Data4Democracy
Figre out additional information we want to collect
We're making good progress accumulating crime data, but that's only a small part of the story of the United States. Some additional items to consider:
- employment (https://www.bls.gov/web/metro/laummtrk.htm)
- patent applications
- social trust (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/13/americans-divided-on-how-much-they-trust-their-neighbors/ )
Please add suggestions, additional things to track and we can create a complete list. Then, we can update the readme.md to include everything and create some more issues to handle grabbing the info.
Other things that have been brought up:
- Housing/rent prices
- Poverty rate
- Health insurance coverage, or some other sort of health metric
- Some education metric - proportion of children enrolled in school?
Ideas from an economy standpoint:
- GDP Tracking (maybe filter to specific industries)
- American Stock Market Indices
- USD Value compared to other currencies
- Import/Export Balance
I do think jobs is probably the right next step. The BLS data poses a challenge because it's monthly and we'd like to give more regular updates. So I want to focus on now-casting the numbers, which is a good statistical modeling project.
The "social trust" one is great and I think opens the discussion for survey-based metrics. We should see if we can recruit someone who has survey expertise. I have experience running surveys, and we'll have to pursue a funding model for survey recruitment, but I think that's something we could drum up.
- Love the idea to have imports/exports in there.
- Patents applications is a great idea, too. I have a friend who worked in the USPTO, I'll ask him if the application data is public.
- Stock prices I'm skeptical of us adding much value there, unless we figure out a novel industry breakdown.
- Agriculture Production/Subsidies
- Fisheries Landings
- Reservoir(Dam) construction/removal
