TycheAbout:OriginStory

What is the Tyche Insights origin story?

Karl and Keith came with the idea for Tyche Insights without ever looking to start a business.  We have been big fans of USAFacts since its inception and that’s what catalyzed the idea behind Tyche.  What we like about USAFacts is that their stories validate, challenge and inform anyone's understanding about our government and how it does (and doesn't!) work.

As a test we analyzed public data from the City of Albany, NY government, exploring housing, property, crime, etc.  We had a realization that we could turn this analysis into USAFacts-like stories and inform local community members.  From there the discussion became “how do do we support citizen-led local data storytelling anywhere?” and the idea for Tyche Insights was born.  

Tyche Insights is a Public Benefit Corporation that balances profit and public good motivations.  Tyche Insights will create, grow and support a community that does local data storytelling & data journalism.  "Support" means that Tyche Insights will assist anyone throughout the whole data storytelling lifecycle - conceiving ideas, acquiring public data from local governments (cities, counties), analyzing data, creating visualizations (graphs, charts, dynamic visualizations), writing stories, editing, publishing.  This support is available for free, to anyone.

From the beginning Tyche Insights has three foundational elements - 1) stories must be told in an unbiased fashion, 2) stories must be based on public, government data and 3) any data story is available to anyone, forever, for free via a Creative Commons license - there is no subscription or any cost to read and use the data.

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