Carbon Brief: Policy grids
This week we published two new policy grids; Australia and Canada. This is a format/ tool-chain I developed last year for the glut of elections, allowing us to concisely summarise party & candidate manifesto positions on climate issues. By keeping the design simple and focused on mobile users we've also been able to put it to use in a couple of additional contexts like the tracking 30x30 biodiversity pledges.
So far we've published eleven (thirteen if you include translations).
Behind the scenes there's a Google spreadsheet per grid that journalists are able to colaborate on (every one at CB uses spreadsheets the whole time so there's no learning curve). When the text is ready we trigger a Github action which collects the data via the sheets API and then publishes static pages generated by SvelteKit.
Google sheets input and static HTML/CSS/JS output gives us a decent interface for collaborating on the content whilst providing us with a simple and resilient way to deliver the information to our readers -- i.e. we're not using any complicated server setup with the associated support (and monetary) costs.