As a kid, when the first generation of First Person Shooters became popular with my friends, I was still nose deep in my books and board games. The few video games that I did reach for were more akin to glorified board games than anything coming close to what systems could pump out at the time. Don’t get me wrong the sports games of the mid-90s, like Madden and NBA Jam, were near and dear to my heart. A sweep right from Aikman to Smith was a proven winner in Madden ’94. I took more than a few teams through the entirety of the NBA Jam season in a perpetual state of fire but when I met Sid Meier I never looked back.
If Civilization 1 was a young and innocent love, the second edition in the series was true, mad, and deep. My life has never been the same since. I turned into a turn-based, civilization building, strategically minded junkie. Where friends loved the pace of engagements in FPS games, I loved the ability to methodically push towards victory in my turn-based games.
A war here, a religion founded there. Guiding double digit economic growth over decades, negotiating complex treaties to prevent an upstart from contending for global domination.
These were my jams, this was my childhood. Strategy was the name of the game. Defining a long term goal, working on all fronts to accomplish it, anticipating adversity, and innovating as the situation evolved.
The urge to see the whole picture has not left me moving into a graduate education and an imminent return to professional life. When reading Strategy as a youngster I learned the value of seeing the big picture. But the big picture is elusive and always changing. Some say the Devil is in the details. If that’s the case, then a strategic platform needs to provide the big picture while retaining those devilish details to ensure that plans can be updated as the situation unfolds. Finding a platform that can replicate the games of my youth and the products of my imagination has always been a goal of mine. With Weave I had found my platform.
Weave is an open source database visualization program that runs atop Adobe Flash. It creates an interactive and nuanced presentation of data allows for large quantities of information to be uploaded and analyzed quickly from a wide array of sources. The visualizations shown are of projection from the 2010 UK election. Each Westminster BLAH BLAH is colored respective of each party’s results. The scatter plots below the mapped results capture voter turnout results against the percentage of votes garnered by the winning party and voter turnout results against income.
Weave, with its ease of data entry and visualization, can allow for election projections based on day to day data extraction from campaigns, polls, and media sources. The platform’s capacity for layers of information constructs a highly responsive model that can be adapted to a variety of strategic needs. Weave can map a variety of data inputs as varied as digital media outreach, GOTV operations, vote turn out projection, partisan performance projections, and fundraising hot spots. The University of Massachusetts - Lowell and the Open Indicators Consortium (OIC) collaborated to create a, "highly flexible and robust application development platform designed to support multiple levels of user proficiency – from novice to advanced. Weave also offers the capacity to integrate, visualize and disseminate data at nested levels of geography."
The geographically visualizing varied data inputs have the benefit linking digital efforts to political efforts to mobilize targeted peoples. This capacity to link online with the offline will be invaluable when confronting a new political landscape as the US enters the first election cycle after re-districting.
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