[openspending-dev] Views re-design

Wed Feb 8 14:06:37 UTC 2012

Hi all,

I've started drafting up some notes around the new
views/visualization/embed system. I'm not sure this is entirely
comprehensible, much less whether it makes sense.

The goal with this whole exercise is not to do a big upfront waterfall
thing, but simply to get a picture of what we'd like OpenSpending to
look like. From this point of view, I think there are a few lessons
I've already derived:

* Query builders of some sort will be important and making them
generic will be non-trivial but key to making OpenSpending easy to
use.
* The switch from a graph-based understanding of the data to an
analytical one will finally fully arrive at the vis layer and kill the
old views, but we can retain the existing structures because they make
sense when looking at transactional data (which we usually do not want
to visualize as aggregates)
* The "What's an app question" will be more complicated and we need to
keep our eyes open for people smaller than Facebook who have it
solved.

https://github.com/okfn/openspending/issues/380 is where this happens ;)

Thanks for any input,

- Friedrich