What’s the big idea!?
The google colab notebooks and three nonprofit-related streamlit apps using data about nonprofits came from the same basic impetus: to learn more about local community. It started as an amusing exercise to explore data science tools around a theme that interests me. I now see it as a proof of concept for an idea where lots of information about a local area could be presented in easily navigable collections of visualizations and maps. It could be a launching pad to other data sources, like Census Reporter, Google Data Commons, Wikidata, Wikipedia, dbPedia and much more.
It seems possible to integrate government, demographics, land/property databases, private sector activity, and whatever other ways that humans connect and organize in a community.
How could it be useful?
As someone who has been involved in community projects, I have looked for tools to help with variety of tasks:
- Identify community needs, unserved populations, existing resources, and possible gaps
- Enable collaboration and relationship building. Find organizations and people who have a common interest. Especially for areas with limited resources, finding practical and creative collaboration can be more important than money.
- Grant-writing. Finding facts to document a need.
- Identify local government resources, initiatives, and elected representatives to help.
- Find a place to volunteer that matches interests
- Simply be more informed about community
Roadmap
For now, it’s just a drafty pile of “scripts,” data processing, and api calls. Nothing fancy. Streamlit is a great tool to prototype an idea. Google Colab can churn through the data pipeline.
Eventually, it could evolve into a proper application, but I don’t have an opinion yet on what that would be. React, Flask?
Here’s design goals:
- Modular. Framework that allows new “layers” or datasets or modules to be easily integrated.
- Leverage existing resources.
- I ended up processing IRS Tax Returns because there were variety of issues that prevented using existing datasets. It would be better to contribute to those projects and then use the dataset in this app.
- There’s no reason to code a graph on demographics of a census block if Census Reporter has already done a great job of it.
- Guide User to other relevant resources and awesome projects
- Explore relationships between disparate datasets.
- instead of seeing a table of demographic data on one screen, then a map on another, it would be ideal to enable layering and linking, so user can “explore.”
- Technically, this likely means defining components like people, organizations, geography and using IDs to make the connections between modules. eg. EIN for organizations and census codes for geography.
- Ability to navigate or explore information space in many different ways. Try novel user interface ideas.
- Ability to easily reload data with selected local area. Dynamically collect data from many sources.
If you’re interested, please don’t hesitate to contact me and fiddle with the code.