Easy Sates, the professionals friend

My name is Jacob Magure. I am a Lobbyist who returned to school to complete my degree. I have also volunteered for political campaigns since I was 10 (I would walk districts with my father.) So it is fair to say I have some experience in politics, as well as higher education. It is lessons from that experience, and how that relates to Easy States, that I will be writing this short piece on.

In any serous academic or work circumstance, data is king. A plumber needs to know the data on what homes were built when and how, to know where is best to advertise. A coffee shop needs to know where has the most traffic flow during its planed hours of operation to maximize its business. School is no different, Data is the base of most college work. Politics is literally reliant on data, the term statistics is derived from the word state, as states were the first to collect and use this information; in politics data isn't just king, its key. Sadly these statistics can be hard to find, even harder to interpreter, and comparing them in real time is a chore of collection, graphing them is just a pain; that is where Easy States comes in.

Easy states is a massive data mine, full of treasures. The drastic amount of data about people, and the diversity of the data across peoples and fields is amazing. Alone having all this data in one place is amazing, but it is the functions of the web-sight that make this great. Depending on the type of data, you are able to use different interpretation functions, you are only limited by those functions which can actually use the data. These functions will run all sorts of basic computations, and will also create graphs on the fly for you! Further more, you don't have to do this one data point at a time, you can have up to 30 variables on the screen without the professional membership. This allows you to compare, contrast, and companion pieces of data with each other. You can also do this with the graphs is creates. This feature is amazing, as it takes much of the pain out of data collection and interpretation.

I wish to share an example from lobbying. We all the time have to create what we call 'White papers.' these are 1 to 3 pages long (best to stay at 1 if you can,) and are used to convey information. Example, say I was trying to lobby pipe repairs for a rural municipality. I would need a white paper that had statistics on quality of water urban and rural, new development and old. Graphs are the best way to interpret statistics as most people can understand them. Before I knew about this web sight, I had one of 2 options: 1, Data mine NGO's and other information organizations for information and graphs about my topic, 2 collect the raw data, input it, and then make excel graphs (yes, there is technically a 3, hire someone, but I don't get jobs with budgets like that yet, or i am the someone they hire.) That scenario is why this web-sight is great, it has the data already, it will order, compute, and graph the data for me. Obviously this wont work for data the web-sight doesn't have, but it is so easy to check this web-sight for your data, that it wont be a big deal to check first, and if it does have your data, you have saved a tremendous amount of time.

While I have not yet had the opportunity as of this writing to use this web-sight professionally, my time with it academically has been very nice, and I can see its potential for the upcoming legislative session.