Track on successful surival check, DC10

Transparency & accountability through technology: Track the money gives US citizens a report on the $787 billion "Economic Recovery" stimulus spending program. It faces the challenge of bringing the huge amounts of data centrally, in order to answer questions such as "Where is the money is going?", "How is it being spent?" & "How many jobs it has created?" etc.

Still, even if all the data is out there, would people be able to make sense of it?

"I want you to say it with you, with meaning, brother!"

To help visualize all these, several tools are made available on the site. Example: this view for the global breakdown of funding utilizes simple bars and charts to convey the scale of distribution for each of the 3 funding categories, and their various programs, all in relation. No chart junk. Also, these views make use of interactive components, such as rollovers, which help layer the information, and reduce the initial complexity of each data set, like Tufte suggests.

Lights-On map, Edward Tufte

Speaking of Tufte, the Lights-on map, which was designed by him, gives viewers an overall sense of the project's coverage over time. It overlays fund recipient information with geographical data, and shows the distribution over a period from February 17, 2009 to December 31, 2010, by having nodes appear gradually on a map, with a graph on the side plotting the total amount spent over this time. Really neat.

.. and because of the open nature of this project, maps like the above can be created by any developer, an aspect which I find really interesting! The Recovery API is made open to public, and allows all these data to be queried by custom applications. This allows writers, programmers & artists to craft out stories and tools to help make further sense of all these data, in a journalistic format.

Check: http://www.propublica.org/tools for more stories and apps!