoods. It's the Overview section on the ANC's page, though I'm open to better ways of displaying that information.