Promoting government transparency and civic awareness through insights into public data.
Data
Modern life is awash with data. Phones and other devices produce data nonstop. Goverments are increasingly releasing open data.
Insight
Data must be gathered and organized to provide insight. Government transparency and responsible civic participation require some way to make sense of data.
Analytics
The analytics techniques of data science provide a systematic method to find trends in data and to make semantic connections through mathematical models and statistical patterns.
Journalism
Modern journalism empowers citizens to make informed, personal conclusions by providing them interactive, analytical access to the source data.
In today's world we are inundated with data. Hardly a second goes by before a new post appears on our social media feeds, or we dash off a reply on our favorite instant messaging app. “News” seems to appear on our smart device almost before it happens. As a society we have never been more connected.
Yet being connected does not always leave us more informed. Putting aside for the moment the ongoing uproar over “fake news”, even information that is reliable is not necessarily understandable. As data hits us from all sides, sometimes we see so many trees that we learn little about the forest.
Statistics have been with us for decades, but the application of analytics through computer systems brings new possibilies for in keeping track of what it all means. The new field of data science takes the techniques and tools of the statistician and combines them with software to find method in the mad onslaught of words and numbers.
As local, state, and federal governments increasingly produce open data in publically accessible formats, data science provides an unprecedented opportunity for government transparency. Informed citizens can make effective decisions and elect responsible leaders by knowing what their governments are doing, but only if they understand the facts and figures of their government's open data.
Jordial works with governments to help them produce more meaningful open data, and works with the people to discover the meaning in that data.
Finally, as with any process that summarizes or interprets data, there is always the possibility of some bias, even unconscious, in the creation of the analytical models. That's why Jordial not only enables and publishes data analysis; Jordial also provides citizens the tools for interactive exploration of the source data, so that everyone can come to their own conclusions in an objective fashion.
As social media and modern sound bite “news” threaten to turn into a series of “he said/she said” arguments, Jourdial reaches beyond the anecdotes to provide insite into the world's data, promoting government transparency and an informed citizenry.
Garret Wilson
President, Jordial Corporation