Data

Albany County: Working Hard to Make it Harder for the Public to Understand its Budget

November 3, 2012 Budget

The past several years, Albany County made its tentative (proposed) budget available online, not only in a readable format (PDF), but in a format (Excel) that the public and occasional legislators could actually do calculations with. No more. When the County Executive’s Tentative Budget was released last month, the PDF documents were posted online, but […]

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No. Intentional Ignorance Does Not Improve Public Policy. Or Politics. Or Business.

May 30, 2012 Census

Earlier this month the House of Representatives voted to eliminate funding for the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS). Lest you think that my objection is nothing more than my geeky self looking for more data to bathe in, here are a couple of examples of how these data are used: Distributing $400 billion in […]

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Oh, Maybe You Can Have That Revenue After All … For Now

May 16, 2012 Budget

For the past couple years, Albany County Legislators have been talking about keeping a much larger share of sales tax revenue for their own purposes and reducing the share passed on to cities, towns and villages. Many of those Legislators have such a proprietary sense of it that they call it “our money,” as if […]

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Evidently, Some Believe That Ignorance is Better

May 10, 2012 Census

It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out where we’ll come down in this fight. With a tagline, “use the damn data,” one should probably assume that we think it’s not only important, it’s essential that we collect valid, reliable data. And it shouldn’t be a surprise that we believe that for social and economic […]

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Happiness is a Positive Cash Flow. What’s the Cost of Ignorance?

April 23, 2012 Cash

Unhappiness is a negative cash flow. Even worse is not knowing what your cash position is. For the past year, I’ve been submitting Freedom of Information (FOIL) requests to Albany County, getting their cash position each week. I’ve been using the data to prototype some displays of public data. It’s not cash flow, but rather […]

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Knight Foundation Awards

June 23, 2011 Data

The Knight Foundation announced 16 winners of its news challenge. Interesting theme that emerged was the the “rise of the hacker/data journalist.” Several of the winners had or were developing technological tools. There were also a couple emphasizing governmental data.

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