[open-economics] Two drafts for development applications

Fri Dec 31 15:38:35 UTC 2010

Hi Dirk (and Guo),

Sorry for slight delay in reply -- was out of action most of
yesterday! Responses inline below.

(BTW one small tip: in general it's not a good idea to send (large)
attachments to mailing list (that's why your message got held up) --
either inline it or post it up somewhere with a link. Also html with
links to mailing lists is not so good as links get lost when converted
to plain text ;) ... )

On 29 December 2010 22:58, Dirk Heine <dirk at common-future.org> wrote:
> Dear Rufus, Dear OKF-Developers,
>
> My name is Dirk; Friedrich recently introduced me to OKF and I had the
> chance to participate in one of your Open Economics phone-conferences in
> October. In this meeting you called for proposals for development-apps and
> today we send you two such drafts.

Great stuff -- I remember the discussion during that call about the
'do-your-own-weightings human development index'

> These projects were realised with Guo Xu, research associate of DIW, and
> through the advice of Friedrich. With all likelihood it will be too late for
> the WB competition (although we are still trying to realise both projects
> asap and maybe it would still be possible if you guys are interested in
> taking on these projects together) but we hope to develop them jointly with
> OKF in any case (irrespective of this app competition).

This is great work and I still think we would be in time at least with
the HDI app (which you've already done a great first version of with
eutopia!). I certainly would be up for working on this. The best way
would be to pick a day to do a virtual code-sprint. The deadline is
the 15th of Jan I believe so we could aim for something next
week/weekend or during the week after.

As a default: are you you free Friday 7th Jan or Sat 8th Jan?

> You find the alpha version of the first application here as a free-standing
> website and here as a Facebook-application. Our plan for the second
> application is attached.

For those who don't get the links because of plain-text-ization:

<http://eutopia.guoxu.org/>
<http://apps.facebook.com/eutopia/>

I think this already looks great (and much better already than the bit
of work i'd done along these lines a year or so ago). Of course I've
got some suggestions for improvements :) (as I'm sure you do too)
e.g.: have fewer questions, (5 by default), put the questions on the
same page and make clear these are relative weightings (rather than
how much you care) etc. I could definitely help with the frontend
javascript (and backend if you were coding in python with, say, flask
:) [1])

[1]: http://flask.pocoo.org/

> We would be grateful for a consideration if these two projects could become
> part of your Open Economics framework. We would very much appreciate the
> chance of developing these projects in this team and would value a soon
> response.

I can say straight off that we'd be delighted to have both these
projects to become part of the Foundation's Open Economics 'framework'
/ working group :)

Rufus