When we launched The Intelligencer, the idea was to have a space that was something of a laboratory for data journalism and reported stories. Some of the things I have experimented with in this space have fallen flat and some have shown profound results. I am proud of every attempt. The goal was to always be delivering something a little bit different to MinnPost readers, and, as was the case with the crowdsourcing done here, to find new ways to make readers a part of the story — or at least a part of reporting it.

I am sad to be saying goodbye to MinnPost this week, and this will be my final Intelligencer post. Many thanks to the indefatigable Joel Kramer for giving me this amazing opportunity. Thanks also to my editor, Roger Buoen, who is as level-headed, thoughtful and supportive an editor as any reporter could ask for. Another pile of thanks to Corey Anderson, whose corner of MinnPost headquarters is the site's engine room.

The experiments in this space got much more interesting when I began collaborating with Kaeti Hinck, MinnPost's Director of News Technology, and intern Kevin Schaul (who should really have the title "Master Intern"). Because of Hinck and Schaul, I am leaving MinnPost with the satisfaction of knowing that the kind of work I loved doing while at MinnPost will continue, and that MinnPost's toolbox for data journalism and other forms of online reporting and storytelling will only grow (and you can watch it grow, at the Data & Apps page).

Most importantly, I want to thank every person who contributed to my crowdsourcing efforts or joined a discussion in the comments. I never took the quality of discussion and reader participation at MinnPost for granted; it surprised and delighted me all over again with each new post. Seriously, did you people go to some sort of civility camp? Can we make it mandatory?

So thank you, thank you, thank you. I have loved being part of this team. MinnPost itself is an experiment, and the people working every day to make it a success are not just keeping MinnPost strong, they are inventing a new business model for journalism — a truly noble and critical endeavor.

If you want to know more about what is next for me, find me on Twitter (I am usually there). Or you can just return to the MinnPost homepage and read some really good reporting by really good people.

Eighty-six percent of the nation’s largest counties have more income equality than Hennepin County, according to an analysis of the investigative journalism site ProPublica.

ProPublica created an app that shows income inequality in the country's 818 largest counties, including the 10 most populous counties in Minnesota.

Income inequality is measured using the Gini index. The index, explains ProPublica's Al Shaw, is "a statistical measure that ranges from zero, which would describe a community in which every citizen has precisely the same income, to one, which would describe the opposite extreme, in which one person receives literally all of the income."

For example, Ramsey County’s Gini index is 0.46, according to ProPublica, which means that 72 percent of the nation’s biggest counties have more income equality. Hennepin County’s index is 0.479. At the other end of  the list of Minnesota’s big counties is Sherburne with an index 0.361, which, according to ProPublica, means that zero percent of the country’s largest counties have better income equality.

Nationally, 99% of counties have more income equality than Manhattan.

Here's a look at 10 Minnesota counties on the list, ordered by ProPublica’s Gini index (the "% better" column represents the percent of populous counties in the United States with better income equality):

Have a look at the data yourself, using ProPublica's elegant app, Income Inequality Near You.

Go straight to the interactive table: Minnesota's failed banks.

Failed banks have become the stuff of Great Recession lore. They got too close to the toxic assets game and went under. Surely we're coming out of that mess now, right? A quick glance at the failed bank count for Minnesota would suggest that we are. So far in 2011, just two Minnesota's banks have failed. Last year by this time there had been seven failed banks.

Other data from the Minnesota Department of Commerce tells a different story. They keep a watch list of problem banks, and the number of banks on that list are at a record high.

In December of last year, there were 111 banks on that list. As of September 2011, there 109 banks on that list, or just over 36 percent of Minnesota's FDIC-insured banks in Minnesota.

The rise has been steady: 2008 ended with just 51 banks on the list. There were 91 banks on the list in 2009.

These were typically not banks dealing closely in the bad mortgages that got us into this recession. They dealt mostly with the developers building the houses that would eventually be attached to bad mortgages.

Maybe they would make a loan to a real estate developer who would use the money to buy a parcel of land and divide it up. Those parcels may have been valued at $80,000 when the money was handed out, but worth just $30,000 now. The big banks struggled with this sort of thing and mostly made it out alive. The smaller banks haven't been so lucky.

After the subprime mortgage tsunami, of course, came unemployment and, for many, a drop in deposits.

River Bank in Wyoming, Minn., was the latest bank failure in the state to fail, and the 75th to fail nationwide this year. It went down with $417 million in assets and just $379 million in deposits — a gap of close to $40 million, the largest gap of the banks that have failed in Minnesota since the economy tanked.

Should we be worried? Predicting what will happen next is impossible. The FDIC keeps its own list of problem banks, and that number went down by 23 banks in the 4th Quarter, from 888 to 865. The Minnesota list is a bit more broad, but not by much.

We've posted something of an autopsy of Minnesota's failed banks. Click on a bank near where you live (they are scattered all over the state) and see how badly it failed.

Did you have an account at any of these banks? What was the experience like for you? Any experiences you share I'll pull up into this post.

See all of our data visualization projects at our new data and maps hub.

Go straight to the map: Minnesota exports to the European Union in 2011

A European recession — and maybe worse — is a real possibility. There has been much talk about the United States' dependence on a stable Europe. All told, exports to to the European Union hit $240 billion last year.

Minnesota exports to the EU totaled close to $4 billion, or close to 22 percent of the state's total exports. The percentage for the first two quarters of 2011 has hovered right around 20 percent, according to the Department of Employment and Economic Development's quarterly reports on export activity.

Of Minnesota's top 25 manufacturing export markets in 2010, nine of them were members of the European Union. What sorts of exports are we talking about? Here's a sample: $72 million in plastics to Germany, $170 million in computers and electronics to the United Kingdom, $218 million in machinery to Belgium. The list is long: chemicals, fabricated metals, transportation equipment — it goes on and on like that.

Of the fasted-growing country markets for Minnesota exports in 2010, three were European Union members. Growth in Hungary and Poland was driven by computers and electronics. In Finland, the growth area was transportation equipment.

If they are worried over at the Minnesota Trade Office, nobody is saying. "We are not expecting any major change to Minnesota exports," says Executive Director Katie Clark. "Greece is our 66th largest export market and exports to the European Union accounts for only 20 percent of our total."

Still, she says, they are watching carefully, and there is a teaching moment in all of this for small- to mid-sized businesses. "We encourage people to export in multiple markets," she says. "Only 1 percent of companies across the United States export. Of them, 58 percent of them export to just one country. Canada is Minnesota's largest market — larger than the next four on the list — and luckily Canada is pretty stable." But if some reason that were to change, a lot of Minnesota companies would be in trouble.

I've mapped Minnesota exports to the EU. Click on any EU country to see how much money they've spent on Minnesota exports in 2011, and where they rank among other EU countries.

Today we're launching the MinnPost Data & Maps page, where you can view the best of our work in mapping and data visualization. All of the tools we use are open source. What does that mean? Put simply, it means there are no trade secrets here. Anything we can do you can do too — and for free.

Thanks to open source tools like Google Fusion Tables, ProPublica's TableSetter and TimelineSetter, and a JavaScript toolkit called InfoVis, we've been able map the growth of poverty in the suburbs, post searchable tables of campaign contributions, illuminate the lesser-known milestones of Michele Bachmann's life and career in politics, evaluate the work of first-term legislators and give you the opportunity to fix Minnesota's deficit.

We are constantly experimenting with new ways to present data and tell stories. Your feedback is essential at every step. If you haven't tried one or more of these tools, have at it now! And tell us about the experience. What can we do differently? What can we do better? What data would you like to see us wrangle into a map or an app? As always, we look forward to the conversation.

To go straight to the maps: Where our newest citizens are from and where they have settled.

Close to half of the foreign born in the United States are naturalized citizens. In 2010, the United States naturalized more than 600,000 legal permanent residents and denied close to 60,000 petitions for naturalization.

Naturalizations decreased by 40 percent between 2008 and 2010, but that number is a bit misleading. There was a huge spike between 2007 and 2008, which is explained in a Migration Policy Institute report:

Half of those naturalized in 2010 lived in California, New York, Florida and Texas. Roughly 9,000 call Minnesota home.

I've created two maps using Department of Homeland Security data from Fiscal Year 2010. Each illuminating Minnesota's diversity. It's small "d" diversity, I know, but still.

Where Minnesota's recently naturalized citizens come from
The first map shows the birth places of Minnesota's newest naturalized citizens. Click on any dot and see how many of the new Minnesotans were born there. National totals are there too. Here are the top 10 birth countries:

• Somalia: 2,021
• Ethiopia: 813
• India: 586
• Laos: 567
• Liberia: 444
• Mexico: 370
• Vietnam: 291
• China: 246
• Nigeria: 192
• Kenya: 180

It should surprise nobody to see Somalia at the top. Of the 5,728 Somalis naturalized in the United States in 2010, 35 percent of them live in Minnesota.

On the other end of the spectrum are newly naturalized Mexicans. Of the 67,000 naturalized in the United States in 2010, not even 1 percent were in Minnesota.

These tallies include people from countries the United States is at war with. In 2010, 12 of the 2,230 Afghans who became citizens were in Minnesota and 40 of the 3,489 Iraqis were here.

Where Minnesota's recently naturalized citizens are living
The second map I put together shows where in the state the newly naturalized Minnesotan's are living. Click on any county shaded red to see a breakdown of birth region and the cities that claim them now. (Counties not shaded had no newly naturalized citizens.)

Close to 8,000 of them lived in the metro area, which is treated as one cluster in the DHS data, so I omitted it from the map. Here's the metro breakdown of birth regions:

• Europe: 687
• Asia and Oceanic: 2,575
• Africa: 3,825
• Mexico: 252
• Other North America: 269
• South America: 307

Rochester tops the outstate cities with 366 newly naturalized citizens in 2010, mostly from Asia and Africa. St. Cloud comes in at a distant second, with 171 people, again, mostly from Asia and Africa.

Owatonna jumps out as a place where nearly all of its 50 residents naturalized last year were from one region: Africa.

Enjoy the maps and feel free to report back and tell me what you found. Happy clicking!

Yesterday we added a new tool to the MinnPost data toolbox. It's called TableSetter and it allows us to publish searchable tables of information. If you've ever looked at data in Excel, you know what to do. There is a search box for filtering information and you can click on any column heading to sort the data.

We used TableSetter, a piece of open source goodness created by the good people at ProPublica, to give our readers access to Federal Election Commission data on contributions to the presidential campaigns of Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty.

For each candidate, there is a table of top donors and a table of Minnesota-only donors. See donor names, employers, occupations, cities and sates. And see the contribution amount and the date the check was written.

If you used any of these tables when we posted them yesterday, we want to hear about the experience. If you haven't seen the tables yet, here are links to all four:

• Minnesota donors to Michele Bachmann in the 3rd quarter
• Minnesota donors to Tim Pawlenty in the 3rd quarter
• Top donors to Michele Bachmann in the 3rd quarter
• Top donors to Tim Pawlenty in the 3rd quarter

I think of things like this in a couple of ways. At the very least, it's a dynamic way of footnoting our reporting. At best, it empowers our readers to be part of the reporting process. Maybe you see something in the data that our reporter didn't mention. Or maybe you have a question we really ought to answer.

And speaking more broadly, what kind of data would you like to see us publish using TableSetter? Be as specific or as general as you like, and we'll see what we can do.

Thanks as always for experimenting with us.

Incumbents always have their campaign engines idling. In our political system, where the big spender is often the big winner, that means keeping the piggy bank full. Minnesota's House incumbents are doing just that, and we've visualized the cash on hand for each congressional district's incumbent.

For a full analysis, see MinnPost Washington correspondent Devin Henry's post on just-released Federal Election Commission data — just scroll past the Bachmann stuff, it is all there, including the fundraising accomplishments of the challengers so far, which has been minimal, with a few exceptions, most notably Chip Cravaack's 8th District challenger, Tarryl Clark, who raised $20,000 more than the incumbent in the 3rd quarter.

When you get to the map, click on any district to see piggy bank status and fundraising numbers for 2011 (through the 3rd quarter, which ended on Sept. 30). Here are the war chest rankings:

1. Erik Paulsen, 3rd District: $903,885

2. John Kline, 2nd District: $686,041

3. Collin Peterson, 7th District: $609,898

4. Tim Walz, 1st District: $503,662

5. Chip Cravaack, 8th District: $382,507

6. Keith Ellison, 5th District: $157,355

7. Betty McCollum, 4th District: $107,162

There is somebody missing here. Michele Bachmann is the 6th District incumbent, you all know that. What we don't know is what will become of her presidential ambitions. There is no active House candidate in 6th District right now, but be assured Bachmann will bring her money with her if she decides to run for the lesser office.

The OccupyMN protests are one week old today, and headed into their second weekend. The cold and wet weather crept in this week — so far the organizers' greatest adversary in their effort to keep the Government Center Plaza populated with protesters, who have been sleeping in the elements, having been denied permission to pitch tents.

Now they are not asking for permission, they are demanding it. Here's a statement released today:

As OccupyMN reaches its one-week anniversary of the occupation of the People’s Plaza, we continue to stand in solidarity and remain committed to fighting for the 99%. We have been sleeping overnight without tents in the rain and cold. As the weather gets colder, for the health and safety of all of the occupiers exercising their first amendment rights, we decided at last night’s general assembly that we will hold a rally and set up tents this Saturday at 4pm. Just like food and water, we believe that shelter is a basic human right.

We have met repeatedly with the sheriff and chief of police but they have yet to resolve the issue. We have mobilized supporters to call the commissioner and county administrator Richard Johnson to petition we be allowed to set up tents. We will physically deliver petitions this afternoon to the county, and we are hopeful that we will be granted permission to set up tents as other occupations around the country have been allowed to.

Allowing protestors to stay the night in tents is not a new or unreasonable request. Earlier this year here in Minneapolis, a group protesting for fair wages was allowed to stay overnight in tents for 12 days during a hunger strike at Cub Foods.

We hope the police will not arrest peaceful demonstrators, but we have been training participants in non-violent civil disobedience to ensure our safety in the case arrests are made. Two more trainings will be held at the People’s Plaza today at 1:00pm and Saturday at 2:00pm. A safe zone will be designated for those who do not wish to risk arrest. We invite all Minnesotans to join us and stand in solidarity with OccupyMN and all other occupations around the world.

We are the 99%. Stand with us on Saturday at 4pm.

Other, less confrontational plans are underway also. There is a posted schedule for teach-ins, ranging from "demystifying wall street" to "mindfulness for activists."

Occupy Wall Street vs. Tea Party
There has better chatter from the start about similarities between the Tea Party and participants in the Occupy Wall Street protests. Mostly, those comparisons have focused on tact and tactics. Blogger James Sinclair has gone so far as to create a Venn diagram to show what he sees as the intersecting interests of the two movements.

"Yeah, I'm oversimplifying, but only a little," Sinclair writes. "The greatest threat to our economy is neither corporations nor the government. The greatest threat to our economy is both of them working together. There are currently two sizable coalitions of angry citizens that are almost on the same page about that, and they're too busy insulting each other to notice."

Former Tea Party member advises Occupy Wall Street
There is a lively conversation in the comments following a disillusioned former Tea Party member's message to Occupy Wall Street participants and organizers. Here's some of what he had to say:

If this new Occupy Wall Street movement is to survive, here's what needs to be done.

Loudly denounce violence and disavow the violent rabblerousers of the movement. They do not help the cause.

Be image conscious. Present your best face and call out those who act like fools within the movement. People are more likely to pay attention to you in your Sunday dress and bringing homemade food, than when you are drinking a bottle of Snapple and chomping on Big Macs while you are looking like a slacker rich hipster/unwashed hippie stereotype.

...Be wary of large donations from special interest groups or non-profit corporations that were not involved this movement from the inception. Special interests groups are not your allies. Non-profit corporations are still corporations, and unfortunately, too many of them care more about donations than doing the right thing. Killing a movement with kindness is easy.

...If you hear people who you know are part of the machine saying stuff like, "Progressives need to be more like the tea party," don't accept it on face value. Always follow the money, study past statements and groups they claim to be part of. If such people are suddenly telling you to emulate organizations that they once consistently denounced as evil or racist, without any rhyme or reason, they are lying to you.

An alliance? Really?
Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic has gone so far as to suggest that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street should cooperate:

Don't misunderstand. Mutual wariness between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street makes sense. These are people whose visions for the future of the country are very different — on certain issues of import, and in races between certain candidates, they ought to be battling one another.

...Tea partiers and Occupy Wall Street protestors could vote for different candidates in 2012, fight vociferously about the ideal size of the federal government, and meanwhile cooperate to prevent big business and co-opted bureaucrats from capturing money that could be better spent (on tax cuts or deficit reduction or infrastructure or social welfare benefits, depending on the outcome of another fight). If the United States and the USSR struck mutually beneficial treaty agreements during the 1980s, if the ACLU and the NRA have usefully allied on civil liberties issues, despite their strikingly different donor bases, there is no reason save stubbornness and political immaturity that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street can't find areas on which to cooperate. Perhaps the Cato Institute and the Center for American Progress can co-host the summit, and Rand Paul and Dennis Kucinich can co-sponsor the resulting reform legislation.  

Is all of this poppycock, or have the comparisons occurred to you also? Looking just at OccupyMN, it would seem way too early for this conversation. But looking at OccupyMN as an extension of the much more robust and discussed Occupy Wall Street protests, the conversation feels inevitable. Your thoughts?

The Occupy Wall Street protests have spread to more than two dozen cities. Last Friday, the protest came to Minneapolis. OccupyMN is now in its seventh day. For those of you have have not visited or taken part in the protests, I can say one thing with absolute certainty: It is not like anything you think it is.

How can I know? Because it is not like anything we've seen from the grassroots in recent decades. The Iraq War inspired wave after wave of national and international protest, but these kinds of "occupations" are usually undertaken by small groups of inspired people and they do not spread.

It is not just the movement that has spread, but the template for a people's occupation.

(I was live tweeting from OccupyMN Tuesday, and I've included links to my tweets throughout this post.)

Twice daily there is a General Assembly, where conflicts are resolved, demands debated, and talking points honed. It is a closely managed process. Anybody who wants to speak gives their name to a moderator. When somebody is speaking, there is interaction from the rest of the people gathered, but it is mostly silent. There are hand signals and everybody knows them. There is a signal for "get to the point" and one to show your opposition to a point. There are signals of approval and a desire for direct response to a comment.

The discussion is so orderly and focused on process that it took me 15 minutes of observation on Tuesday to realize they were discussing something rather explosive. Supporters of the controversial political activist Lyndon LaRouche had propped up a giant poster of President Obama with a Hitler mustache. "So we're the Tea Party now?" one passerby quipped.

A protest with a sponsor or a more traditional organizing committee would likely have just told the sign's owners that they were not welcome and send them packing. This occupation, above all, is about the ultimate expressions of free speech, and that was the matter under discussion. Some wanted the sign gone; some wanted it less visible, maybe on the ground; and some insisted it should stay where it is because free speech is free speech.

One General Assembly participant explained that the movement had been striving from its start in New York City to keep the faces of political figures out of the protests, that these protests were not about specific politicians, but a culture of greed.

There was no clear resolution. Somebody came to invite any interested protesters to attend the Hennepin County Board meeting and most attendees popped up and headed for the doors of the Government Center.

About two dozen protestors lined up at the metal detectors made their way to the 24th floor, where they were asked by an OccupyMN organizer to be respectful and just listen. And that is exactly what they did. As the county board discussed bridge reconditioning, lead hazards and bituminous overlays, rows of mostly young protesters in ripped jeans and ball caps listened, laughing with one board member who was laughing at a process misstep and focusing intently as the board moved from one agenda item to the next.

At a march to Wells Fargo that day, the movement showed its capability to produce bodies — even on a Tuesday morning — and its diversity. The crowd of hundreds who marched to Wells Fargo were diverse in race and age.

Filling up the lobby of Wells Fargo, another hand signal came into play. Fists in the air don't really mean what they used to. When the fists punch the air at OccupyMN, it means be quiet. It was a remarkable thing to witness. A cacophony of chants echoing inside a cavernous lobby went silent in a blink so organizers could call upstairs to request a meeting with the Wells Fargo CEO. There was no meeting, so the fists went down, and the chanting started up again: "We'll be back! We'll be back! We'll be back!"

No matter what you think about the tactics of the protesters, it would be foolish not to participate in the conversation they have started. What do the protests mean to you? Spare me the quips about jobless hippies — it doesn't get us anywhere and it demonstrates ignorance about what is actually happening downtown and across the country.

Let's talk about the issues: What have you heard from the protesters that resonates with you? What have you experienced at the protests that would help people to understand the movement better? What does the term "People's Agenda" mean to you?

Or to borrow a question from the OccupyMN discussion box downtown, "What is your story?"

Speak up in the comments section below and I'll pull what you are saying up into this post.

UPDATE: I am not pulling comments into the post. What ended up happening was a pretty long conversation with lots of specific replies. Best just to read through it where it is! Thanks everybody for your participation.