Overview
Big Data Social is the Ceará State Government's public analytics platform for social protection: dashboards, indicators, and maps that make the state's social-program data transparent to citizens and actionable for public managers. I worked on it for two years as a front-end engineer at a data-science lab, on a multidisciplinary team of designers, data scientists, and back-end engineers.
What I built
- The public portal — the platform's front door: program statistics, and an interactive choropleth map showing Cartão Mais Infância coverage across the state's municipalities.
- Analíticos e Anuários — the indicator dashboard module: visual panels covering social benefits, education, housing, work, and income.
Hard problems
- Data visualization at scale — dashboards aggregate data about hundreds of thousands of families across 184 municipalities. The data team served pre-aggregated endpoints; on the front end, memoized and virtualization-aware rendering kept dense D3/Visx charts and Leaflet maps responsive.
- An audience of everyone — a government platform serves every citizen, on any device. That meant screen-reader-friendly markup and VLibras (Brazilian Sign Language) integration as requirements, and data design that non-technical citizens can read.
Outcome
The platform shipped publicly and became a daily tool for the government's social-protection teams — the dashboards I built are part of how program decisions get made and communicated. As of today the portal reports 119,000+ families visited across 182 municipalities, ~150,000 families on Cartão Mais Infância, and R$193M/year in tracked investment.