The Compliance Constellation is the feature people remember. It’s an interactive scatter plot showing every Victorian council as a luminous point in a night-sky field, positioned by compliance score (x-axis) and expiry health (y-axis). Your council pulses with animated rings. Your peer group is outlined. A gold star marks the target position.
The anonymisation challenge
The hardest problem wasn’t the visualisation — it was the data governance. Councils are understandably sensitive about their compliance scores being visible to other councils. We needed a system where every council could see where they ranked without identifying specific peers.
The solution: anonymous identifiers. Each council sees their own name and position clearly, but other councils appear as anonymised points. The peer group boundary (a convex hull calculated using the Jarvis march algorithm) shows the competitive landscape without revealing individual identities.
Platform administrators and auditors can see full names for oversight purposes. This role-based anonymisation runs at the database level — Row-Level Security policies ensure the anonymisation can’t be bypassed by client-side manipulation.
Pure SVG, no charting library
We built the Constellation in pure SVG with React hooks. No D3, no Recharts, no charting library at all. Why? Because the visualisation needed to feel alive, not like a chart.
SMIL animations create the pulsing rings around the self-point. The convex hull boundary is computed client-side and expanded by 16 pixels for visual margin. Point radii scale with workforce band (small councils get smaller dots). Compliance bands (green above 85%, amber 70-84%, red below 70%) use radial gradients for a soft glow effect.
The result feels like looking at a star field — not a business chart. That was intentional.
What-If integration
The ghost dot feature connects the Constellation to the What-If Simulator. When a compliance officer selects training gaps to close in the simulator, a dashed cyan dot appears on the Constellation showing where they would move. This instant visual feedback transforms gap closure from an abstract exercise into a spatial journey: “If we close these three gaps, we move from here to here.”
Velocity tracking
Static position isn’t enough. A council at 70% compliance trending upward is in a fundamentally different situation from a council at 70% trending downward. The velocity badge shows three-month compliance trajectory: ascending, stable, or descending.
This data point alone has changed how councils prioritise training investment. Position tells you where you are. Velocity tells you where you’re going. For a deeper look at how the What-If Simulator uses the ghost dot to connect gap closure decisions to Constellation movement, see our product deep-dive.