[okfn-discuss] Where Does My Money Go: what should we work on first?

Thu Jun 18 09:41:37 UTC 2009

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/

...without understanding a thing :)

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.

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.

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.

Best,
-hjalmar

P.S. As you may imagine, the Economy is presently a rather big issue in
Iceland, so you might also be interested in this:
http://datamarket.net/request_data/icelandic_economy/ - as it is something
we hope to apply to other economies sooner than later.

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 6:08 PM, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>wrote:

> 2009/6/16 William Waites <ww at styx.org>:
> > 2009/6/16 Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>:
> [...]
> >>  * What visualization would people like to see?
> >
> > I'm imagining something that looks like a directed graph
> > (layout options?) with node sizes corresponding roughly
> > to net assets of an organization and edges coloured to
> > represent funding flows and sizes.  This changes with time,
> > so a time slider would evolve the picture...
>
> Nice idea! This is a bit like something I did recently but with
> technology flows [1].
>
> In terms of implementation I guess the question is what would be the
> nodes? Government departments? Specific projects? ...
>
> Or, to let the data decide, what data on funding flows is available?
>
> > I also think the problem looks like a social network immersed
> > in a heat bath, and so can maybe be modelled as a Markov
> > process with transition probabilities derived from money
> > outflows. But what can we learn from and how could
> > we visualize this representation? I'm not sure...
>
> I really like the idea of including the temporal component. PESA
> (which I mentioned in my previous email) has data going back a decade
> or so though they have a special note saying that data may not always
> be comparable.
>
> Rufus
>
> [1]:<
> http://www.rufuspollock.org/2009/05/22/visualizing-technology-flows-over-time-i/
> >
>
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