Mapping civic education in Europe by Sergio Galán

There are hundreds of organizations in Europe working in fields related to the concept of “Civic Education”. They somehow contribute to providing a set of civic competencies to manage social conflicts, cope with complexity and uncertainty, and comprehend the disruptions to democracy.

For the first time, there is a project to map the connections of those organizations. The Civics Innovation HUB - our client - has conducted a survey among 300 of them in 21 European countries. They came to us with the result of their survey, asking for advice on how to make all the collected information available on-line.

Iteration after iteration we ended up developing a data platform made of three main sections:

- a European overview (on the home page)
- several country profiles
- a long scrollable view of the aggregated data

For which we developed a few custom visualizations and implemented some other more conventional ones.

Organizations are the main entity of the survey and are represented, consistently over the site, by a data-based *fingerprint* that represents three main aspects: the type of entity, the main field of work, and the civic education focus, in a sort of bubbly radial plot.

The most sophisticated visualization we created for this project is a radial network diagram that shows the connections (collaborations) among organizations for each country.

- Users can choose the criteria in which every node is sorted around the circle.
- A filter function allows for reducing the number of organizations displayed by pushing the non-selected ones to an orbit further away from the center.
- And finally, by selecting one organization, the corresponding node moves to the center of the diagram, reshaping the network diagram, while a detail panel opens from the right.

The sum of these three interactions creates a quite complete explorable device.

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The home page opens with a clustered and zoomable map of Europe, shows each and every organization involved in the survey – as a list or by several country matrix diagrams – and gives access to the section dedicated to presenting the overall aggregated data; there, users can scroll – question by question – a long list of diagrams (heatmaps, stacked bars, and bar charts) paired with a short contextual text describing some of the insight of the survey.

The platform is a multipurpose solution that enables our client to display, update and reuse their data in different contexts. A printable version of every diagram is available through the control panel. Our own integration with a "nocode Database" (Seatable) allows current data updates or new data collection, by the creation of new polls.