Sankey

One of my main claims to fame right now is that I built the Sankey display for DataRepublican’s website, which she liked enough to make me a co-developer. I did that because I was looking at one of her org relationship charts and I wanted the connections between them to be sized based on the dollar flow between the orgs.

In data visualization terms this is a Sankey diagram, after Captain Matthew Sankey (Irish engineer, Royal Engineers). In 1898 he published it in The Thermal Efficiency of Steam Engines to show heat through a steam plant: stream width is quantity, waste branches are losses, and the sadly thin branch is actual work on the pistons. Charles Minard’s 1812 Napoleon map used width-as-flow earlier; Sankey is why we use it for energy and money. I learned about Sankey diagrams at a cybersecurity startup where we used it for network flows.

datarepublican.com/browse does this for 990 grant dollars, and shows the US Government as a node in the flow. Here is a static picture of the Uniparty so you get the idea. You can hover over any node to get the name, EIN, and money flowing in and out. Hover over a grant line to get the details of that flow. Click a node to get the Grumpy Take on that org. The pink loops are the circular dollars: money flowing into donor-advised funds often flows into other donor-advised funds, which makes the flow more opaque.

The live version has more features and lets you adjust the view parameters. Be warned, it takes a while to load the first time, though it caches all the data locally, so you can come back quickly if you like exploring the NGO universe.

Open the Uniparty live

Credit @DataRepublican. This page is the static snapshot plus links into Grumpy takes. The live tool is hers.

All source code is at github.com/twinforces/datarepublican. I am currently working in the grokrefactor3 branch to pull the 990 data down into a local database so I can do more detailed analysis. You can get the data from Hugging Face, more here.