I'm noticing how joining a clean list of municipal entities to ad hoc market research is a first-class thing I'd need from any townmunculus. This morning I did a LinkedIn quest to catalog 2nd order connections of a client with whom I'm wrapping up a successful project phase. At the end of this week, I'm getting underway with a consultant to outsource some more market research and will need useful work to feed them.
A data structure to deal with this situation is an ever-widening spreadsheet that may become an SQL database. A core use-case of townmunculus may be, through a nice type-ahead, to expose a usable primary key that could help me join ad hoc spreadsheets to the app's master repository of data with minimal keystrokes.
My city_prospecting_list.xlsx already feels stale: city managers have moved around, etc. Staleness needs to be a first-class feature of townmunculus. I am feeling like a good plan here will be to segregate town names, borders, and populations (which are "slowly varying" and might refresh along with tool version increments by rebuilding the database from Census info) from business details like key person contact info, the fiscal year start, and the RFP procurement threshold (which are sparse, "proprietary," and quite mutable from my observations of localgov business).
Possibly a last_reviewed field in the business details database would indicate staleness.
I'm noticing how joining a clean list of municipal entities to ad hoc market research is a first-class thing I'd need from any
townmunculus. This morning I did a LinkedIn quest to catalog 2nd order connections of a client with whom I'm wrapping up a successful project phase. At the end of this week, I'm getting underway with a consultant to outsource some more market research and will need useful work to feed them.A data structure to deal with this situation is an ever-widening spreadsheet that may become an SQL database. A core use-case of
townmunculusmay be, through a nice type-ahead, to expose a usable primary key that could help me join ad hoc spreadsheets to the app's master repository of data with minimal keystrokes.My
city_prospecting_list.xlsxalready feels stale: city managers have moved around, etc. Staleness needs to be a first-class feature oftownmunculus. I am feeling like a good plan here will be to segregate town names, borders, and populations (which are "slowly varying" and might refresh along with tool version increments by rebuilding the database from Census info) from business details like key person contact info, the fiscal year start, and the RFP procurement threshold (which are sparse, "proprietary," and quite mutable from my observations of localgov business).Possibly a
last_reviewedfield in the business details database would indicate staleness.