Last week, the City of Philadelphia announced that it would be revising its 2020-2021 proposed budget to deal with the added expenses its experienced while fighting the coronavirus epidemic.

Mayor Jim Kenney estimated that over the next five years, the government would have to make up a $650 million hole created by dealing with the pandemic. Many offices and departments would see cuts,  including the Office of Workforce Development and the Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy.

And the City’s options for taking on debt are limited, Technical.ly CEO Chris Wink explored this week.

“Unlike the federal government, which includes control of the money supply by our central bank, local governments have no such monetary power,” he wrote. “Cities have only three budgetary tools: increasing revenue, decreasing expenses and issuing debt, primarily through municipal bonds.”

While the city figures out where it can spare money in its future budget, the Office of the Controller released a data visualization tool for the public to better understand where proposed cuts will come from. (City Council has not yet ratified the proposed budget, and it won’t take effect until the new fiscal year on July 1.)

The data tool, which reviews the entire five-year proposed plan year by year (2021 to 2025), allows users to see spending data by fiscal year, City department, spending class and spending category. Revenue data can also be viewed by fiscal year and revenue source, and the tool includes a guide for terms like “general fund” and the breakdown of taxes and other revenue.

While some offices, like arts and culture and the city representative, are being totally cut, the 2021 budget actually proposes additional spending in some areas, like the Office of Innovation and Technology, which is getting a 19% increase in spending next year, the tool shows. Most of that additional spending will go toward materials and equipment, personal services and purchase of services in 2021.

The tool also shows the the brunt of spending cuts and increased revenue are coming mostly in the next year or two, with $341 million in cuts slated for 2021, and only $35 million slated in 2025.

“We’re taking a larger look at what’s happening, what [the City] is going to do and what we are looking at,” said Jolene Nieves Byzon, the controller office’s director of communications.

The office has a two-person finance, police and data unit, Nieves Byzon said, and Nick Hand, the unit’s director, built the data viz tool along with Sara DeNault, its senior associate.

The tool is built using the spending and revenue data from the city, and the backend of the tool is available on Github. Both are available for download so others could build similar tools or create projects with the projected numbers.

“We really are committed to the transparency piece of this situation,” Nieves Byzon said. “We will continue to figure out ways to help people understand what’s going on.”

Incoming Temple University freshman Scott Blender is not spending his last summer before college like many other recent high school graduates.

He could have spent most of his days binging Netflix, hanging with friends or soaking in the summer weather, but the Penn Valley native has been spending the last few months thinking, learning about and working directly with the overwhelming amount of coronavirus data that comes out every single day.

Back in April, Blender and about 20 other young adults who knew each other virtually set out to form the Coronavirus Visualization Team (CVT). While many of them didn’t have money or supplies to donate to frontline workers fighting the virus, they could at least try to help people understand the severity of the pandemic, he said.

“There is this large-scale infodemic,” Blender told Technical.ly. “And we really noticed how data visualization could be used to tell the larger story.”

View this post on Instagram

Read the full article on the CVT Medium!

A post shared by COVID-19 Visualization Team (@joincvt) on Jul 4, 2020 at 11:46am PDT

The goal of the organization, which has been granted 501(c) status, is to connect students to relevant academic research opportunities, bolster efforts of orgs fighting on the frontlines by forming partnerships with them, and spread awareness to the insights uncovered by its data visualizations and research.

Blender is the organization’s chief operating officer and executive director of its board of directors, and when he gets to Temple in the fall — the university has announced a “blended” schedule of virtual and in-person classes — he’ll be majoring in economics and data science.

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Visualizations from CVT: 1. US Death to Confirmed Ratio: The percentage of cases resulting in death. 2. US Active Cases: The current active number of US cases. 3. US Confirmed Cases: The total number of cases. Over the pandemic, 1.6 million people have been infected in the US.

A post shared by COVID-19 Visualization Team (@joincvt) on May 27, 2020 at 12:00pm PDT

Since CVT’s inception, it’s grown to include about 300 mostly college-age students around the world, Blender said. The team is made up of data scientists, researchers, developers and analysts who work with data sets involving a variety of facets of the pandemic — unemployment, socioeconomic data, comparing the pandemic to climate change effects and seeing where current case counts are rising.

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Impact of coronavirus on yield curves of US Government bonds. Credits: Calel Colon Project: Avoiding a COVID-19 Depression

A post shared by COVID-19 Visualization Team (@joincvt) on Jun 16, 2020 at 10:45am PDT

The volunteers are pulling data sets from multiple locations like Our World of Data and Johns Hopkins, Blender said. Then, they’re being visualized and made sharable in Tableau. Scroll to check one out:

The team is growing, Blender said, and is accepting applications for others who want to get involved, create data visualizations or help on further projects, like informative programing, that the org is planning on starting. It currently offers a list of coronavirus and data viz resources on its site and folks can subscribe or donate to the project.

“We want to be a gateway for data journalists, and help them leverage the information we’ve gathered to tell those stories,” Blender said.

This January, the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Innovation and Technology surveyed residents in order to learn more about what they find valuable about the City’s open data sets.

The City hosts more than 250 datasets on OpenDataPhilly.org, a portal developed by geospacial software company Azavea. Various City departments collaborate with OIT to release the public data sets, allowing residents to find information on topics like land use, building footprints or election results. By putting out the 2020 PHL Open Data Survey, OIT wanted to know: What’s successful, difficult or lacking when it comes to data sharing in Philly?

Of the hundreds of residents who responded — including those who hold positions in the nonprofit, business, academic research, community advocacy, journalism, education, urban planning and data spaces, as well as from people who are homeowners and renters — 90% said that open data is “important” to their work, and 92% thought that the office’s data visualizations are “helpful,” the office said this week.

According to number of responses, the heaviest users of the public data were nonprofit pros, students and professors, and city staffers, said Kistine Carolan, the City’s open data program manager.

“However, we saw reliance on and leveraging of open data also by many community advocates and some journalists,” she said.

Nonprofits indicated a heavy use of open data as part of the services they provide and use it in their grant-seeking efforts, Carolan said, and city workers also used other departments’ data for their specific services to help make decisions or improve their operations.

Respondents told the City that the ways in which it can improve its open data sharing included making some datasets more comprehensive by adding the ability to organize by ZIP code or other features; ensuring that already released data stays up to date; releasing more data that’s only available now as PDFs; and continuing to deliver open data through apps like Atlas.

“The biggest take away is how important open data is for a wide variety of actors and industries in our City (and beyond),” Carolan said. “We saw over 120 requests of new datasets or enhancements to previously released data. We’re reviewing those requests to help us prioritize new data releases.”

Looking forward, the CityGeo team will continue to add datasets that automatically update with the latest info, allowing the team to focus more on releasing new data, the City said. It will also prioritize data projects that align with the primary areas noted by the survey respondents, especially those relating to property and city planning, financial information, and health and human services.

The City also said there will be a focus on visualizations, which make data sets easier to understand, and on expanding awareness of the data sets’ existence.

“We want residents to know that this data is available and useful for many purposes,” OIT said in a statement. “Anyone can use and access this data — whether it’s for a business project or simple curiosity to learn more about Philadelphia.”

You can check out every open data set on OpenDataPhilly.

Welcome to Skill-Based Learning, a short series brought to you by Women in Data — Philadelphia that will highlight some different skills required for being successful in data and tech and offer resources for you to start learning. This week, we are focusing on data visualization.

Data visualization helps bring to life valuable insights that data provides. With the ever-growing field of data and tech, the need for a specialist who is able to convert a complex data story into a simple insight is high. We recommend considering data visualization as your specialty if you have the ability to comprehend business acumen, simplify complex models, and be creative. With a data visualization specialty, you could apply your skills to jobs including analyst, developer and engineer.

Any research is incomplete without a strong data visualization. Your end user may or may not understand the complexity of the quantitative model, but they will look at the visualization as a way of understanding the model and make a business decision based on that. A lot of data teams face challenges when it comes to model adoption and change management. By creating a strong visualization, you are not only winning the hearts of your team but also building your credibility as an empathetic data scientist — they are rare finds.

Free resources

This Harvard Business Review article talks about some of the best data visualizations to date. If you have zero experience in building dashboards, we recommend a few different tools to learn.

Tableau is a well-known tool for dashboard building and data visualization. Tableau Public allows you to publish your dashboard for feedback. ThoughtSpot is an intuitive business intelligence tool that helps you build forecasts and simplify your analysis, and has the ability to maintain extremely large data sets. Harvard University offers a free introduction to data visualization course. Coursera has a list of all the top some of the best courses around data visualization.

Books

One of the best books (which is considered a classic) is “The Art of Data Science.” It gives a step-by-step explanation of data visualization journey, especially if you are working with or are hoping to work with managers and business heads. You can find a .pdf version of this book online.

University education

If you are looking for a structured learning environment, Drexel University is offering two data visualization courses using Tableau.

Events

If this is something you are interested in learning more about, Women in Data — Philadelphia is hosting a free data visualization workshop on Saturday, Aug. 29 at 11 a.m. EST.

Skills to Last a Decade workshop

Saturday, Aug 29, 2020, 11:00 AM

Online event
,

153 Members Attending

Lea Pica, host of the popular Present Beyond Measure® Show podcast & blogger at leapica.com, teaches thousands of analysts and marketers how to inspire action and impact. Lea is a seasoned digital analytics practitioner, social media marketer, and blogger with over 13 years of experience building search and analytics practices for companies like Sc…

Check out this Meetup →

Please let us know what other data skills would you like to learn more about — rajvi.mehta@womenindata.org. You can learn more about Women in Data on our website.

Earlier this month, Philadelphia surpassed 400 murders within the city, with 322 lives being lost to gun violence. It’s on track to be the deadliest year since 2007.

News of the killing of West Philadelphia resident Walter Wallace Jr. by Philadelphia police Monday night continues to draw attention to gun violence in the city, as his death was the latest in a disturbing number of Black lives claimed by law enforcement.

Many news outlets reported these statistics, and on Wallace’s death, as the city tracks about 40% higher than last year at this time. And tech solutions like the Office of the Controller’s mapping tool and the Initiative for Better Gun Violence Reporting’s Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard both offer data visualization to see trends and keep track.

But the live data we rely on is flawed. So is news media coverage, says Jim MacMillan, director of Initiative for Better Gun Violence Reporting: More than half of all shooting victims in Philadelphia were not reported in the news, and when they are, it’s often centered on deaths, multiple shootings, women and children, he said, citing findings of a recent study by Preventative Medicine.

1/.. Some personal news: I’m not a real doctor but I was generously named here as an author along some of the finest, including Penn and Temple trauma surgeons who treat countless gunshot patients in Philadelphia. https://t.co/BORVQ9mgvq

— Jim MacMillan (@JimMacMillan) October 9, 2020

The Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard project uses data from Open Data Philly. It is interactive, can be embedded into other sites and takes a wide look at gun violence in Philadelphia starting in 2015 through present day. Users can look at specific data points, like age of gunshot victims over time, or number of shootings that turned fatal. They can also opt to look at only shooting involving police officers, or shootings that happened indoors.

Now sorting through reports of gun violence in Philadelphia over the past 48 hours. Seems like many more incidents than in some new reports. Check what you're reading against the official data when available, though updates can take several days: https://t.co/OXkTvP88Zg

— The Center for Gun Violence Reporting at CCP (@pcgvr) October 28, 2020

The data about shootings is public information and is updated by the Philadelphia Police Department. But it’s not updated every day, MacMillan said. The City has a large capacity, sure, but data updates happen on a random schedule, and that means news outlets could be unintentionally reporting incorrect numbers. A streamlined fix would be to update the data set around the same time every day.

“If we care about who’s dying, the least we could do is count them all,” MacMillan said.

Information available through the Philadelphia Shooting Victims Dashboard, which pulls from open data provided by PPD. (Screenshot)

Like all data sets, the shootings data has shortcomings. For example, when looking at all shooting victims for the last five years, you can see trends in age, shootings over time, and race and gender.

But when looking at officer-involved shootings, far less information is available. In the last few years, officer-involved shootings have decreased, but police didn’t submit information about age or race. So far in 2020, nine people have been shot by police, and Wallace is the first to be killed. But he’s not reflected in the data set as of Wednesday afternoon.

The set can’t tell us as much about what happened and who was involved. And that’s the real point here. It can give us some context, but it doesn’t represent what we really know and still need to learn about this public health crisis.

“We’re remembering that every data point is a person,” MacMillan said.

None of this explains what happened yesterday or in any other incident. We can take context from the data but it never paints a complete picture.

— The Center for Gun Violence Reporting at CCP (@pcgvr) October 27, 2020

As counties across Pennsylvania are still counting votes, we’re starting to get a clearer picture of the state’s voter turnout as the nation waits for results from this and other key battleground states such as Nevada and Georgia.

On Thursday around noon, about 615,000 Philadelphia votes had been counted, and unsurprisingly, Philadelphians turned out heavily for former Vice President Joe Biden, with the candidate currently carrying about 80% of the city’s votes so far.

While it will likely be a while before we know how the city’s turnout compared to the 2016 election where about 64% of registered voters cast a ballot, The Temple News Digital Managing Editor Colin Evans began to paint a picture of where in the city voters were showing up this time around.

Evans, a senior journalism and economics major at Temple University, tweeted out this interactive map Wednesday afternoon. By hovering over your voting district (find that info here), you can see how many eligible voters turned out in this election.

Hey #Philadelphia voters: I created a live searchable map of votes by district for the #2020election. You can use it to see how strong turnout was in your neighborhood.https://t.co/GOrYZAsPSd

— Colin Evans (@colinpaulevans) November 4, 2020

Evans used R to scrape the results of the Philadelphia Election Results website which breaks info down by ward and division and organized the info into a data frame.

“Then I did a full join between that data frame and the geography data from Open Data Philly showing division and ward boundaries and uploaded the joined dataset to Flourish, which visualized the numbers based on the geographies,” he told Technical.ly.

Evans updates the map as new voting info becomes available.

And that could be a while, if you’re following along with what’s going on with the Pennsylvania courts: Around noon Thursday, Philly temporarily halted counting to accommodate a court order granting closer access to the operations for Trump campaign canvassing monitors. Counting began again about a half hour later, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported around 12:20 p.m.

Evans, who’s covering his first election for Temple’s independent student newspaper, said it’s been a difficult process because of the anxiety and uncertainty that’s unfolded.

“It’s almost surreal to see Philadelphia garnering so much attention and then to realize that our coverage is a part of what people are going to look to to understand how this election is going,” he said.

We’re solidly in day three of counting votes for the general election that took place Tuesday, and as Joe Biden takes a lead in Pennsylvania, we can take a look at which neighborhoods the former vice president is winning handedly in majority-Democrat Philadelphia.

Wes Weaver, a senior GIS and data analyst at the Philly District Attorney’s Office tweeted out a side project he’d produced in the days after the election: a ward-by-ward map looking at votes for Biden or President Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, a majority of the city is deep blue, with places like North and West Philly reporting very high numbers for Biden, while pockets of Port Richmond, South Philly and the Northeast leaned toward Trump.

I made a map. Philly 2020 presidential general election (preliminary) results by division. https://t.co/fw82990jl4

— Wes (@WesWeaver) November 6, 2020

If you know your ward number (of if you scroll in far enough on the map to see your block) you can see total updated voters; numbers that voted for Biden, Trump and third-party candidate Jo Jorgensen; and if there were any write-in votes for your neighborhood. The ward that encompasses City Hall, for example, has logged 529 votes (81.4%) for the Biden ticket, 117 votes (18%) for the president’s ticket and four votes (.6%) for Jorgensen.

Like The Temple News Digital Managing Editor Colin Evans, who made an interactive map to see voter turnout data for every neighborhood, Weaver wrote a script in R to pull the division shape data from OpenDataPhilly to join the vote counts to each division, and create the map. It uses the turnout data, which the City Commissioners Office provides, as well as a later release of data which shows how people voted.

It’s one of many data-focused side projects the GIS pro produces, and he’s done some work on elections in the past. He usually creates election maps because they’re fairly easy to make, he told Technical.ly, and because it’s hard to find this division-level results in news updates.

“I got into this field because I’m an activist first, and strongly believe in using data to inform public policy and promote transparency in government,” Weaver said. “That’s why I’m at the DA’s office now. The staff at the City Commissioners Office have done a great job — better than anyone else in the state — at making this data open to the public.

His intention is translate the onslaught of data the city releases into an accessible and usable map for the public so folks can better understand what’s happening in their neighborhoods and throughout the city. He’s especially interested in elections that are close or contentious, he said — both of which this election is turning out to be.

“And I often talk to people who are surprised to learn that dozens of people in their immediate neighborhood voted differently than they’d expect,” Weaver said. “I just heard from someone who was stunned that about a third of their neighbors voted for Trump, for example.”

Weaver’s also shared links to some maps that dive into how Philadelphians voted on the different ballot questions, such as “Should Philadelphia borrow $134 million for capital purposes?” Results show it was supported in the same areas Biden is picking up most of the votes and not supported in Trump neighborhoods.

Ballot question 4: Should Philadelphia borrow $134 million for capital purposes. It's not boring, you're boring. https://t.co/EjyrACgyaX

— Wes (@WesWeaver) November 6, 2020

More of Weavers’ data projects can be found on his website.

For your weekend viewing pleasure: Media-based developer and data scientist Neil Halloran has just released a documentary about understanding scientists’ claims about climate change, three years in the making.

The animated documentary, “Degrees of Uncertainty,” debuted last week — aptly, on Earth Day — and dives into how society has come to learn about climate change and the processes scientists have taken to learn it themselves. The 24-minute documentary explores how journalists and the public learn and talk about climate change and takes a stab at the question, “How sure are climate scientists?”

? ? ? So pleased to announce the release of my latest data-driven documentary:
https://t.co/yijOfbuV9X#EarthDay

— Neil Halloran (@neilhalloran) April 22, 2021

Halloran previously released a series called “The Shadow Peace,” exploring nuclear war and peace, the sequel to his viral “The Fallen of World War II.”

Halloran also previously owned and worked on a film company, Higher Media, along with his brother Mark, but now works through his own company. Halloran said he receives help from remote researchers and London-based musician Andy Dollerson.

“I also make a point to get lots of feedback through the process, which was especially important for a topic as thorny as this,” Halloran told Technical.ly.

The docs are created by hand using custom software, he said — “I suppose it’s a mix of filmmaking and creative coding which [is] a very laborious process.”

This film in particular took three years to make, and Halloran said he plans to work more with outside animators for future projects so that he can produce films more frequently.

Watch the full film below:

Transport energy consumption is one of the leading contributors to greenhouse gases, and 40% of energy transport is derived from urban settings. As the climate change impacts of greenhouse gases become harder to ignore, many cities across the U.S. are rethinking their urban mobility plans with the aim to improve public transport infrastructure and also encourage more cyclists and pedestrians to take the road.

Austin, Texas has been a city at the forefront of this space. In November 2020, its City Council put two urban mobility propositions on the ballot. Proposition A was a $7.1 billion initiative that included a new rail system, a downtown transit tunnel, an expanded bus system, and a transition to an all-electric fleet. Proposition B initially seemed unlikely to make it to the ballot. It was a $460 million investment to expand Austin’s bike network, invest in urban trails, and fund projects to improve safety and convenience for biking and walking. On Nov. 2, 2020, voters passed both ballot measures. The story of how Proposition B made it to the ballot is a story of effective partnerships, accessible data and strong data visualization.

Effective partnerships and accessible data

PeopleForBikes, a nationwide bike advocacy group, has had a longstanding relationship with Austin’s Transportation Department (ADoT) and City Council. Over the years they have worked together to strengthen Austin’s bicycle infrastructure. In large part, they have been able to do this by using data in PeopleForBikes’ Bicycle Network Analysis (BNA) tool. This tool, built in partnership with Azavea, measures how well bike networks connect people with the places they want to go. One of the key advantages is that it quickly computes data on a city bike network that would take a city’s transportation department significant time and money to do on its own. The ability to make biking data accessible has been a game-changer for ADoT.

Accessible data frameworks

ADoT wanted to show that an investment in Proposition B would greatly expand the impact of Proposition A, but they couldn’t do it alone. ADoT is one of the more advanced city transportation departments when it comes to data, and they have staff with deep data science knowledge. However, it would have been prohibitively expensive for them to collect and process the data needed to demonstrate Proposition B’s importance to the City Council. Luckily, due to past collaboration, they knew they could call on PeopleForBikes and quickly get accurate data from the BNA framework. This framework, notes Rebecca Davies, the Bicycle Networks data manager at PeopleforBikes, “made what would have otherwise been a tedious and prohibitively expensive task fast and easy”.

Accessible data and compelling visualization to push public policy

By using data in the BNA, PeopleForBikes quickly complied statistics for ADoT to present to the City Council showing that Proposition B would amplify the effect of Proposition A, leading to a significantly improved transit network. The planned improvements in Proposition A alone would expand access to 146,749 people who would now be within biking access to public transit (Map B). By also passing Proposition B, for a relatively small additional budget of $460 million, they would increase access to 429,494 people in total (Map C).

Map A: Existing conditions when Propositions A and B were put forth. (Image by PeopleforBikes via Azavea)

Map B: Proposition A improvements. (Image by PeopleforBikes via Azavea)

Map C: Propositions A and B improvements. (Image by PeopleforBikes via Azavea)

The results were so staggering that leaders simply could not ignore the value that biking would bring to supporting transit. The City Council added Proposition B to the ballot and it passed along with Proposition A on Nov. 2.

The benefits of open source and easily customizable software

The BNA was an effective source of information for ADoT for two key reasons. First off, BNA uses OpenStreetMap, an open source map of the world. Given the open source nature of OpenStreetMap it was very easy to update and modify data sets. Therefore the BNA always had updated maps of Austin that reflected any recent street changes. Secondly, Azavea had updated the BNA to make it more customizable per city to highlight factors such as individual street speed limits. Previously BNA used a de facto street speed limit on residential streets. When Propositions A and B were put forth in Austin, residential street speed limits were considerably higher than most of the nation, making biking less safe in many areas. This updated information in BNA highlighted the greater impact that Austin bike lanes would have in streets with these higher speed limits.

Azavea was proud to have supported this effort through our work on the BNA. This case exemplifies how accessible data can push public policy forward. It can help cities rethink their urban mobility plans as well as a variety of other factors that also contribute to climate change and longterm sustainability. Want to learn more about how we can help your city? Reach out; we’d love to talk.

For the last two years, the City has had a mission to understand how its residents use open data.

It started with a survey in early 2020, with the Office of Innovation and Technology asking residents about its 250 datasets on OpenDataPhilly.org the following: “What’s successful, difficult or lacking when it comes to data sharing in Philly?” Various City departments collaborate with OIT to release public data sets, and residents can find information on things like land use, building footprints or election results.

Of the hundreds of residents who responded — including those who hold positions in the nonprofit, business, academic research, community advocacy, journalism, education, urban planning and data spaces, as well as from people who are homeowners and renters — 90% said that open data is “important” to their work, and 92% thought that the office’s data visualizations are “helpful,” the office said last summer. 

Now, OIT has released a new dashboard showing where the data is being accessed across the world. It also shows datasets that have recently been published and those that are a work in progress. Users can also fund overall performance metrics of the City’s Open Data Program.

“The goal of this dashboard is to show the importance of open data and to be transparent with the public about how we’re managing the work of publishing open data,” Mark Wheeler, the city’s chief information officer, said.

?What’s new in @PhiladelphiaGov's open data work? A brand new dashboard!

?Our #CityGeo team made it easy for anyone to see who is using #OpenData, what datasets have been released, what’s in progress, and more.

Check out the Open Data Dashboard?? https://t.co/9cg2T77D1o

— PHLInnovation (@PHLInnovation) November 16, 2021

The dashboard is interactive: It allows users to search and filter for information or specific datasets according to their main interests, and filter by release year or department. The dashboard also includes a set of FAQs to explain key terms and show that the map relies on Google analytics data from 2015 and on.

To date, since 2015, the open data program has been accessed by 606,000 users in the US, and by 661,000 users worldwide. The site has been accessed 4.2 million times since 2015, in nearly a million total sessions, and was used most often in 2019, with 2020 following closely behind, the dashboard shows.

The visualization shows that obviously, a lot of these users are from Pennsylvania, but neighboring states of New York, New Jersey and Maryland account for thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of page views. In fact, the global map shows users that there are only a handful of countries that haven’t accessed Philly’s open data in the last six years.

Kistine Carolan, the City’s open data project manager, is the creator of the dashboard. The results from the open data survey drove this internal work, which includes increasing data automation and building the department’s capacity to create even more data visualizations.

“The City’s 2020 PHL Open Data Survey showed that people use open data in meaningful ways and want to be able to access it easily,” Carolan said.