Philly Gun Crisis Tabulator

phillyguntab.md

TL;DR

We'd like to help Philadelphians understand the economic impact of gun violence, in hopes of raising awareness that this crisis affects us all. Tonight at 6pm meet us at Code for Philly hack night if you'd like to contribute to the build.

Localhost 908A N 3rd St, Philadelphia, PA at 6pm

##Theory (Mostly by Jim MacMillan, Max Marin contributed as well)

A lot of people don’t seem to care about gun violence because they feel that it doesn’t affect them.

Evidence suggests that the economic impact of gun violence in Philadelphia comes in around $1-3 BILLION dollars annually, in direct and indirect cost. (We're working on the substantiation with data.)

Examples of direct costs include emergency response, medical treatment and rehabilitation, investigation, prosecution, and incarceration

Examples of indirect costs include lost property value and business investment, as well as lost productivity

That’s roughly $2,000-$6,000 annually, per resident.

If we have a $1 billion total annual cost of gun violence in the city and divide by 1200 annual shootings victims, we can say that each victim costs about $833,000.

If we let out neighbors know what they are paying for gun violence, maybe there would be more outcry for solutions?

Strategy

What if we built a simple, sharable, embeddable, subscribe-able, mobile-optimized site with one function: To illustrate the economic cost of gun violence in Philadelphia?

Something like the national debt clock? Maybe with a running total? Maybe with a per-resident total?

Tactics

Reporting

Max Marin has stepped up to offer daily logging of fatal/non-fatal shootings while we get the project underway. He's also going to lead gathering of YTD data.

Website

Davis Shaver has donated server space and domain name costs to this effort.

We can use a library like CountUp.js to visualize the escalating cost.

"Shareable", "Embeddable", and "Subscribeable" are all important traits for the concept and most of the design/technical challenge will entail realizing them in the product.

The lowest common denominator for CMS? We could go with a flat file or setup a Google Spreadsheet integration with Tabletop.js. We are open to ideas and suggestions!

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database

@lablayers thanks for the link! Great reference.

Here are my notes from last night. Next meeting April 12 at Code for Philly.

• Introduced ourselves and went over the summary facts and goals (As much as $1-3bn or $833k/victim annually, simple/shareable/embeddable/subscribable/mobile)
• Did a quick brainstorm exercise sketching visualizations of the concept (a tweet, a mobile view, etc)
• Shared the brainstorm and talked about the common components
• Components
  • Above the fold, a striking number showing the growing economic toll (while also on that screen making sure to acknowledge the tragic human loss)
  • Push users below the fold to more context, including our methodology, links to data/possible map, our mission statement, and then our CTA
• Discussed next steps and homework
  • What data and how – Max is going to lead exploration of what data we'll need. This somewhat includes the definition of which gun crimes are included in scope, but our methodology will inform that as well. Max has graciously offered to cover the shoeleather component for the first few months after launch but for now we just need to define the schema for each log entry, something like 'CRIME TYPE | Date Time | Location | Detail1 | Detail2| ExtraLink1 | ExtraLink2 | Etc'.
  • How does this lead to economic impact – Aaron is going to lead a review of the literature out there concerning economic impact of gun violence. We'd like to be able to show our thinking for how each new gun crime contributes in economic cost, ideally with the ability to explain how that breaks down in direct or indirect costs.
  • What is our call to action – Jim is going to take a look at possible call to actions for users (if we succeed in getting them riled up about the issue, what is our desired behavior?). Included in this scope is subscription call to action, in what ways would we want to encourage a user to follow or subscribe to some channel.
  • How will we update a site – Davis is going to put together a prototype of a Google Sheet->Website workflow with Twitter integration. We'll go with a minimal style for now until we have a chance to talk visual approach