As an analysis site inspired by the principles of the open source movement, our job would be incomplete if we didn't provide our readers with the tools to look at the numbers on their own. What good is all this talk about analytical openness if you can't take a look at our analysis yourself? So it is in that spirit that this column will cover free and open-source tools to allow interested individuals, cash-strapped local campaigns, or really anyone with the desire to do some number-crunching on their own to participate.

For this first Cool Tools column, I'd like to spend a little time explaining the open source movement that we'll be taking advantage of in future installments. From the Open Source Initiative:

Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

As noted elsewhere, we drew our inspiration for the site from the open source movement: with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. The open source mentality of allowing everyone access to the "sausage-making" process behind what you do allows for much faster identification of any potential problems and thus a more robust end result. The open source software we will use, therefore, makes for a natural ideological mesh with our goals to make public the predicates and processes behind modern political analysis, both to educate anyone interested in the nitty-gritty of statistical analysis and to shed sunlight on sometimes shoddy methods that can lead to misleading or downright false data.

In future columns, we will be discussing how anyone can get started with a basic set of open source tools to turn any old computer lying around into a capable number-cruncher for analysis work. We will then cover the usage of open-source analysis tools which are nearly as powerful (and in some cases, more powerful) than their respective closed-source commercial analogs. So keep your eye on this space, and join us next Thursday as I start us on our open-source tool kit with a discussion of how to set up a powerful, user-friendly Linux installation.