Mike decided, with a few others, to make a point and prove that publishing and using this data could be done quickly and cheaply; actually it took roughly 24 hours (that's fast) and turned out to be COMPLETELY FREE!!! :)

Update

April 19, 2013

I helped Mike created a personal site, so the State Sequester Project is best viewed there. Although the original is still available (link below), for now.

A co-worker, Mike Byrne - @byrne_tweets, recently read a few articles talking about the state sequesters. Most of these articles presented data, but the data was not in a reusable format. The data was contained in PDFs or Powerpoint or something else that didn’t make sense.

Mike decided, with a few others, to make a point and prove that publishing and using this data could be done quickly and cheaply; actually it took roughly 24 hours (that’s fast) and turned out to be COMPLETELY FREE!!! :)

After successfully accomplishing the task, and creating a Github project for it with a gh-pages branch, Mike asked if I could help him give his his project a better design, “I’m lame at CSS.” He really isn’t, the design wasn’t bad at all. But I attempted to improve on it.

After forking the repo, I quickly came up with an alternative (and then another, and then another) made the pull request(s) and now we have what you see today.

Very cool project all the way around! Visit the page to read how he accomplished it (or my working version of it), and to view the maps.

Mike's Mapbox Version