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PROJECT 02 · 2023
Northstar
A public-facing dashboard summarizing constituency-level infrastructure project data for a civic transparency initiative.
Civic technology
Archived
Contributing engineer
ReactD3Node
The problem
Public infrastructure project data existed but was scattered across inconsistent government PDFs. Citizens had no simple way to see what was happening near them.
The approach
Worked with a small civic-tech collective to normalize the underlying data first, then built a dashboard simple enough for someone without any technical background to use on a low-end phone.
OBSERVE↓REDUCE↓MODEL↓BUILD↓TEST↓SHIP
System diagram
Focus or hover a node for what it does.
Raw records
↓
Normalization
↓
Project index
↓
Map view
↓
List view
Raw records arrive as inconsistent PDFs and spreadsheets.
A normalization step maps them to one shared schema.
A project index makes every record searchable by location.
A map view shows projects geographically.
A list view serves low-bandwidth connections and screen readers equally well.
By the numbers
1,200+
Projects indexed
3
Contributing engineers
8
Interface states
2
Public releases
Decisions I kept
- List view was never treated as a fallback — it got equal design attention to the map
- Data provenance was shown for every record, including gaps
- No login required to browse public data
Things I didn't build
- User accounts and saved searches — the priority was open access, not personalization
- Automated PDF parsing — manual verification proved more reliable at this scale
What changed
Served as a reference dataset for two local reporting projects before the collective's funding cycle ended and the project was archived with its data left publicly downloadable.
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