[open-economics] OpenHDI

[Rufus Pollock]

I've put up an etherpad page for the OpenHDI project and hackday here:

<http://okfnpad.org/openhdi>

On 4 January 2011 22:47, Guo Xu <digitalepourpre at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi OKFN,
>
> My name is Guo - I have been working with Dirk on EUtopia, a web-based
> application that allows users to calculate their individual
> development indices (http://eutopia.guoxu.org).
>
> I met Rufus yesterday and we decided to move forward and build an
> application named OpenHDI for the World Bank App Competition. The

The current code that Guo and I hacked on (rewrite in javascript and
flask) is here:

<https://bitbucket.org/okfn/openhdi/src>

I've also registered openhdi.org.

> basic idea will be closely related to EUtopia (asking questions and
> collecting weightings for an index), but it will be boiled down to
> less questions (covering only the dimensions addressed in the original
> HDI) and present the results in a more appealing way. I believe that
> this project is not only interesting for the competition, but could
> also gather valuable data for research: No matter how sophisticated,
> all indices essentially suffer an aggregation problem, where ad-hoc
> weightings are used that need not represent any "true" weights. By
> asking users to reveal their individual priorities, we might find some
> interesting deviations from the standard averaging: Unlike ad-hoc
> weights set by researchers, our approach would 'democratize' the
> index.

This is a great idea Guo and I think the point about collecting the
data on people's weighting is really useful.

> Given the limited time frame, next weekend has been set for a virtual
> code-sprint - and it would be great if we could get more coders for
> the 7th and 8th. In the meantime, I will continue to develop the
> existing application conceptually so we can jump straight into
> implementation for the hackday.

I'm definitely going to be around Friday (7th) and probably the 8th
too. In addition to myself and Guo, I believe that Dirk Heine and
Friedrich Lindenberg will be participating. If you're

[...]

Rufus