Telling Simple (and Complex!) Stories with Open Data : Forum One

"Over the last six months, the California Health and Human Services (CHHS) Open Data Portal, which launched with 64 datasets and related visualizations, has grown in size, extending the possibilities of its usage and the powerful stories that can be told about CHHS services. The purpose of the Portal is to 'spark innovation, promote research and economic opportunities, engage public participation in government, increase transparency, and inform decision-making' through the ability find and download datasets on the Socrata web platform. Socrata also provides a number of visualization tools that can be used directly on the portal, or syndicated to other sites (such as this blog). Here, for example, is the baby data names visualization, which is popular online ..."