Recognizing the need to look at elections a different way, Patchwork Nation was born four years ago from the inspiration of Dante Chinni and built into a living project in partnership with the PBS NewsHour and the Christian Science Monitor. It focus is on delivering national data with local context while remaining visually intuitive for the reader.

The interactive map helps break down national data to analyze how it impacts communities. And the graphic visualization tool lets users see data charted and graphed by county, congressional district or community type. It puts the data in the hands of the user, allowing him or her to compare different data sets and explore national data county- by-county.

The Jefferson Institute is proud to have partnered with Patchwork Nation in their 2010 relaunch, which involved porting them to Drupal, adding a district layer to their already compelling map of U.S. counties, and deepening the delivery of data visualizations for individual counties and districts with the Knight News Challenge sponsored VIDI data visualization toolkit.

The goal of this on-line course hosted on the JI Education Hotspot and sponsored by the OSI Think Tank Fund is to help students acquire the structural and stylistic skills necessary to write more effective policy memoranda, and thereby to become better advocates for policy change. This incorporates not merely a more nuanced and strategic approach to paper construction, but to some extent, use of a rhetorical vocabulary and understanding of the elements of substance and style that they might be able to pass on to their colleagues.

The organizations receiving policy mentoring are the Caucasus Institute for Peace, Democracy and Development (CIPDD), headquartered in Tibilisi, Georgia, and the International Center for Human Development (ICHD), located in Yerevan, Armenia.