[okfn-coord] WDMMG, 4IP and Mysociety

[Rufus Pollock]

I've just written back to Tom to respond to his email from last week
and to  follow-up an in person meeting I had with him on Saturday in
Cambrdge (at his request).

In the mean time Paula has contacted and met 4IP. From my conversation
with her yesterday two main points arose:

1. (As I understood it) 4IP said that mysociety have themselves put in
a bid with 4IP and it was this that prompted the meeting with MS in
late August. If so Tom's behaviour seems a little odd: he has not
revealed to us that they too have put in a bid and it is not clear how
this fits with the collaboration plans.

2. 4IP will look in our application and give us some preliminary
comments asap. Was clear that we were not as well-known to them as
MySociety which was as we would have expected though something to bear
in mind re. potential collaboration.

Rufus

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>
Date: 2009/9/9
Subject: Re: Proposal
To: Tom Steinberg <tom at mysociety.org>


Dear Tom,

Good to chat on Saturday and hope Gov 2.0 is interesting. To respond
to your original email and summarize Saturday's chat:

All agreed it is important to move quickly here. I have passed on your
email to our Board straight away upon receipt last week and we should
get back shortly.

You clarified how this had arisen with 4IP (first discussed on phone):
4IP had brought up possibility of looking "gov finances/spending" with
you guys "coincidentally" -- i.e. not prompted by our application or
anything related. This is useful to clarify because:

>From our end one of the things we (the OKF) need to do is check with
4IP on the situation e.g. would they be OK with someone withdrawing
and putting in a new bid.

Looked like we share a very similar vision on how project would operate:

 * Drive by the needs of users (users being either citizens or
developers or ...) -- not some vision of the schema-to-end-them-all
 * A core of data with 1-3 dedicated frontends (perhaps oriented to
different audiences)

Very rough and preliminary discussion of how budget would look and be
allocated which (very approximately) went like:

 * preliminary analysis and research (~10-15%) -- primarily OKF
 * data acquisition, cleaning and analysis  (~60%) -- primarly OKF
 * presentation in 1 (or more specialized) frontend websites (30%) --
primarily MS

Given MS prominence in this area obviously one of our concerns, should
we enter into a collaboration, is that OKF role may disappear. This
was only briefly discussed due to imminent train departure. However,
you understood our concern and  mentioned that perhaps this could be
addressed by making sure OKF retain clear "ownership" of the project
e.g. by labelling it "The Open Knowledge Foundation's Where Does My
Money Go" or suchlike.

Regards,

Rufus

2009/9/1 Tom Steinberg <tom at mysociety.org>:
> Hi Rufus,
>
> I am writing to ask if OKFN would like to collaborate on a joint
> proposal to 4IP relating to the development and growth of a website
> dedicated to making UK government spending more transparent.
>
> I am aware that you have already put in a bid to 4IP, but I would like
> you to consider withdrawing it and re-authoring it in conjunction with
> mySociety's team,and hopefully with some help from our uber FOI
> volunteers.
>
> The goal of the project from mySociety's perspective would be twofold
> - to make a useful site that adds value for citizens on day one, but
> more strategically to shape wider expectations inside and outside of
> government about what spending transparency looks like when 'done
> right'. The hope is that this can be used to persuade or cajole the
> new administration into publishing information either in a copycat
> way, or (better) in the formats we request.
>
> I expect that the project will require substantial design hurdles to
> be overcome, as well as masses and masses of semi-manual data cleaning
> - and that's just for the first version. As a consequence I'm not
> envisioning that this project would be likely to be built if we had to
> do it purely from our own spare resources, despite its popularity as
> an idea in our call for proposals. This is why the importance of third
> party funding like 4IP is paramount.
>
> Anyway, I'm concious that I don't want to be seen to be stepping on
> toes, but I do think this could be a great thing for us to collaborate
> on.
>
> best,
>
> Tom
>



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