If Congress fails to reauthorize funding to repair our crumbling infrastructure by September 30, it will have very real consequences for all 50 states.

The White House recently released a PDF report detailing the requirements to begin to rebuild America’s infrastructure. Great, its definitely needed but the problem was this report (the web version) contained a visualization that was difficult, at best, to deciper and the data behind it was buried inside a PDF. This coming from the White House, who have been pushing the idea of Open Government and Open Data.

A friend of mine saw the report first and fired off an email to a few of us. Another friend quickly “liberated the data” from the PDF using Tabula and published it in a Google spreadsheet. I then converted that to json to use in, what I hope, is a better presentation of the problem … more of a story.

To build the front-end I used Jekyll and DataMaps. I also used Grunt for several tasks, including LiveReload to help make the site responsive using a mobile first approach.

The big take away from all of this is that to open the data (at least get it out of a PDF) in json format and build a decent front-end with visualizations didn’t take that long. This whole project was completed in under 2 days, probably around 6 - 10 working hours. There is just no reason not to do it.