[okfn-coord] Building Democracy submission

Wed Sep 3 11:46:37 UTC 2008

On 02/09/08 19:30, Jonathan Gray wrote:
> I've just posted a draft submission for the Building Democracy 
> competition from the Ministry of Justice:
> 
>   http://okfn.org/board/wiki/BuildingDemocracy
> 
> Comments would be particularly appreciated regarding, "What kind of 
> assistance would you like from others?".
> 
> At the moment I have:

What we currently have seems to be more about saying what we are going 
to do. E.g. we don't really expect assistance from the makers of 
open-source toolkits.

> <quote>
> I intend to collate as much relevant data as possible, to analyse it and 

Should always be 'we' (here and throughout application) :)

I think, given that this is about assitance from others, we should go for:

As described above, our focus is on analyzing and presenting data. For 
this we obviously need the data in the first place. Here we would hope 
that existing sources, of such data, especially within Government, would 
be cooperative in assisting in us in this task.

In addition we plan to use a variety of open-source tools. While we 
would not need direct assistance from their suppliers of these we 
obviously expect to be using them in developing the project.

> decide upon a suitable structure and focus. I will then work with 
> existing open source geospatial, timeline and visualisation software - 
> such as MIT's Simile Suite, Prefuse and Processing - to develop a 
> working model for a taxpayer in Hackney.
> 
> I would greatly benefit from advice regarding how to structure the data, 

Not really sure about this para, maybe change to:

We would obviously benefit from advice regarding ... However, while 
valuable, such assistance would not be essential to our work.

> budgetary classification, and from developers with experience of using 
> visualisation packages.
> </quote>
> 
> Does this sound like a realistic way to proceed? And does this sound 
> like the right kind of thing to ask with assistance with?
> 
> Jonathan