Vu Nguyen’s
playground of ideas

Now that the elec­tion is over and I am well rested, I want to look back at what we have worked on all these months at msnbc.com. A few peo­ple wrote me ask­ing about the process of cre­at­ing a large scale project in a fast paced envi­ron­ment. Here is a longer answer to that ques­tion. Since this post will be a bit long, I will break it into sev­eral sections.

Pre-election con­tent

We put a huge amount of effort into the Decision ’08 Dashboard data explorer map. Many peo­ple had been prepar­ing inter­ac­tive con­tent for our elec­tion cov­er­age for months before I arrived. By the time I started in July 2008, most of the core func­tion­al­ity of the map had been devel­oped. My first assign­ment was to sup­port other devel­op­ers and design­ers, by prepar­ing data and writ­ing small util­ity classes. Next, I cre­ated the polling data dis­play and helped with design­ing the fundrais­ing data display.

Click on image to see full size.

We wanted to map every data set we could find that came with geo­graphic infor­ma­tion. There were at least 10 data sets we wanted to map, but we launched our pol­i­tics front map with only six data sets. We added user opin­ion, polling, can­di­date appear­ances and fundrais­ing data over the next sev­eral weeks.

Most of our data sets were huge and we needed the tech­nol­ogy to sup­port and serve them to a large audi­ence. This is where the team that builds our pub­lish­ing plat­form came in. They built a new, user-friendly data­base tool just in time for us to use for the election.

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