APDU board member Elizabeth Nash discusses her conference session, ?Innovative Approaches to Understanding Our Most Pressing Public Policy Issues: Lessons in Education and Opportunity?, in this blog post. The panel explored the use of public data in policy topics such as the opioid epidemic, homelessness and education and opportunity disparities.
Many people enjoy seeing a visual interpretation of the data, and this is where data visualization comes into play. Data visualization involves presenting the data in a graphical format, including using charts, graphs, tables and more. These are some of the more effective data visualization tools that your company could be used to maximize the benefit of data collection and analysis.
On September 8, GSA held a workshop titled ?Emerging Technology and Open Data for a More Accountable, Open Government? to solicit ideas from government, industry, and civil society leaders about how artificial intelligence, blockchain, and open data could make government more effective, more accountable, and more transparent. The goal of the workshop was to crowdsource ideas for the fourth U.S. National Action Plan for Open Government?the biennial commitments the United States makes to the Open Government Partnership, an initiative in which 75 national and 15 subnational governments have pledged to ?promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.?
Across government there may be just about as many definitions of data as there are people. Sometimes even data specialists seem confused as to what we mean when we say ?data?. This diffuse definition is a particular problem because not everybody understands how data contributes to knowledge and evidence.
Federal Student Aid released seven new reports to highlight the characteristics of Federal Student Aid customers. The new reports were posted to the FSA Data Center, the centralized online source for Federal Student Aid data, along with a series of updates to the quarterly application, disbursement, and portfolio reports to include data through June 30, 2017. Updates were also made to the report that provides self-reported information from Title IV schools about their cash management contracts.
Research for Action, with generous funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has studied the use of “multiple measures” for student placement over the last two years. Through a national policy scan and resulting typology, a summary of evidence on student outcomes, institutional profiles, lessons learned from the field, and questions to consider, RFA has created an interactive toolkit designed as a resource for postsecondary policymakers and practitioners exploring multiple measures reform.
Visualization of the Week
100 Data Stories A small visual exploration of the episodes and guests of the Data Stories podcast by Christian Laesser. You find the podcast of Enrico Bertini and Moritz Stefaner at datastori.es. You can make your own dataviz with their dataset. Enjoy.
Did you work on a great report that you want your colleagues to know about? Just email us and we?ll include it here.
Federal Rulemaking and Calls for Comment
APDU maintains a list of open calls for comment on proposed federal data collections. We periodically alert APDU members to newly added calls for comment. Over the last several weeks, calls for comment on the following proposed data collections were published in the Federal Register (with due date):
National Agricultural Statistics Service, USDA
Wine Grape Inventory Surveys (November 21, 2017)
September 28, 2017
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