Sunlight Foundation

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.).