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ARMSFLOW.org

Comment on this project

The Idea:

What will change in the world because this Project happens?

ARMSFLOW is a data visualization which displays arms transactions globally between 1950 and 2006. ARMSFLOW provides a context for historical and contemporary geopolitical events by allowing visitors to see the international flow of weaponry, sorted by year, country, and direction of sale.

What information will people interact with to make this change?

ARMSFLOW includes 14,619 arms transactions (each is a sum of 1 year's exports) and 228 government entities. The governments of origin and destination are geocoded using Yahoo's Geocoding API. The data was used with permission from the SIPRI Arms Transfers Database in Stockholm.

What else have you done in this Cause Area?

http://www.vestaldesign.com/design/shrimp-refugee-housing/ The SHRIMP (Sustainable Housing for Refugees via Mass Production) is an attempt to bring housing and other relief to large displaced or homeless populations, especially those who have suffered in a natural disaster. It has been featured in Wired, CNET, and was recently selected for the Milan Triennale's "Una casa per tutti" exhibit in May 2008.

Cause Area:
- Public & Social Benefit
- Safety & Disaster
Cause Area Tags:
Project URL:
http://www.ARMSFLOW.org
Supporting Organization:
Vestal Design
Supporting Organization URL:
http://www.vestaldesign.com
Financial support?:
No
City:
New York
State/Region:
New York
Country:
USA

The Assessment

What kind of help or resources do you need to turn your project idea into a completed mashup?

ARMSFLOW is part of a larger project called FLOWBASE which is intended to provide users with tools to visualize flows, using enormous or inaccessible data sets. Future targets include crime databases, the CIA World Factbook, and Scorecard.org.

With additional resources, FLOWBASE will allow users to participate in the review, parsing, and interpretation of data sets. Note that the users do not *generate* the data – rather, they collaborate in its interpretation, and they correlate it across sets. They work together to attach significance to these flows.

For this reason, ARMSFLOW attempts to display information sans agenda – leaving it to the visitors to draw conclusions from the information in a participatory structure.