Working with criminal justice information has led to new challenges for Sunlight developers. Using a tool called Elasticsearch, we're cutting through the newfound jargon to produce a useful criminal justice database.
Continue readingFederal open data audit: Defense downright dismal, Interior immense yet imperfect
As we audit the public data catalogs of federal agencies, we found a wide variety in quantity and quality of data. Here, we look at the departments of Defense and the Interior.
Continue readingSunlight’s review of federal open data catalogs (Hint: It’s not so great)
We at Sunlight are conducting a broad audit of agencies' sometimes-faithful attempts to comply with President Obama's open data executive order. Our findings so far are good, bad and perplexing.
Continue readingAnonymization and microdata: Can we open up granular info without invading privacy?
We’re taking a closer look at a number of important questions associated with use of microdata — the individual-level data we understand to offer both enormous potential benefit and potential risk.
Continue readingIntroducing Lapidus, an Analytics Dashboard
Lapidus is an Analytics Dashboard we developed in response to our desire to track metrics for all of our projects, whether they are web sites, APIs, mobile apps, etc. Sunlight has multiple projects that target different audiences and have different uses, but it is important for us to understand how all of these projects are used. Beyond that, we wanted to improve how we compared metrics across our projects -- while keeping in mind that not every possible comparison makes sense. With Lapidus we can view metrics across all of our projects in a single view, and when viewing aggregates across date ranges, Lapidus automatically color-codes certain metrics based on whether they increased or decreased from the previous period. Lapidus does not replace Google Analytics -- in fact it relies on GA for web metrics data -- but it does extend our ability to record and view additional metrics of our choosing.
This project was started by Jeremy Carbaugh (who named the project after a character from 'Lost'), who laid out the initial models for the metrics app with an eye toward flexibility. Ali Felski provided the design which also inspired some of the better features of the site (color-coding, sorting, etc.).
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