[okfn-za] (no subject)

Thu Apr 19 22:10:37 UTC 2012

On 19 April 2012 22:35, Justin Arenstein <justinarenstein at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone.
>
> I'm a virtual member of the OKFN Cape Town chapter, and am the publisher at AENS (which is a social justice news agency that works for everyone from M&G to DailySun). I also help Google and various media / civil society organisations with their open data & digital strategies.
>
> Anyhow, as Adi says, we want to find more engaging and meaningful ways for ordinary people to engage with government budgets. We're thinking about drawing on things like the US-focused http://datavizchallenge.org/viz/56 and the OKFN's own DailyBread version at http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/dailybread.html, perhaps with the ability to compare your qcity's spending against those of other cities, similar to this http://countysinrankings.org/.

Just to say a big +1 on comparisons. IMO, for more people, comparisons
are much more meaningful (we love to compare and it makes much more
sense). We did have regional comparison in the first version of where
does my money go but it has been left behind in upgrade to javascript.
We'd love to re-introduce this (and have already seen some people play
around with side-by-side bubble trees for this purpose.

The one challenge from experience is getting data in a good and
*comparable* form.

> Because we're not reinventing the wheel, we can have some real fun with this project. And, because we're pulling in civil society and media partners, we expect whatever we create to have a real world impact -- even if it is just to spark debate.
>
> So, as Adi says, let's get creative and make a difference.

+1 :-)

Rufus