We seek to apply the concepts of information visualization to the topic of government spending, in order make our government more transparent and accountable to the public. We plan to create an application that can be entered into the Apps for America contest, which is sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation.
As such, our goals will align with the criteria of the contest, specifically:
- 1. Usefulness to constituents for watching over and communicating with their members of Congress
- 2. Potential impact of ethical standards on Congress
- 3. Originality of the application
- 4. Potential usability of the application
- 5. Code quality of application
Our other goals as far as our visualization are to make the visualization as easily understandable and usable as possible to lay users with no knowledge of data analysis and visualization, to present our visualization in a non-partisan and transparent manner, and to enable exploration and analysis of the data using simple interaction techniques.
