How I came accross data…

Last year, I started working at my university’s bar, the Pic’Asso (“Asso” as association). I had the best position of all, responsible of IT.

Of course, like in most jobs on Earth, I had to do some repetitive tasks that I don’t personnaly like, that take time, and that are almost useless. Having to add articles to the register, or having to put videos on the tvs is not what I like doing the most. However, sometimes, and those are the rare times you love your job, I could do something fun, anything I wanted.

Some time ago, a friend of mine, and by chance the treasurer of the student’s halls (the Pic’Asso) at the same time, had the idea of simulating some sort of market law with our prices. He wanted all beers to cost more or less depending on their consumption; he called it The Wall Street of Beer.

So, obviously, we decided to start development. I began thinking of the algorithm needed to run the WS of Beer, and my colleague started to develop the calculator — in python :( . I wanted prices to rise as consumption rose, that way people that drank the same beers would be “forced” — by the prices — to test other beers, less bought, and thus less pricy.

Once we completed the algorithm and it was all coded, we had to show the new prices to the public, which was the hard part. At the time, we chose to make a table listing all our beers and their respective prices, just like in a stock market. We displayed the original price, the new price, the old price, the name, and obviously a green or red arrow along with the percentage of change.

This kind of representation was obviously easy to make, but very effective. People could directly see the price of their favorite and oh-not-so-favorite beers, and instantly choose which to buy. However one thing was missing,, they could not see a stock history of what had changed…

Some time later,

we hosted a big party in our university’s parking lot. We wanted to make it “transparent”, meaning that every student would know what they were paying for and what was being sold — the law in France makes it so any association must have a financial equilibrium of 0 at the end of every mandate. We only sold 3 kinds of beer, and all at the same price. However, we did not want them to know exactly how much money was being spent, but how much was being buyed. So we went for “one beer” as our base uni, and we decided to make a simple graph, which plotted the total number of beers sold every 10 minutes. And we added thresholds, to make it a little bit more interactive.

We displayed our graph in a big wall on the parking lot, which was right in front of the main stage where a DJ played his music. Everyone was able to see it, and everyone participated in its growth. It was beautiful.