On Wednesday, the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning & Economic Development (DMPED) launched a new, open-source Economic Intelligence Dashboard.
Built on GitHub, the dashboard takes economic data — think population, income, affordable housing, etc. — and compiles it into simple Tableau graphs. Essentially it’s a version of a similar internal dashboard used by the office, but without any data that’s not already public.
The dashboard “is a continued effort of the Bowser Administration’s goal to use data to respond to residents’ needs and improve the District,” Joaquin McPeek, spokesman for Mayor Muriel Bowser, told Technical.ly in an email.
Who’s the audience for this one-stop-shop of economic data?
In a conversation with Technical.ly, Andrew Trueblood, who spearheaded the project, mentioned business people, community leaders, residents and civic hackers. Imagine that you’re thinking of starting a business in D.C., are looking for some basic information on things like population, employment and income, but have no idea where to find this data. Now you do — and you can see it all within a matter of clicks.
Civic hackers are another really important audience, though. Trueblood said DMPED definitely wants to connect with the civic hacking community in order to improve and develop the dashboard.
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