Three months, two formal presentations, and many data visualizations later, the inaugural year of the Data Visualization Internship is well underway. Washington state government agencies and local software companies joined together in a public-private partnership to create this innovative virtual internship program for college and grad students and recent grads from across the state. The interns have been mentored by industry experts to concoct cool and crunchable new looks at state open data for the reports of a handful of innovative state agencies.

The end product allows researchers, policymakers and companies to better understand Washington State, and create new opportunities using information. The intern projects included visualizations of 1)  child care subsidy expenditures by county and total population for the Department of Early Learning; 2) important labor market statistics already published on Employment Security Department website; 3) worker’s compensation data for Department of Labor and Industry; 4) the growing revenues generated by the legalization of recreational marijuana in fiscal year 2015 – and where they are growing the most; and 5) the Bellingham Bay cleanup sites

The interns came from universities across the state, including Western Washington University (Brianne Hoppe and Daniel Cheney), University of Washington-Tacoma (Hung Nguyen), Gonzaga University (Alexandra Tester, Mark Garces, Granger Moch, and Joshua Harms), University of Washington-Seattle (Andrew Weller), and Pierce College (Pam Carlson).

Each student team was matched with a mentor from a government agency and a data visualization software company. Participating government agencies include the state departments of Employment Security (Robert Haglund), Labor & Industries (Kirsta Glenn and Lisann Rolle), Early Learning (Carrie Wolfe), Ecology (Krista Kenner and Barb MacGregor) and Revenue (Kim Davis and Don Gutmann). The software mentors come from Tableau (James Carroll and Max Galkin), Socrata (Ryan Collier), ESRI (Nathalie Smith), Live Stories (Adnan Mahmud), and Microsoft (Joneil Sampana).

The program launched on June 23 at Socrata; check out the photos here . The interns’ visualizations were on display at FullConTech and they presented their work on Sept. 15 at a reception following FullConTech. The interns will present to Governor Inslee on Oct. 28 as part of Results Washington.

See some of the early data visualizations here.