Findicator

» see findikaattori.fi as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Findicator opened in 2009 as a joint project between Statistics Finland and the Prime Minister's Office. The premise was that a country ought to be able to look at itself on one page. About a hundred indicators, each one a single chart with the numbers underneath it and a short note explaining what was being counted, updated whenever the underlying statistic was released. Inflation sat next to life expectancy, long-term unemployment next to police-recorded crime next to greenhouse gas emissions. Every one of them was free, published in three languages, with no login and no cookie wall.

Two prime ministers put their names behind it, Matti Vanhanen at the launch and Jyrki Katainen for the rebuild. Jocelyne Bourgon, who spent a career on how governments account for themselves, described it as real movement toward a national system of societal reporting. That is a large claim for a set of charts, and it was mostly fair. Very few countries had anything like it, and most of what they did have was buried inside a statistical agency's own database interface rather than sitting on the open web with a URL per indicator.

Then the updates stopped at the end of February 2022, and on 15 March the service closed. The notice that replaced it is two sentences long and says Statistics Finland has for the time being discontinued the maintenance of the Findicator service, which is technically outdated and deficient in accessibility.

~ the record ~

~ how a public service dies ~

Nothing dramatic happened here. There was no scandal, no budget line struck out in a hostile parliament, no vendor going under. A statistics agency looked at a thirteen-year-old codebase, weighed it against Finland's accessibility obligations for public sector websites, and decided it could not keep serving it in good conscience.

Accessibility is the detail worth sitting with. The EU web accessibility directive applies to public sector bodies, and a service built in 2009 was built before any of that was enforceable. Retrofitting a hundred interactive charts to meet it costs more than the charts cost to build. So the honest options were rewrite or close, and a small agency with a statistical database to run chose close.

~ where the numbers went ~

The closure notice does the decent thing and lists replacements, one per indicator, which is more effort than most shutdowns take. Inflation goes to the StatFin database, along with the GDP figures and the age structure of the population. Import and export numbers move to Finnish Customs. Homicide goes to the University of Helsinki's Institute of Criminology and Legal Policy, and the link is Finnish only.

That list is the whole loss in miniature. Every number survives and every number now lives somewhere else, behind a different interface, in a different language, under a different institution. Findicator's actual product was never the data. It was the single address.

~ the funny part ~

I have spent enough of my working life pulling Turkish figures out of TUIK to know exactly what Findicator was worth. Our numbers are all published too, and getting a clean series out of them means a database query interface, a spreadsheet download and a certain amount of squinting at footnotes. A page you can send to somebody with a chart already drawn on it is a different kind of object, and the Finnish government spent thirteen years operating one.

The domain has no address record at all today. Search engines still hold the old indicator pages in their indexes, so findikaattori.fi/en/1 for inflation still turns up in results and resolves to nothing.

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