Pie eating contest

I went to a community meeting to hear someone attempt to persuade the other attendants to agree with them on some thing or other. The Persuader got points instantly for having handouts of the charts and graphs used in the presentation. Oh, and they brought enough so everyone could see. I arrived a few minutes late, so everyone was on the second or third pie chart. I thought I had missed The Pitch and was only going to get the chart parade. Next pie chart, and the next, every time I am having to call in a whiskey tango foxtrot to the first page to see if the quantities represented as proportions on the charts were the ones in the table on page one. Nope. Then, I felt a subtle wave go across the room and seize someone who blurted out, "What is your point!?". Civility broke down at that point and took a while to restore itself. Sort of.

I was a witness to a chart fail.

Lessons learned from a data presentation standpoint.

1. If presenting a table of numbers accompanied by a bar chart of the exact same thing, just do the chart.

2. When trying to illustrate percentages of something compared to the percentages of several other things, don't use a series of pie charts (on different pages and of greatly varying sizes). Use another simple bar chart or better yet, a segmented bar chart.

3. Don't show percentage without reference to the totals. Please.

4. Finally, don't mention in the presentation that there is another set of data that conflicts with the one you are presenting and not have it available for comparison as well.

This is just a summary of the chart fail that occurred for The Persuader. Eight pages of information without context or source reference, and seven of those were pie charts without totals represented. After what seemed like 10 minutes, The Persuader lost the room because the point was not being communicated and the pie charts only agitated everyone.

What I love about this experience is that it showed data at work, albeit poorly, at the community level. This is nothing new, not at all, but the presentation of data can always be better. The Persuader went to a source, gathered data, charted it and brought handouts for a meeting that could have been 10 or 100 people. So when I wonder what Open Data/Open Gov means to us as individuals and communities, this is one example.

Chart Note: You too can add serious or sarcastic charts to your site with the Google Chart Tools API.