Case study 02 / 03 · Ceará State Government · 2021–2023
Big Data Social
Front-end engineer (multidisciplinary team)
Ceará's public analytics platform for social-protection programs: dashboards and maps covering benefits that reach hundreds of thousands of families.
- React
- D3.js
- Visx
- Leaflet
The problem
The State of Ceará runs social programs at serious scale — Cartão Mais Infância alone reaches ~150,000 families, Vale Gás Social has served 450,000+ — but the data behind them lived in internal systems. The government needed a public, transparent window into social-protection data: dashboards for decision-makers and citizens alike, covering indicators across all 184 municipalities.
The outcome
Big Data Social became the public face of Ceará's social-protection data and a daily tool for government teams, who use its dashboards to guide program decisions. The portal today reports 119,000+ families visited across 182 municipalities and R$193M/year in tracked investment.
Highlights
- Built the public portal and the Analíticos e Anuários dashboard module on a React SPA
- Data visualization with D3, Visx, and interactive Leaflet choropleth maps of all 184 municipalities
- Kept dense dashboards responsive with memoized, virtualization-aware rendering over pre-aggregated data
- Accessibility as a requirement, not a feature — screen-reader support and VLibras integration for a statewide public audience
The long version
Readme.
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.
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