[Offenerhaushalt-at] Improvement of offenerhaushalt.at

[Krabina Bernhard]

Dear OpenSpending community,

I have both good and bad news for our Austrian implementation of an OpenSpending portal:

Although some of you in the (dev)community for the OpenSpending software have been supportive in terms of reacting on the mailing lists and our idea of (partly) funding features that could be interesting for the OpenSpending core in general, no one has raised their hands and told us to be willing to implement on of the features we mentioned up to now.

Additionally, we did not succeed in finding developers in Austria who were interested, besides a small startup in Vienna. They looked the openspending software, but were reluctant to take over the tasks because they had the feeling that the OpenSpending software is both very big and not very well documented and that the effort to get to know and productivley enhance it would be quite big. This is what also collegues from OKFN Germany told us right from the beginning (most of the German projects don't use the core software, just some elements). 

I don't want to start a discussion on wheter or not OpenSpending is a good or not so good piece of software or is well or not so well documented. Fact is, that time is pressing (we want to release an improved version of an openspending portal for Austria in early October) so we needed to take some decicions.

So we decided that we will start from scratch based on a Drupal web site, using some open JavaScript visualization toolkits and build what we need around Drupal. 

It is going to be an openspending portal with the focus on:
- spending data from ALL municipalities in Austria
- municipalities being in control whether or not to make their data/visualisations open for everyone
- no automatic feature of users being able to upload data and make their own visualsations (but we at KDZ are interested in other public spending data than from municipalities, so come and talk to us ;-)

We want to continue our efforts towards making as much public spending data open and convincing as many municpalities (and other authorities) to do so, but we needed our special approach.

As soon as we have our site up and running I will let you know and will be happy to cooperate with you in future (e. g. lets talk about how to put the disclosed datasets from our platform into openspending.org then...)

Best regards,
Bernhard

-- 
Mag. Bernhard Krabina
KDZ - Zentrum für Verwaltungsforschung
Centre for Public Administration Research
Guglgasse 13, 1110 Wien
Telefon: +43  1 8923492-27, Fax: +43 1 8923492-20
Mobil:   +43 676 849579-27, Twitter: @krabina
mailto:krabina at kdz.or.at - http://www.kdz.or.at


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