Public data for the people
In the age of data, corporations from Amazon to Zillow rely on large data sets to build more effective products. At the same time, civic institutions like cities, transit authorities, and national governments are releasing more and more data in machine-readable formats. But how can they make that data accessible and useful to someone who can’t tell an API from an IPA?
In this talk, I’ll discuss my work with the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on a site that tried to make a tremendous data set – public information about US home mortgage applications – easy to access and use for people at all levels of data sophistication. Our team had to consider three distinct audiences with widely divergent needs: expert technologists, researchers and advocates deeply familiar with a particular subject area, and the general public. If the general user isn’t given the right sort of assistance, she may never engage more deeply — but the CFPB’s mission includes educating the American consumer. We needed to make it tantalizing for users to dig deeper, but also provide enough on a surface level that no one would go away confused or dissatisfied. We also needed to make it simple for researchers and community groups to access more complex data sets in ways that would be useful for their work.
This talk will address some of the challenges we faced, and some of the mistakes we made along the way, but also some of the unexpected successes as well. I hope it will excite you about the possibilities for civic design as public data becomes an integral design material, and perhaps inspire you to think about data in new ways.
