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

Thu Jun 18 19:09:09 UTC 2009

2009/6/18 Hjalmar Gislason <hjalli at hjalli.com>:
> 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/

Fantastic! This starts to make me think that it might interesting to
do something pan-european ...

You've also inspired me to get up online the "treemap" of UK
departmental spending I put together a few months ago:

<http://www.openeconomics.net/wdmmg/dept>

(This is our temporary home for Where Does My Money Go app while we prototype).

> ...without understanding a thing :)

Do you have any English material about this (and is the data you used
openly available?)  We'd love to blog about this.

> 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.

Right - this is exactly  the situation in the UK (though I'm not even
sure we get a break-down beyond the departmental level!).

I think we probably want to separate this kind of work into 2 stages:

  1. Getting the data
  2. Presenting it

while clearly related I think these two are, and should be, fairly separated.

> 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.

Absolutely. It is a really good way to present this kind of stuff and
pretty crucial to public debate (the main motivation behind WDMMG).

> 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.

It would be great to collaborate and it might be interesting to do a
contrast and compare between Iceland and the UK -- especially in the
current climate.

Regards,

Rufus
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