2009/6/18 Hjalmar Gislason <[email protected]>: > Interesting discussion (and congrats on the funding Rufus). > > We (at DataMarket: http://datamarket.net/) did a similar thing for the > Icelandic national budget this autumn. Unfortunately our budget is not > published in English (go figure), but you can see the result here: > - http://apps.datamarket.net/fjarlog/
Fantastic! This starts to make me think that it might interesting to do something pan-european ... You've also inspired me to get up online the "treemap" of UK departmental spending I put together a few months ago: <http://www.openeconomics.net/wdmmg/dept> (This is our temporary home for Where Does My Money Go app while we prototype). > ...without understanding a thing :) Do you have any English material about this (and is the data you used openly available?) We'd love to blog about this. > The columns on the front page represent ministries, ordered by the size of > their budget). Top one is Health, then Welfare, etc. > > By clicking each column you'll get a further breakdown of each ministry's > budget. This tree is three levels deep and breadcrumbs at the top show where > you're located in the tree. As an example, this page: > - http://apps.datamarket.net/fjarlog/?lidur=08-206 > > Shows "Ministry of Health > Medical Insurance" and the items are "Medicine, > Doctor visit subsidies, ..." > > In order to go any further (in the case of Iceland) you'd have to dig into > the budgets of individual government organizations, which unfortunately are > not published as structured data or in any standardized format. Right - this is exactly the situation in the UK (though I'm not even sure we get a break-down beyond the departmental level!). I think we probably want to separate this kind of work into 2 stages: 1. Getting the data 2. Presenting it while clearly related I think these two are, and should be, fairly separated. > We feel that even in its current state, this application has helped the > local discussion on the national budget (regularly mentioned in the media), > as it makes it easy for laymen to grasp the key issues in the budget, where > there might be options for expense cuts, etc. Absolutely. It is a really good way to present this kind of stuff and pretty crucial to public debate (the main motivation behind WDMMG). > We have many ideas on how to do this better and develop this further, and > I'd be happy to share those and even collaborate on the prototyping with UK > data if you'd like. It would be great to collaborate and it might be interesting to do a contrast and compare between Iceland and the UK -- especially in the current climate. Regards, Rufus -- Join our "100 supporters pledge": http://www.pledgebank.com/support-okfn Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age - http://www.okfn.org/ _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
