Tag Archives: data visualization

One of our customers, the Tides Foundation, recently partnered with Rhiza to analyze the impact of its grantmaking activities. Irene Kao, Project Manager for the Impact and Innovation Department at Tides talks about her experience of using Rhiza Upshot to bring their data to life to tell a continuous story that is meaningful, dynamic, and actionable in a recent blog post on NTEN’s Non-Profit Technology Blog.

Below is a map created by Irene using Rhiza Upshot that looks at the location of the education grants awarded by Tides in 2010 alongside contextual data about the areas of the country where the education needs are the greatest. Irene looked at indicators like per pupil public school funding, reading proficiency, and high school graduation rates. The result was an easy to understand visual framework that can be used to facilitate new conversations about education funding decisions going forward.

In the NTEN blog Irene says “The map, then, becomes the beginning of a story that continues with partner discussions around strategy and what the work looks like in a year, in two years, and onward. By harnessing quantitative data, our community begins a kind of qualitative “choose-your-own-adventure” story – one that empowers people to make decisions based on firmly anchored information and desired impact.”

For a closer look at how Tides is measuring impact, read Irene’s blog post on NTEN’s Non-Profit Technology Blog.

Whenever I picture the American West as it was at the turn of the 20th century I always picture wee homesteads, rocky country, trucks with curved fenders, and big herds of wild horses. After watching the Misfits, starring Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, I assumed that every last feral horse in the west had been rounded up long ago and shipped off to dark ends.

However, to my surprise, I learned this week that feral horses are a protected animal population in the United States. They have safe haven in many western states and are allowed to live unfettered. In Nevada (the setting of the above mentioned film) there are over 16,000.

There are also populations of wild donkeys roaming the empty spaces of the American West, which, unlike the horses, I knew about first hand. I met a small heard of them in the cascade mountains once when I was a little girl. They could smell a sucker from a mile away and would wait outside of our cabin until I would come out with a bag of carrots. They’re shaggy, friendly beasts and always happy to trade a pat on the nose for fresh produce.

They aren’t as numerous as wild horses and don’t have the same protections, but they still manage to get by on their charm. Yes, there is such a thing as burro charm.

The FluTracker map makes it easy to determine where clusters of swine flu are in relation to homes, businesses, and facilities. But what about flu information not tied to location, like the average number of new swine flu cases per day, the total growth in cases since the beginning of the epidemic, and the increase in reports of fatal cases„

To support decision-making with even more complete information about swine flu trends, users can now view FluTracker data as charts. Visit FluTracker now to see the latest information.

6:30PM @ NEW HAZLETT THEATER, PGH > CLICK TO RSVP

How does YOUR environment impact YOUR health„ What is more important – the products you use every day, or the effects of your outdoor surroundings„

We’ll review a typical day of two of our favorite citizens and 1. unveil the kinds of things they are exposed to every day – in their daily habits, their home and their neighborhood, 2. learn about the impact our world has on US, and 3. give suggestions for changes you can make that will impact YOUR health.

Panelists are Jane Houlihan, from the Environmental Working Group, and Amanda Parks, co-owner of Equita. Our case studies are Justin Strong, co-founder of the Shadow Lounge + AVA, and Heather Arnet, executive director of the Women and Girls Foundation. Our moderator is Josh Knauer of Rhiza Labs.

Cocktails and conversation to follow. Join us! For press information call 412-434-7080.

Josh Knauer, CEO of Rhiza Labs, will deliver the keynote address to attending GIS professionals, scholars, nonprofit and government staff at the 2009 Pennsylvania GIS Conference on May 19. His presentation will use the Information Commons to explain how social entrepreneurship in the geospatial community can stimulate new and useful thinking about data sharing.

The conference, an outreach service of the Center for Geospatial Information Services and the Institute for State and Regional Affairs at Penn State Harrisburg, runs May 19 and 20 at the Holiday Inn Hotel and Conference Center in Grantville, PA.

Visit the Pennsylvania GIS Conference page to register and reserve a room at the conference rate.

Some more cool tools:

• BusinessWeek has launched Business Exchange, a user-filtered news aggregator separated into professional interest topics. (My personal favorite – the urban planning feed.)
• NYCGo has collected myriad New York City travel brochures into one interactive map so popular that heavy traffic crashed the site soon after it went live. [via New York Times City Room]
• “Some map makers have found a way to draw people to their detail-oriented field: have a party. It involves replacing beer — at least for part of a day — with a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit to build on OpenStreetMap, a project that uses volunteers to map the world.” [via PCWorld]
• Mapof.it creates short, human-readable URLs for several mapping sites. [via LifeHacker]

After January’s airplane miracle on the Hudson, divers charged with retrieving the craft demonstrated a good reason for public agencies to maintain comprehensive, current public data — even if their immediate utility is not apparent:

The divers who located the engine at the bottom of the Hudson River could see only a few inches in front of their masks, but they were not, in a manner of speaking, on unfamiliar ground.
The floor of the Hudson, from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to Troy, N.Y., has been mapped in recent years by scientists who used sonar to scan every square foot of river deeper than six feet.

Mapping commonly shared assets of the natural and built environment positions communities to respond to the unexpected. Government agencies should maintain detailed geospatial data, even when their justification seems rather far fetched — you never know when a jet airliner will land in the Hudson River between Midtown and Jersey. Read more »

Obviously, Rhiza Labs makes the coolest participatory Web tools around. And, there’s a lot of creativity in the web world. We’re particularly impressed with:

• The National Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) Visions for Transforming America, an interactive map showing older neighborhoods that are ripe for revitalization, those neighborhoods’ metropolitan contexts, and slideshows illustrating paths to reinvestment. [via Rooflines]
• LiveMocha combines social networking with web-based software that helps users learn foreign languages within an online learning community.
• “The Printed Blog, a Chicago start-up, plans to reprint blog posts on regular paper, supplement with local ads and distribute it free in big cities.” [via New York Times]
• 99Problems.org, a project of the League of Young Voters Education Fund, is soliciting reader contributions to generate one blog entry per day documenting issues the Obama administration should tackle sooner than later.

Check these out to see a few more ways that social media is changing the way we plan, learn, communicate and do business — and stay tuned for future round-ups.

Mapping, at its best, promotes insight and facilitates data-driven decision-making; at its worst, it generates gee-whiz infotainment. The Boston Globe reports:

Maps have increasingly become vehicles not just for telling us how the world looks, but for organizing and representing all sorts of information … The past year saw an explosion of such maps, portraying everything from earthquake devastation to voting patterns to international reading habits – often made on the fly, by citizens, in response to events … if you want to understand what happened in 2008, they are an excellent way to navigate the year.

Read more »

Rhiza Labs Launches Community Insight at Where 2.0, Bringing Online Collaborative GIS Tools to the Public Sector

BURLINGAME, CALIF. and PITTSBURGH, PA. — Rhiza Labs launches Community Insight, a web-based platform for mapping and analyzing multiple datasets that are shared by users with a common interest. Rated as one of the best of the dozen apps previewed on May 12th at Where 2.0, CNET’s Rafe Needleman called it “a very useful tool for any organization trying to make sense of its map-based data.”

Community Insight users range from organizations creating websites for the conservation science field to policymakers using Community Insight to better understand where social service needs and resources intersect. Read more »