TycheAbout:ReadersAndUsers
When we first envisioned Tyche Insights we started with the concept of Readers. We want data stories to inform anyone who reads a single article to satisfy a question on their mind. We also want articles to support a person who is taking a journey equivalent to Wikipedia, where you start with one data story and you glide through a dozen articles about a community or a topic.
Data stories will also have Users - we think of a User as a person who takes action or utilizes the story in a particular manner. What are some types of Users?
A Citizen can use data stories to hold their elected officials accountable or to understand the connection between the actions and spending of their government and outcomes:
- “In the news I saw that developers are concerned about how long construction takes. I looked in the city’s budget at our planning department allocation and it looks very small. This is something I would like to bring up at the next city council meeting”
- “Our mayor said that she is keeping budget costs under control and I can validate that by looking at the budget numbers for the past 5 years”
A Journalist may use data stories to identify a journalistic topic that was not on their radar or inform an article with real data:
- “I have a treatment for an article about business growth in our city but didn’t know if objective data was available. This data story contains business data - counts and business types - harvested from state sources. I can weave this data into the story for context.”
- “This data story uncovered an area of the city’s operations that we haven’t been following. We’re going to use the data and inferences from this article to ask some questions”
Elected Officials can be Users too, they may use data stories to validate existing policy performance or identify other communities with similar issues that we can collaborate with on solutions:
- “We have made establishing budget controls a key component of our policy. The recent budget-related data story shows the trajectory of our budget and provides an independent validation that we’re doing the right things”
- “We have dramatic issues with homelessness and their healthcare. What other communities are highlighting this same challenge so that we can have some collaboration explorations with them?”
Academics and Researchers are users when they use data stories to identify subjects for research and acquire real world data that has been contextualized:
- “We are reviewing specific topics for social science research. We are looking through various data stories to find themes that are primary or adjacent to our area of study; this will help us come up with questions & hypothesis”
- “Capturing relevant data for our study is consuming our resources. We can reuse the data that is showing up in data stories which will decrease our costs and time”
Those are just a few of the ways that we want people to Use data stories, other examples include:
- City employees
- Nonprofits
- Major funders and foundations
- Businesses
- Data product creators
- Lobbyists
- Artifical intelligence creators
- Students