Thread by @wolfewylie

When I first joined the federal government, the structure of the organization was deeply confusing to me. Too many acronyms, so many lines of reporting, the sheer size of the place. It's a difficult place to learn.

So I built a tool.

Today I can share it with all of you:

I wanted an easy visual resource to show me where any team is and who they report to: Give me a sense of it all. That data came from GEDS: the Government of Canada's employee phone book.

geds-sage.gc.ca/en/GEDS/?pgid=…

The GEDS data is part of our #OpenData portal here: open.canada.ca/data/en/datase…

But uncompressed it's over 800MB of JSON and it's meant to describe each employee, not the structure of the organization.

So I wrote a little script to invert it and use each employee's reporting line to reverse-engineer an org chart for the whole of government. That starts to look like this:

This exercise reduces the 808MB JSON file down to a much more reasonable 8MB, or just a few hundred KB per department. WIN! Now on to visualization. I used the @MiroHQ API to build out the org chart of any department anyone wants to see.

This was fun math to get the layout right, I'm not gonna lie. But once we're in @MiroHQ we can start to zoom in on teams, link teams together and even search for teams within a broad structure.

And suddenly the entire organization of any government department is demystified, and collaborative work becomes easily visualized! FUN! The front-end lets you pick any department, and one of three layout choices (horizontal, vertical left-aligned and vertical right-aligned).

Because this is all #OpenData the code behind it is here, and that page includes instructions for how to install and use the tool: github.com/wolfewylie/gov…

And, because it's the federal government, the tool is entirely English/Francais bilingual.