COLLEGE TOWN, FL — Florida State University students launched a redesigned Florida Open Gov website to help the public track government spending and school performance.
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A student-led project years in the making at Florida State University is now live.
The DeVoe L. Moore Institute launched a redesigned Florida Open Gov website, built and refined over time by multiple classes of student researchers. The platform gives users access to public data on education, payroll, and spending. Interactive maps and charts help break down the information.
"The students took the initiative to do the redesign, to clean the data, and to think about the ways that that data can be presented through various visualizations. So this is an example of how we can really bring practical tools into the classroom on campus to give students the kind of experience that they’ll need for professional work," Dr. Samuel Staley, the Director of DeVoe L. Moore Institute, said.
The developers behind the project hope the site will turn complex data into something people can understand and use in their everyday lives.
"Even when I downloaded data, it said, you know, 100,000 rows. I’m overwhelmed. So I work with data every day. So our point is to put it into a format that’s easy to use, so parents, teachers, and researchers alike can access the data. What that looks like is acquiring the data and then transforming it. So we clean it, remove any zeros or no characters, anything like that, and then we load it into our website, which is in public accessible through Florida Open Gov," Student Data Analytics Team Manager Alexis Staveski said.
From comparing school districts to tracking where money is going, the site puts the information all in one place.
"What’s really neat about this particular group, the data analytics group, is that it’s a legacy project. So there have been a lot of data analytics researchers who are out working careers in tech, in consulting, and they are the biggest fans of this project. And so they are actually so happy to see it continuing on, and that kind of legacy has kind of continued," Crystal Taylor said.
The website is now live, and the public can view its government data and charts for free.
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