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The Toronto Star has published a interactive feature based on 400,000 rows of data about work orders at the Toronto District School Board.
You be the detective.
Today, the Toronto Star launches School Work, a project that allows readers — parents, teachers, students and others — to look at how money is being spent in Toronto’s aging public schools. Find your school at School Work. Tell us if you think too much is being spent on some jobs. Tell us what jobs need doing to make your school a better, safer learning environment.
Remember the $143 pencil sharpener installation? That’s where the idea came from.
Unlike some other data-driven Star features, this one seems to not offer the raw data for download.
Still, there's an explanation of their process and rationale...
Making the data accessible to our readers
We decided very soon after getting the data that we were going to open it up to our readership for shared scrutiny. The lab developers put the data into a database with a flexible data schema. The design and interaction team sketched out what different groups within our readership (parents with kids in school, teachers, principals, facilities contractors, data experts) would want from the data. We wrote up ‘story-boards’ that played out how different readers might navigate and flag data. The key to making a 400,000 item data set accessible, we decided, was the creation of school pages, and grouping the cost items by category (gym, cafeteria, fire alarm inspections, mulch) and by job trade (carpenter, electrician).
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