The ward reports from this project are published at https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/census2020/home/ward-reports.html
These reports are based on demographic data from the US Census Bureau, open data from https://data.cityofchicago.org/, and projections provided by Civis Analytics
The reports provide current Census response rates combined with demographic data at a ward level, so that Aldermanic offices can better understand performance within their wards.
The reports are rendered on a weekly basis as static, stand alone html files, but this project could be easily modified to run as an application on a Shiny Server.
The current final reports are located in ./WardReport_v2, and the actual report is WardReport_v2/WardReport.Rmd. If you are curious to see how the report works, or to adapt it to your own needs, this is a good place to start. By default this will open the lasest cached file in the project, and the current ward number from WardReport_v2\cur_ward.yaml.
The production process to generate the reports is as follows:
First create a new cache run WardReport_v2/10_refresh_cache.R. This is necesary to speed up the render process. The cache includes data for allwards, but the static dashboard is rendered for just one subset.
Second, to render the reports for each ward run WardReport_v2/20_render_reports.R. This chagnes the current ward number in WardReport_v2\cur_ward.yaml and renders the report based on the actual report markdown file WardReport_v2/WardReport.Rmd, and saves the results in an output folder.
As a side note, the report could easily be made into a modular application in Shiny's reactive framework.
The final step is to email aldermanic offics on the distributon list mantained with the Civis platform. This is accomplished though WardReport_v2\ward_reports.py. Within Civis Analytics' census platform, the Census Intelligence Center, this script will run in a containerized docker environment that automates the email distribution process.