Web App Innovations

The following post is a response to the article below:


Web App Helps Visualize Farm Bill Spending

The Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has launched the Farm Bill Budget Visualizer, an innovative web-based application that allows visual analysis of Farm Bill spending since the 2008 Farm Bill. As debate surrounding the 2012 Farm Bill becomes more urgent, the Budget Visualizer facilitates understanding of how the provisions and budgets within the farm bill tie into the nation’s public health, environmental sustainability, and other priority concerns.

Every four or five years, the federal Farm Bill specifies policies that have profound positive and negative impacts on public health from numerous angles—through food assistance and nutrition education, efforts to improve access to fruits and vegetables, commodity programs that indirectly impact environmental quality, and conservation programs that impact soil and water quality, for example.

The Budget Visualizer uses “treemap” technology, a method of displaying spending data as nested rectangles, which allows users to “see” the proportion of federal funding received by Farm Bill programs. The application, developed in partnership with the Hive Group, is intended as an educational aid for the general public, advocacy groups, and policymakers who wish to better understand the relationships among public health and other priorities, and federal spending in the Farm Bill.

With the application, users may filter by and view specific expenditure categories such as public health, fruit and vegetable access, sustainable agriculture, commodity grain production, or industrial food animal production. Users may also view data regarding actual and estimated spending in the years 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012. The Visualizer and accompanying materials are available at http://www.jhsph.edu/clf/programs/visualizer/.

Using data uncovered by researchers at the Center for a Livable Future, the Visualizer ties together budgetary information otherwise only available from scattered sources, enabling new analyses. Roni Neff, PhD, CLF’s research and policy director, says, “Transparency is a key theme and objective of our work; we’ve not only provided our audiences with access to details of the Farm Bill budget, but also provided a new way to understand this complex piece of legislation.”

The Visualizer was inspired by food system advocate, Marjorie Roswell, who created a prototype in the lead-up to the 2008 farm bill.

The article is interesting because of the potential opportunities it opens for future innovations in the field.  Imagine a webapp that tracts the number of homeless individuals within a region to allow greater access to services!  If that appears controversial (since it requires a mechanism of tagging), imagine a web app that provides utilization of shelters every day.  This is then accessible by homeless individuals via their social workers or physicians who can tell them their best bet for a nights rest away from the streets.  

I believe that the future of IT integration is bright with small yet innovative web apps that make a huge difference in a domestic and international setting.

Keys to Success - Coordination

During the past few months I have had the privilege to work with Tara Vecchione, Anna Diller, and Matthew Scally on the budget formulation process for the Global Health Bureau at USAID.  The process is if anything complicated and relies on a strong coordination of stakeholders coming together for the common good.

The same principles apply to the field of IT, especially in the homeless health context.  Here is an excerpt of the most recent email I received from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development:

Updated Guidance on the Homelessness Pulse Project

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Pulse Project collects quarterly data on homelessness from Continuums of Care nationwide.  The attached guidance:

·         Reviews the objectives of the Pulse project,

·         Describes recent revisions to the Pulse reporting requirements,

·         Provides definitions of key concepts, and

·         Answers frequently asked questions.

The guidance is designed to help HMIS administrators and vendors program accurate Pulse reports in their systems.  HUD is currently developing programming specifications for the Pulse project, which will be released in early 2012. 

If you have any questions about the Pulse project or want to learn more about participating in the project, please send an email toAHAR@abtassoc.com.

Here's what I found so impressive about the email from a coordination standpoint (and we're not even talking about the actual guidance document)

1)  Each guidance document takes the time to review the objectives.  How many times have we been at board meetings or management meetings when someone asks "why are we doing this again?"  Presenting guidance in this format brings everyone back to the same page to have a productive meeting

2)  Recent revisions and key concepts are highlighted.  This allows everyone to follow on all the changes made to the project.  A small step toward establishing corporate memory independent of people.

3)  The contact information for any further questions was provided.  Having points of contact for different elements in the project are absolutely crucial in order to pass information in the right order and to have action administered by the right people.

All in all, the coordination of the project is greatly helped by a common understanding of objectives and rebuilding buy-in with stakeholders at each point of contact.