The World Bank recently published an interactive data visualization about poverty, hunger, child mortality and other global challengs. Called Building a Better World, the site uses two different modes of visualizations for each of the key statistics: one using a traditional geographic projection, the other with the sizes of the countries distorted to the size of the data being represented.
The World Bank is just one such organization devoted to sustainability issues utilizing the web to visualize important information about their projects. The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) has an entire "statistics portal" filled with information including Country Statistics, an interactive Factbook, and my favorite, the Factbook eXplorer, which combines stories and statistics with great impact.
Gapminder is group promoting sustainable development and is well-known in certain circles from founder Hans Rosling's presentations at TED, which is one of the first places I point people when I want to explain the power of great data visualizations. Here is his first TED presentation:
You can watch two more here and here. His data visualization software was so powerful that the founders of Google, who he met at TED, purchased it in 2007 and is now available for free.
When these and other organizations are soliciting for new funds, they might be interested in looking at Philanthropy In/Sight, a Google Maps mashup launched by The Foundation Center last week to explore "giving patterns, emerging trends and funding relationships globally, nationally, or at the community level." Grants, grantmakers, needs and impacts can all be viewed and sorted by various criteria with data updated weekly. The site currently has information on almost 100,000 grantmakers accounting for over 1.5 million individual grants.
Thanks, Blog About Stats and The Agitator
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