User:KarlTyche
Hi, I'm Karl Urich, one of the founders of Tyche Insights and I write data stories for the Albany Data Stories Hub.
I live in Albany, NY. Albany is an interesting town to study and write data stories. Albany's population is ~100k, it is the state capital, it is a relatively old city (founded in the 17th century), and has a lot of challenges associated with older cities and being a state capital. The City is about average for its data being open and readily available; we file a fair amount of FOILs to get the data that we want.
You can find out a little more about my professional background here. As I say, I've spent a career building data solutions for nationwide and global usage by telecom, insurance, commercial real estate and other industries... and I had never studied my own city's data until the last year.
Just about all data story topics are interesting to me. The most interesting are evaluating a government's finances using the Strong TOwns finance decoder, and stories involving housing.
What am I working on now for data storytelling? I have a couple of things in the queue that hopefully will become data stories:
- analyzing the City of Albany's debt - municipal debt is something that is not well understood and we want to understand how to storytell around it
- looking at some New York Dept of Transportation pedestrian accident data to see how that can help us understand where accidents happen and what the trend looks like, and what measures have brought accidents down (if that's the case)
- lastly, I'm interested in how various states pressure test the finances of their local governments, e.g. NY has this system run by the Comptroller - https://www.osc.ny.gov/local-government/fiscal-monitoring - I have heard that nearly two dozen states have similar systems and we want to see how we give this data more visibility
My favorite article I've written is on school speed cameras, although the articles that I've written on the City of Albany's budgeting have been eye opening as well.
What do I like about telling data stories about my City? I learn a TON about my City, both good stuff and things that need fixing. I truly believe that sharing public data-driven stories helps inform people and makes us wiser, more engaged citizens.
My 3 legged Treeing Walker Coonhound, Lefty, was the inspiration for the original Tyche Insights logo. While we did eventually professionalize our website with a real logo, it's important to share this for historical & posterity's sake:
