About
Every "best places to live" list is somebody else's weighting of somebody else's data, delivered as a rank with no way to see inside it. You can't tell why one county beat another, you can't tell what was actually measured, and you can't tell the list that you care about one thing more than another.
Eden Index inverts that. It's a transparent, reproducible score for every US county and metro area, built from twelve categories of federal open data, where the weighting is yours to change and the gaps are stated rather than hidden.
A default weighting is an editorial judgment, and we say so — a "neutral" default is exactly the dishonesty this project exists to push back against. Where a place has no data for a category, we mark it as unmeasured and redistribute that weight, instead of quietly filling the gap with an average and presenting the result with the same confidence as everywhere else.
The methodology, the weighting vector, and what's measured versus what isn't all travel with every score — versioned, and visible whenever you look at one.
The same factset that powers the app is served by a public, read-only API at api.clerkofeden.com, documented and free to build on. Eden Index is a data product as much as an app, and the attribution and limitations travel with the data wherever it's used.
Eden Index is an independent project. If you want to reach the person behind it, see Contact.