• Rufus Pollock
• Friedrich Lindenberg
• Stefan Wehrmeyer
• Nadia El imam
• Stefan marsiske

Agenda

• Previous meetings: http://wdmmg.okfnpad.org/meetings
• Updates
• Becoming OpenSpending
  • http://okfnpad.org/openspending
  • http://wiki.openspending.org/Status_2011-02-10
• Currently interested countries, cities, places
• Immediate tasks
• Why is it hard to get data …
  • Because gov have it internally and don’t want to / not interested in giving it out

Updates

Friedrich

• converted the whole system to mongodb
• new aggregator system
  • performance
  • reified aggregations – i.e. aggregations (the bubbles) are now real things in the system
• load eu, fts
• new view system – bespoke views
  • treemaps

Stef: got uk 25k spending data working, looked at needlebase

Stefan:

• refactored js explorer http://rufuspollock.org/wdmmg/explorer.html
• UX -> looking at front page (Merge http://data.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/ and http://wheredoesmymonegyo.org/ and http://offenerhaushalt.org/) http://wiki.okfn.org/p/Where_Does_My_Money_Go
• flagging system

NEXT STEPS:

Identify theme questions, questions we are interested in having answered

1. Use: http://ask.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/

2. Examples questions

   • Little money to many small actors, versus big actors
   • Energy policy (lisa evans)

3. Pursue them using the site, ask others interested in answering the same question and engage them into hunting down answers, finding datasets, research

4. Blog about the experience of trying to do this.

5. Find out what’s hard & engage others in discussing why that is the case

6. Announce on the discuss list and document process from start to end

   • Announce the challenge – make sure you establish value system ( this is not a witchhunt)
   • Story
   • Openspending, wheredoesmymoneygo, mailinglist,
   • Format for blogs & findings ( encourage people to look for info themselves)

Find out how users navigate the site

Generality versus Specificity

Generality and specificify

• Generality is important for the model
• Specificity is important for presentation

Where do we spend time

• Visualization
• Analytics
• Community
• UX

• Acquisition

• Usability/Theming/Layout +1 (FL)

  • Front page
  • Call to action
  • Treemap
  • Navigation
  • Search: entry & dimensions

• Content prodution, analysis

• Community

  • Meetings +1 (stef)
  • Data from different countries
  • Blogging / Tweeting

• Load more data

  • ourselves
  • enable other people +1 (stef)

• Small way to contribute site (interesting)

• Technical foundation

  • Proper ORM, maybe use general API controller library
  • Controller code to model
  • de-Wordpress-ify?

25k Departmental Spending Data in the Where Does My Money Go? Data Store

As a sample of the things you can find here are some examples of what you can find:

• Spending with Capita
• Spending by the Ministry of Defence

• Explorer: http://rufuspollock.org/wdmmg/explorer.html
• Source: http://bitbucket.org/okfn/wdmmg-js/src/tip/src/explorer.html

Warning: won’t work in IE (atm due to lack of svg support) and works best (i.e. fastest) in Chrome!

I’d be interested in any feedback and any suggestions for experience with protovis or any other javascript libraries (I’ve also used flot and thejit a bit). In particular one thing a bit lacking currently in protovis is any animation (something that’s goodin thejit …).

Features:

• True ‘explorer’: you can choose any set of breakdown ‘keys’ to visualize
• Primary ‘financial bubbles’ view with interactive navigation into bubbles
  • Support for arbitrary depth of data ‘tree’ so you can keep navigating down (though currently limited by user interface to select at most 3 levels)
• Multiple other visualizations including treemap, sunburst, dendrogram and ‘icicle’
• Time support
• View the source data in table or as json

I’m sure there’s tons to improve especially on the usability (e.g. should default labels have amounts in them?) so if you take a look please let me know any feedback.

Some specific limitations:

• Does not work in IE — but hope to fix this using svg.js soon
• Colours and general ‘look’ could be improved — help wanted!
• Occasional bugs e.g. weird redraws — if you find one please let me know

To do this we’ve been busy collecting (and cleaning) government time series include projections from 2008, 2010 (before the budget) and 2010 (after the budget), into the google spreadsheet below. Each projection is contained in a different sheet. At present this is only at the level of GDP, total expenditure, total taxation, deficit etc. There’s also a description sheet which gives a bit of information about the structure.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tFggM4NNja9rSzUd_qQTv9w#gid=4

An initial view of a couple of sheets of this work are now available in the budgetizer:

http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/budget/budgetizer/

This is very much an alpha visualisation – the main thing at this stage is the code to read from multiple sheets and visusalise them as graphs.

Even with this simple view, you can see that while the annual overspend (expenditure over receipts) falls under the post-budget plan, the total deficit remains huge compared to GDP (compared to where it has been over the last 30 years)

Having built this, the plan is to add features to allow users to interactively experiment with different senarios. Even doing this roughly is quite a lot harder as it requires projecting the consequence of changes of policy multiple years into the future.

The event opened with two days of lectures, papers and debate around the areas of public data re-use and visualization. Highlights included a review of works by the Sunlight Foundation, and an exciting presentation of green lifestyle applications in development for Helsinki’s City as Living Factory of Ecology project, as well as stimulating presentations by Ben Cerveny of Stamen Design, and artist Aaron Koblin.

Project presentations took the form of a market in which initiators laid out their ideas in order to recruit collaborators. During the next two days and the following weekend, working groups came together around each of the concepts, to be developed over the ensuing fortnight.

Outcomes

Experience shows that it’s very difficult to judge at the outset which of these projects will deliver the most interesting or usable results, when success depends on many diverse factors. So I was thrilled to see that two of the projects that seemed particularly viable at the start of the seminar yielded such interesting results.

The team working on Madrid’s Kultur-O-Meter produced a detailed poster showing how the city’s cultural budget is distributed. With so much emphasis on the interactive, it’s refreshing to see how a very simple static model can be used to present detailed information concisely and elegantly. I particularly like how the design shows very clearly where the uncertainties lie. Accompanying their presentation is an account of the challenging process of data gathering and analysis (in Spanish).

Piotr Adamczyk, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art developed a timeline framework for exploring the museum’s extensive collection, which could be a wonderful resource for visitors and curators when it’s done. Props also go to the team behind New Political Interfaces for their fun and well-designed toy for visualizing political discourse online.

Liz Turner is founder of visualization studio iconomical and designer of Where Does My Money Go?

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