Lessons from Reporters - by David Cohn on Monday, February 4, 2008 17:50 - View Comments

Dallas Calls on Readers for Dataplanation

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A classic call to your former readers for help. My guess right now is that the people who read Dallas ISD, and therefor who might answer this call, are living and breathing Dallas Independent School District.

In that sense – this is a quick one-off beat blogging project.

Not sure if Kent has enough readers to help him mull through the data- but there is no harm in asking.

 

A commenter on another thread recently expressed frustration over the district’s on-line check register.

 

I think we can help.

 

Click here to download, in an Excel spreadsheet, the last six monthly check registers, dating to the start of this fiscal year.

 

Have at them.

 

HOWEVER – there are some caveats that you MUST read before you do any sort of sifting or calculating of this data. Click the jump to read the data caveats.

 

We have more if anybody wants them.

 

The dataplanation:

 

1. The data is exactly as we received it from the district, with the exception that we broke it out by month as an easy way to organize the spreadsheets. Other than that, the data has not been altered in anyway. If a field is blank, that’s how the district gave it to us.

 

2. Many, many checks are listed multiple times. If, for example, a single check was used to buy multiple items, or items for multiple accounts, this check will be listed for each item and account.

3. The data is best viewed in a database manager

  blog it

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  • http://dallasisd.beloblog.com/ Kent Fischer

    Actually, this isn’t so much a call for help, as it is responding to a readers request for a more user-friendly log of district checks. We already mine this data regularly, and I’m not expecting (nor did I ask for) readers to conduct an analysis that we haven’t already done/thought of.

    Texas law requires districts to publish on-line records of their checking accounts. Dallas ISD *hides* theres in a place that’s hard to find, and it’s in pdf format — hundreds of pages long and un-downloadable into Access or Excel. Not very user-friendly, which I’m guessing is the point.

    I regularly file FOI’s for the same data in spreadsheet form. We have them going back more than five years. After one reader complained about the district’s format of the records, I thought it would be a useful service to make our spreadsheets available to anyone who cared to see them.

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David Cohn is the founder of Spot.Us and former editor of BeatBlogging.Org.