Dioxane. Epoxybutane. Trichloroethane. Dimethylhydrazine. Want to know the risk level of carcinogenic air pollutants in your county? Check out the Social Data Player below (See the “Total” column — all risk figures are per million residents):
Recently, the EPA made this dataset publicly available. This dataset is one of more than 240,000 government datasets which are expected to come online within the next month, many of which are hosted as downloadable CSV files. Providing downloadable files is a great first step for improving government transparency; however, the process of downloading the file and analyzing it with desktop software is cumbersome for non-technical audiences and makes it difficult to share with others online.
With the Social Data Player Platform we think agencies can usher in a new era of government transparency, by engaging the largest number of citizens possible. With the Social Data Player ALL citizens with a web browser can:
Access the data directly in any website that contains the Social Data Player – there are no files to download or software to install. For dataset publishers, embedding the player is as simple as inserting a small snippet of HTML code into their site
Easily search the data, and create filters, quickly finding the toxic cancer risk in the counties important to them
Comment and rate the data, engaging in a discussion that might unlock new discoveries or questions about the data’s validity
Share the dataset, as well as their personal filters, across popular social networks like Twitter or Facebook. Unlike an offline .CSV file, the data and discussion can be shared easily online, utilizing the connectedness of social networks to reach the largest number of citizens.
Not only do non-technical citizens benefit from accessing the data in a Social Data Player, but so do more technically-inclined audiences like software developers and scientists. With a Social Data Player, the data is instantly machine-readable via the Socrata API, as well as downloadable in popular JSON and XML formats.
Content managers benefit too. With Socrata Analytics – which is included in the Social Data Player Platform — content managers can track citizen participation. Socrata Analytics makes it easy to trend dataset access and track the proliferation of datasets on 3rd party websites.
Available Now
Today we’re excited to announce the commercial availability of the Socrata Social Data Player Platform for national, state, and local governments that want to transform the way their audiences consume and share public datasets. The SDPP includes the Social Data Player, capabilities for easy dataset uploading by content managers, the Socrata Application Programming Interface (API) for providing developer access to datasets in a machine-readable format, Socrata Analytics, and Socrata’s data storage and delivery network, which lowers the cost of delivering data online. To learn more visit our site or contact us.
If you are interested in getting started now with Social Data Player Basic, simply sign up for a free Socrata.com account and upload your datatset. Socrata Social Data Player Basic is our free entry-level offering allowing you to upload data to Socrata.com and then embed a Social Data Player on your site.
It’s been a busy, hectic and very fun last 5 days here at Socrata worldwide headquarters. We’ve become Socrata the company Making Data Social and we’ve launched Socrata.com, the Social Data Network for people who love data.
Read the press release announcing the change when you have time.
Socrata has its DNA in the old blist application. In addition to focusing much more on the social side of discovering and analyzing data, the technology stack behind the site is new, which means the site is much faster and more robust and scalable. There are many new features too. I’ll elaborate on many of the features in detail in future posts, but in the interim be sure to try some of the following enhancements on Socrata.com:
Yesterday at the Washington Technology Industry Association event here in Seattle, we announced that Blist is now Socrata. We’re Making Data Social. Our new name is derived from the words “social” and “data” and we hope it evokes a certain Greek philosopher who introduced the world to a new method of inquiry called the Socratic method. Socrata is a different kind of software service not like one any of us have seen before. We’re calling it “social data discovery” which is the process of unlocking, transforming and rendering data in ways that are interactive, social and accessible to audiences previously excluded from exploring data and interacting with each other around data.
We also launched the entirely new Socrata.com site. It’s a social network for people who love data. Socrata.com is where you want to go to find public data and/or to create new datasets to share with colleagues, friends or the public. You can comment, rate and discuss public data. You can publish your own or any public dataset. Spend some time on Socrata.com and let us know what you think.
Joe works for a small R&D laboratory in Torrance, California. In order to create their clients’ luxury hair and skin care products, Joe’s team relies on a number of different manufacturers and distributors to provide personal care chemicals. Managing the contact information of over 190 geographically diverse suppliers can be cumbersome without blist. For Joe, “it is a necessity to manage accurate contact data and have the flexibility to change it on the fly.” With blist, Joe can easily access his list from multiple computers, as well as share his list with co-workers. Now his teammates are always working from the same up-to-date distributor list.
Joe also loves that he can track his suppliers without needing to manage a database server. Like many businesses operating in the current economic climate, he feels pressure to keep IT costs low:
“My company is a small business and while my background is IT, I have a number of other responsibilities leaving time at a premium. In today’s business environment equipment costs are also important. Blist, as a Software as a Service (SaaS) app frees up more of my time because I don’t have another app on the server to back up and maintain and also helps reduce IT costs because of hardware and storage requirements. I use blist for a supplier database which is a critical tool in my role.
After using blist since May 2008, I sure don’t want to go back to Excel.”
To learn more about how you can use blist for customer, supplier, or distributor contact management, click here.
Long time Microsoft executive and now head of VMWare Paul Maritz is credited with coining the expression “eating your own dogfood” as used by the software industry to describe relying on their own software before they subject customers to it. In an internal memo in 1988 he suggested that Microsoft software would in the long run be better if Microsoft employees relied on it more heavily during development.
That same spirit is embraced by blist and in fact, we have been using it for bug tracking for a long time. It’s well beyond the dogfood stage and we rely on blist to keep track of software defects discovered internally and by our users. A number of people have asked how we use blist to track bugs and so I thought I’d tell you and show you.
Bugzilla is a 10-year old open source bug tracking project from the Mozilla project. Pretty much every programmer in the world knows what bugzilla is. The naming gurus we are, we named our blist-powered bug tracking system blistzilla. Here’s a thumbnail view of what blistzilla looks like:
blist is ideally suited for use as a bug tracker. A bug tracker needs to perform 4 critical tasks:
Allow someone to record a bug
Provide a means for each bug to be assigned an owner and for the owner to find bugs assigned to him
Provide a means for the status of each bug to be updated as it is being worked
Offer some ability to analyze all bugs as a database
blist meets these needs perfectly. Bugs can be entered by any of 3 methods: a) typing directly into the blistzilla in tabular layout; b) typing directly into blistzilla in page layout; c) entering data through a page layout form widget on a foreign host page - for example on your company’s wiki.
Let’s examine the columns in blistzilla:
tags - all blists have a built-in tags column which allows you to assign arbitrary tag(s) to any row. We use tags to loosely group multiple bugs together. For example, we have a number of bugs having to do with pick lists. We’ve tagged all of these bugs “picklist redo” and now the engineer who’s polishing up that area of the application can find all of the bugs with that tag.
ID - it’s easier internally to communicate about bugs by a specific ID than by description so we assign each bug an arbitrary ID.
Type is pick list containing 4 discreet values we use for broad categorization: bug, feature, UX, infrastructure
Subject is a plain text column for a short description
Description is a rich text column for a long description. As a rich text field it supports color, bold, italics, bullet lists, etc. which provide for a nice way to write up a detailed summary of an issue.
Priority is a pick list the values of which are: Urgent, High, Normal, Low
Status is another pick list, the values of which are: New; Needs Repro; Ready; Assigned; Feedback; Resolved; Rejected; Duplicate; Will Not Fix. In that blist supports columns having default values, we default this column to “New” which saves us time when recording new bugs.
Assigned To is another pick list, this one containing the names of all of our employees
Assigned On is a date column. Hint - you can type “today” in a date column which makes it handy for entering new bugs
Top 25 is a checkbox. Sometimes the engineering team stops feature work and goes into bug fixing mode. When we do that, we’ll often try to steer the engineers towards fixing the bugs having the most impact. Top 25 is a quick way to achieve this.
Severity is another pick list: Minor Issue; Major Issue; Cosmetic; Crash; Performance
Found In Stage is a pick list which contains: Production; Test (Blocking Deployment); Test (Non-blocking); Development
Regression is a checkbox (we like to keep track of bugs we’ve fixed more than once)
User Submitted is a checkbox (we like to keep track of bugs submitted by users)
Resolved Date
Resolved By is the same pick list containing the names of our employees that we used for Assigned To above (blist allows you to re-use pick lists)
Created Date
Author is the same pick list of employee names
Notes is a rich text column
Master Backlog Xref is a column that allows us to link a back to a major work item on our master backlog. I’ll tell you about our master backlog in another post soon.
Attachments is a blist-in-a-blist containing 2 sub-columns: Description (text) and Attachment (document). This structure allows us to store an unlimited number of attachments per bug. Attachments could be screen shots or crash dumps. Here’s an example:
Each color band is a separate bug - there are 3 bugs in the screenshot above. The first bug has two attachments - a screenshot (PNG) and a video (Flash movie). The second bug has no attachment. The third bug has a single attachment - a JPG which is presumably a screenshot.
As you can see our blistzilla bug tracker is fairly comprehensive.
One of the most powerful and useful features of blist is its provision for creating and using lenses - saved filtered views of your data. We have more than 100 lenses in blistzilla:
In the screenshot above you can see a few of the lenses we use in blistzilla. High Priority Bugs. Low Bugs. Infrastructure Tasks. Last 100. By simply selecting a lens from the drop down menu, the criteria and layout stored in the lens is dynamically applied to the data in the blist. Loading the “Last 100″ lens will show different results today than when I ran it yesterday.
We like using blist for our bug tracking. One of the questions I’m asked from time to time is why we don’t use one of the commercial or open source bug tracking systems instead. The answer is simple. Because we have full control to create whatever columns we want, by using blist we can mold our bug tracking system to match our real world processes instead of the other way around. With every other bug tracking system, you have to conform to the fields and layout that the creators of the software thought you need, which usually means you’ll need to adjust your processes to fit the software. With blist, you’re in control. You decide what to track and the result is an application that matches your business process instead of the other way around.
Real-time collaboration brings the experience of working together with lists and data to the next level. As you collaborate with others you’ll now see instant updates to shared lists, team projects, sales lead trackers, and customer relationship blists.
blist now makes collaboration even easier.
• Group Editing Keeps Everyone in Sync — As multiple people work on the same blist, changes are reflected to every team member as they occur. Also, blist clearly indicates when a row is being edited, supporting team cooperation.
• Team Member Presence and Connections –- When working together, team members know who is present in a blist. Now individuals can make connections with people in their organization – people who they may have never met before – because of a shared project.
• Email Notifications — With a click of a link, team members are instantly emailed about blist updates. There are no files to share and no emails to send – blist makes notifications a natural step in team workflow.
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a story today which includes a terrific US map visually showing the density of investors who have been bilked by Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme.
And while that’s an awesome graphic, which tells a great story, the data table they use to list the victims leaves much to be desired. At least you can sort the data, but how about giving readers the ability to search, filter, email, print and even republish it? Something like this is what I have in mind:
What do you think? Doesn’t that blist widget make it easier to work with the data?
What’s more, the Wall Street Journal story links to the full data set. That’s really great. I love the transparency. But it’s a 162-page PDF document. That’s even harder to work with than an HTML table. How about loading up the entire data set into blist and letting people play with it to their hearts content? That’s what we did. Here’s the full blist of investors bilked by Bernard Madoff:
Dave is the Executive Director for a state Continuing Legal Education (CLE) agency that falls under the direction of the state Supreme Court. Dave is also an author and leads a group of professionals throughout the United States who develop educational materials for lawyers in the field of Psychology.
Dave’s state agency uses Microsoft SQL Server and Access for storing information, but for his Psychology group he chose to use blist to share similar information and collaborate on similar projects. For Dave, the point of moving information off people’s desktops and centralizing it in a database is to enable and organize collaboration between colleagues, not merely to keep it in a database.
For Dave’s Psychology group - a far-flung distributed team - blist’s simplicity of use, and lack of installation and maintenance overhead far outweighed the additional power that a more traditional, heavyweight database could provide - and offered a solution much better matched to his group’s projects.
Team members share lists of primary academic literature and work together to synthesize the findings into applicable lessons and CLE course material for lawyers. Their blist use is three-fold: sharing resources in a document library blist, managing the related project work in a project management blist, and finally coordinating their customer communication with educational groups in a CRM blist. A flexible solution like blist that handles each primary aspect of the business within a single application leads to much more streamlined collaboration compared to an a la carte selection of three different apps from different vendors.
Dave is fairly comfortable with databases, and while blist today offers specialized relational features like pick lists and blist-in-a-blists, Dave describes blist as ‘a great flat-file database’ - and this exactly fits his needs.
Dave is looking forward to being able to mail merge and send email campaigns from within blist. Looking forward to potential future use of blist within his government agency, Dave described the need for various 3rd-party government compliance applications to be able to connect to blist via our forthcoming API for required audits.
If you work with a distributed team or group - either professionally or informally, try blist for free.
Cindy is an attorney who brought blist into her law firm for a mission critical and time-sensitive transition period after learning about blist from her husband who follows new web technologies.
Cindy and her colleagues describe blist as having ‘revolutionized the way our law firm functions’ and ‘opened so many people’s eyes to collaborative software.’ Cindy told me that it took only 5 minutes of teaching a paralegal in her mid-sixties to use blist to turn the paralegal from a skeptic into a firm-wide evangelist for blist.
Here is Cindy describing the way her firm is using blist in her own words:
“Our law firm is splitting, with two groups of attorneys going off to form a total of two new firms, so we are (1) having to figure out how to separate assets, IT infrastructure, library collections, physical space, etc. and (2) building a new firm from the ground up. My “new” firm has taken on these projects as a collaborative effort among the 22 employees of what will be the new firm, so blist has been absolutely wonderful for us since we have to coordinate 22 people, all serving on several teams each, on a multitude of tasks.
We still have a few who aren’t totally comfortable with blist and are wanting us to export blists into Excel frequently for them to work off of, but I think they’ll come around.
I started using blist to track our firm’s extensive library collection, which is currently kept in an collection of Excel spreadsheets and word documents (with tables!). We’re using blist to record the current library inventory, as well as keep track of library expenditures on a going-forward basis. It is proving to be an amazingly powerful tool for our library.
I’m pretty sure it’s going to make a job that previously took 2 full time people into a job that one legal assistant can do in her spare time. The way we have set it up (sorting by title, publisher, area of law, date, type of publication), it almost works like an online card catalogue for our library. Under the old system, if you wanted to find a publication, you had to look through the myriad of spreadsheets, which were kept in a three ring binder in someone’s office. Needless to say, blist is a huge improvement on that.
I am also using it to track business development and marketing events for the new firm. I haven’t done much with that blist yet, but I will.”
If someone that you know works at a law firm, encourage them to try blist - blist is free - by creating an account.
Joe works for a small R&D laboratory in Torrance, California. In order to create their clients’ luxury hair and skin care products, Joe’s team relies on a number of different manufacturers and distributors to provide personal care chemicals. Managing the contact information of over 190 geographically diverse suppliers can be cumbersome without blist. For Joe, “it is a necessity to manage accurate contact data and have the flexibility to change it on the fly.” With blist, Joe can easily access his list from multiple computers, as well as share his list with co-workers. Now his teammates are always working from the same up-to-date distributor list.
Blist is honored to be a finalist of the Productivity category in the 2009 Webware 100 Awards.
