Civic Knowledge

The Challenge

As part of it’s “Free The Data” program, the California Health Care Foundation sponsors projects to make health data more available, including the HealthData+ project, which gives county health departments a platform for telling data-based stories. Although a commercial tool, LiveStories, could handle the story telling component, the system still required dataset that were specific to the wide range of stories its users would write.

The Solution

The California Health Care Foundation hired Civic Knowledge for both its data wrangling services, but also for its expertise in locating the best datasets for any story. Over the course of the 2 year project, we provided hundreds of indicators for the HealthData+ library

The Challenge

While more data is available than ever before, it is still difficult to use, and journalists have a particularly difficult time finding data to support stories within their time and cost constraints. The California Health Care Foundation asked us for ideas about making health data more widely available and useful to journalists.

The Solution

The Health Reporter project studied how journalists use data and explored two ideas for making data more useful and available. The first is a user interface model for exploring large collections of data quickly and efficiently, and the second is a data packaging system to reduce the cost of maintaining data repositories. Both of these ideas are discussed in the project final report.