Around the world, government agencies constantly collect and process quantitative information about all areas of our lives, including economic development, education, public health, and the environment. The results of these massive state-run data gathering efforts are usually called official statistics – and they are a public good.
Official statistics are important tools, for political decision-makers as well as for academia and the general public. Politicians, scientists, journalists, businesses, and NGOs rely on objective and publicly available statistics. Very often, however, the dissemination of official statistics is not aimed at the general public. As a result, they are neither easy to access nor easy to use.
In this lightning talk, I will present results from Datenguide (datengui.de), a research and development project into alternative ways of presenting official statistics, informed by data journalism and user-centered design. With Datenguide, we developed an experimental open source data portal that aims at making official statistics more accessible to the general public by visualizing, contextualizing, and explaining data sets, and by providing publicly available, easy to use APIs for accessing data sets via external software.
Datenguide (working title: Datenland) was funded through a grant from the Prototype Fund, a funding program by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).