[okfn-coord] 4IP

Mon Mar 30 14:55:10 UTC 2009

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 4:08 PM, Becky Hogge <becky.hogge at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've now had a chance to look at this and go through 4IP's
> requirements. They state "Digital democracy" (finding new ways to
> scrutinise money and power) as one of their areas of particular
> interest, so we should aim at that.

Brilliant.

> Initial question-
>
> -What's the status of this as Show Us A Better Way's winning entry?
> Will any money flow from that?

Yes - but they have been very vague about this. They basically want to
directly contract someone who's 'on their books' - so we won't see
anything. Also money is split between several winners, and ratio/cut
for each winner is not pre-determined. (Which doesn't sound quite like
their original '£15k prize' promise.) Richard Stirling also implied
that if prototype went down well there is a possibility it could be
supported further.

I suggest we ask Liz Turner and Dave Boyce
(http://www.iconomical.com/dt/) to do the visualisation work. I spoke
to Liz about this at length a few weeks ago, and to Dave on Saturday.
They are interested in working on a prototype. They may also be 'on
the books' as I believe they are finalising a contract with OPSI (this
is not yet public!).

What do others think about including them on 4IP application? Their
stuff looks really sexy - and could help to have some really shiny
existing work for 4IP people to look at and get excited about.

Re: back end, scraping, cleaning up and aggregating data and so on, I
should mention we've had interest from:
 * Julian Todd
 * Rob McKinnon
 * Richard Fahey

Existing URLs:

  * http://wiki.okfn.org/projects/Where_Does_My_Money_Go
  * http://www.openeconomics.net/wdmmg/

> 4IP's criteria:
>
> •       Will it deliver 4’s public purposes?
> o       To nurture new talent and original ideas
> o       To champion alternative voices and fresh perspectives
> o       To challenge people to see the world differently
> o       To inspire change in people's lives
>
> I don't think we can sell this idea as original (as I'm sure Julian T
> would agree, it's a crying shame we don't have this already). I'm not
> sure we've got a convincing diversity card to play either (point 2).
> So we should probably see the last two pointers as ones the
> application should speak to.

Agreed. Hence I wonder if we could play up idea of typing in a
postcode and seeing where specific tax contributions for a particular
region + income bracket go. (It is unlikely that we'll have the data
to do this at the moment - but perhaps we could do it for a few areas,
and its a compelling long term vision).

> Okay, next criteria
>
> •       Will it stir things up in 4-like fashion?
> o       Do it first
> o       Make trouble
> o       Inspire change
>
> We can tick each of these boxes. Fine, so...
>
> •       Does it meet a user need? Does it scratch an important itch?
>
> Yes, and it's timely (could we style it with more of a credit crunch angle?)

Sounds interesting. Do you think we should we allude to this or is it implied?

> •       Is it 100% native to digital networks, with its centre of gravity in
> participation or collaboration?
>
> This is tricky. Is there actually any collaborative or participative
> element in this work? Are we going to make data sets available for
> other people to create visual representations from? If so, then good,
> but how easily accessible will these data sets be to the lay person?
> What fraction of the UK population do we think will be able to use the
> datasets and get something cool to look at out of them?

One thing I'd personally *really* like (though I don't know about
technicalities) is to allow people to visually represent something and
have a stable URL to refer to it, to be able to embed
images/visualisations in other pages and so on.

Hence focus on allowing people to explore datasets (a la Gapminder and
similar - http://www.gapminder.org/) and to be able to easily refer to
what they find in websites, in print, etc. with images, interactive
visualisations, canonical URLs, etc.

In other words, output of WDMMG could be easily connected to other web
applications, services and easily intergrated into other things (e.g.
could annotate parliamentary proceedings on publicwhip,
theyworkforyou, etc. or could be embedded on internet forums, social
networking services, etc.).

We could certainly publish cleaned up/joined up datasets, but as you
say, perhaps this should not be the focus.

> •       Can it thrive without ongoing financial support from 4iP
>
> Are we proposing building scraping tools that pull accounting
> information from each of the Government departments - ie, are we
> talking big initial outlay, plus small ongoing costs (minimal data
> maintenance plus hosting)?

I think so. Also its good that we've got support from Cabinet
Office/OPSI etc. as Richard says on top of prize money they have a
certain commitment to help us source data.

> •       Can it thrive without cross promotion from TV channels?
>
> I think we can argue this case very strongly.

Agreed.

> Okay. I've looked through their online submissions process, and it's a
> one page form (hooray!), with just a few fields:
>
> Working Title / Elevator Pitch / Needs / Approach / Competition / Region
>
> They don't even appear to ask for a budget at this stage. What we
> really need to work on then is to flex the participative angles, and
> work out whether this project has ongoing costs or not. Once we're
> clear on that, I can go ahead and submit the initial proposal.

Amazing! Would it be useful to either meet in person or speak on phone
about this in next few weeks?

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org