Coders, technology enthusiast, economist, teachers, high school students, and entrepreneurs joined representatives from more than seven government agencies for the second annual National Day of Civic Hacking from May 31- June 1. The event was locally organized and held in Washington, D.C. to confront complex societal problems affecting our neighborhoods, communities, and country.
During the event, we participated and watched representatives from traditionally disconnected groups work together on some of the most pressing issues facing the local and federal government. We asked participants to analyze our public Consumer Complaint Database and our Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Database.
The challenge
We challenged the participants to come up with ways to empower consumers by building tools and visualizations using two of our databases: our consumer complaint database and our HMDA database. Since the launch of the complaint database in June 2012, the number of consumer complaints has increased rapidly, surpassing the 300,000 mark earlier this spring. The breadth of the database now includes complaints on seven categories of products, ranging from credit cards to mortgages. Further, the HMDA database contains 6 years’ worth of mortgage transaction data, approximately 112 million records. Together, these two data sets provide a strong and open foundation for the public to generate interesting data analysis and application.
During the event, we were able to answer questions from civic hackers interested in using the data to build visualizations and applications. Local students Andy Zhao, Derek Zhou, Joe Zhou, Joie Wang, Kyle Zhou, and Rachel Wu, used our publicly available data to build a visualization tool that demonstrated which products, issues, and companies consumers are complaining about, as well as the cities and towns where complaints are most prominent. Druv Sharma, Hui Hung Martin Dertz, and Neisan Massarrat, used the HMDA data to build maps that illustrate lending patterns with respect to gender. This is exactly the type of involvement we’re hoping for and illustrates the opportunities we have to expand this type of public engagement.
What’s next?
We hope to connect with other communities interested in engaging with our databases. We believe there are opportunities for coders, developers, and others with strong technical prowess to build innovative tools and applications that can enable consumers to live better financial lives.
Got a cool data project to share? Just tweet at @cfpb with #CFPBdata.
