“Hey, we saw you in the keynote!”

Last year we cheered when Arlington Visual Budget (AVB) won an Innovation Award from the Massachusetts Municipal Association (MMA). This past weekend the Visual Government (VisGov) team was back again for the MMA annual meeting to continue the conversation on open government. Arlington Town Finance Committee member Alan Jones reported that on Friday, the day started with people telling them that the keynote speaker, futurist Mike Walsh, had given AVB a shout-out along the lines of “the best thing he’s ever seen.” On Saturday, Arlington Town Manager Adam Chapdelaine demonstrated the software at the Mass Selectmen’s Association annual meeting where it was once again well received.

Situated at the event’s trade show, the VisGov team found themselves amongst a wide variety of local and national vendors, ranging from fire suppression systems to the Hampshire council of governments, along with the Massachusetts State Lottery, emergency services products, law firms, even vendors of street lights, parking meters, garbage cans, and social media apps to engage citizens.

You may remember our work with the Town of Arlington to produce the award-winning Arlington Visual Budget, an open source web application that creates an easier way to communicate complex municipal financial information. The app has been well-recieved here in Arlington and is being explored by other communities as far away as Asheville, North Carolina.

As the news has spread in all directions we have discovered that the 2014 Ebola outbreak represents not only a healthcare crisis with global impact, but also an information crisis. Even highly respected news outlets can have conflicting information on a single event, so that the stories are confusing and hard to trust. Hours spent poring over the NIH and CDC and WHO sites revealed the common threads of truth, but the details were scattered. There was no straightforward way to get a complete picture.

So, we decided to create a single source of graphical information that could become an international resource. Something that could compliment the Wikipedia page. Clean lines, a classic readable font, with unambiguous colors and icons. Headers in black and white, red for critical information, gray text to let pictures do the talking. Easy to scan and locate the topics before reading closely for details.

Dirk Knemeyer has a few questions about Apple's ideas for a mobile medical solution.

This coming June, Apple is expected to announce their “Healthbook” app. In a bold expansion on the concepts of Involution’s hGraph app, Apple is attempting not only to federate all of a user’s important, top-level health and wellness data but also to synchronize with hardware devices that do everything from analyze blood to count steps to monitor heart rate.

Mockup of Healthbook screen published to Behance this past February.

Arlington Visual Budget recognized for innovation, value, and impact.

Dirk Knemeyer on multimedia information design.

For Immediate Release

For Immediate Release