Data for the Decisionmakers: Afghan Election Edition

By Chris Doten | December 14, 2010

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Uncle Sam poster with text "I want YOU to provide visualization tools"

NDI does some cool stuff, but for real influence you can't top good ol' Uncle Sam. One of the most important audiences for NDI's AfghanistanElectionData.org visualization tool is policymakers at the State Department, USAID, and on Capitol Hill. By developing open tools that can be used by all - including top policymakers - efforts like this make for better informed decisionmaking by the people who really control the levers of power. And our friends in government tell us they get a lot of milage out of the site. Of course, State or AID could have built their own, private version to use internally. But by providing the resources to let NDI and our coding partner Development Seed put this together, everyone can make use of the data. The folks who have the most invested in this information are the Afghan people themselves, of course. During the launch of the data from the Presidential elections last year we found that the demands on bandwidth and browsers were too much, and that for some the site was too slow to be of practical use. The 2010 site is much faster; I can't wait to hear stories of how the site is used by the citizens of Afghanistan.

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