We are ready for the third R-Lab, the monthly appointment where we co-work together on a real data science problem using R.
This time the R-Lab is promoted by nothing but the Assessorato alla Partecipazione, Cittadinanza Attiva e Open Data of the Comune di Milano!
They proposed us to access to their municipality budget data, and use one day of joint work for designing and realizing an R Shiny app that allows citizens to visualize and explore the city revenues and spending info. Since the task is so demanding, we decided to make this edition on a Saturday, to have an entire day of joint co-working.
This is the plan: the representatives from Assessorato alla Partecipazione, Cittadinanza Attiva e Open Data and Assessorato al Bilancio will introduce data and possible insight. Then we will discuss and design the app functionalities, and develop the dashboard together, working in teams.
As always, we will use R, the open source software and programming language for statistical analysis. In particular we’ll go through Shiny – the R specific framework for interactive visualization-, ggplot2, for building beautiful graphs, and maybe extra packages for special visualizations, as Sankey diagrams. If you are unfamiliar with these tools, or even new to R, don’t worry: we’ll briefly explain their way of functioning, and then everyone can learn by doing and sharing knowledge with other users.
10:00 – Presentations: The Comune di Milano budget data + Shiny, ggplot and viz tools
11:00 – Brainstorming and app design
11:45 – Code #1 12:45 – Collective check #1
13:00 – Lunch (offered!) & Break
14:00 – Code #2
15:30 – Collective check #2
16:00 – Code #3 and merge
17:30 – App publication <3 (hopefully)
18:00 – Bye bye and see you soon!
The Comune di Milano, well, does not need of explanations. The event is promoted by the Assessorato alla Partecipazione, Cittadinanza attiva e Open Data: if you want to know more about this peculiar office, here there’s an interesting article, written by the assessore Lipparini himself. We developed together the idea of this R-Lab, to satisfy the need of translating the city budget into an understandable and visual way: then they involved the Assessorato al bilancio, to have their insights, suggestions and field knowledge.