Using Plotly’s Dash to deliver public sector decision support dashboards

Building and using decision support systems is a critical competency for any public technologist. While dashboards are everywhere today, they still occupy an important and most visual artifact that appear directly in front of frontline and/or executive decision-makers.

Dashboards are amongst the most used end products of an entire process of acquiring, cleaning, and analyzing data towards answering operational questions and becoming an effective administrator of a public resource.

At ARGO, we have used R Shiny, Carto, and Tableau as our primary analytics visualization platforms. They all had their unique strengths.

R Shiny powers several tools in the Analytics Portal for the California Data Collaborative.

Carto has a commanding presence in the GIS space and allows us to deploy spatial analysis.

Tableau has largely been where we have hosted a major of our Street Maintenance (SQUID) work.

In this post, I will introduce Plotly’s DASH — an open source visualization framework that, combines the best of all the 3 mentioned platforms and packs them into an easily accessible and deployable framework.

For this post, I have repurposed one of ARGO’s more complex decision support systems, built originally in Tableau; the SONYC Siting Analysis for middle school expansion in NYC.