[openspending-dev] Openspending - one year later Was: Working with OpenSpending platform from my perspective

[Friedrich Lindenberg]

Hey Peio,

thanks for the nice message, it's great to hear this! Thank you for
the kind words. Please keep us in check, too: what is missing? How do
we go from here to make OpenSpending into a really cool tool for
people who want to monitor budgets? What do you need in Bulgaria
specifically?

Cheers,

 - Friedrich

On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 10:39 PM, Peio Popov <peio at peio.org> wrote:
> Dear OpenSpending developers,
>
> It has been almost a full year, since I last played with OpenSpending. The
> email quoted bellow is the summary of my struggle with the 0.10 version back
> then, when it took me something like a couple of days to create a model,
> load some data and make some treemaps of it. It was a long effort involving
> manual creation of json models, ssh-ing to the actual server to work with
> the constantly changing (and yet to be documented) loading scripts and
> spending lots of time chasing pudo, nick and Martin on irc with support and
> administrative questions.
>
> Few minutes ago I loaded a dataset and created a the same type of
> visualization in less than 10 minutes just with my mouse!
>
> I am completely amazed by the progress of the project! In the last year
> OpenSpending has changed completely and become mature and user friendly
> platform. From my user perspective, with no underlying idea of the code
> bellow, I can appreciate the difference and the great job that you've done.
> You are amazing, thank you!
>
> Please, keep up the great work!
> Peio
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Peio Popov <peio at peio.org>
> Date: Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 4:03 PM
> Subject: Working with OpenSpending platform from my perspective
> To: wdmmg-discuss at lists.okfn.org
>
>
> Dear list,
> In order to help data cartographer's education and make the
> introduction to Openspending platform easier, I would like to describe
> my experience with it.
>
>  First - to introduce myself. My name is Peio Popov, I am from
> Bulgaria and usually act as a legal adviser for IT companies. I
> consider myself a person with a good IT background and general
> understanding of computers.  I've worked for IBM, biggest mobile
> operator in Bulgaria, payment system operator, mobile payments
> provider and certification authority. The payment and PKI related
> companies were start-ups so I did way more than legal stuff, including
> acting as PM, business developer and PKI services manager. Since 2003
> I work on Linux whenever possible and can solve my coding problems in
> bash, php, perl and python.
>
> This background did not help a lot and I had hard time understanding
> and using the platform. Here were the main hurdles:
>
> 1. Denormalized data. I spend more than an hour looking for a way to
> describe the nested levels in the raw data. I've always been told that
> I should normalize my data and if Rufus was not there to explain, I
> could never figured it out myself. It just seemed wrong to waste space
> like that. So please mention it when you speak about csv - it is not
> just a format to contain, but also a way to describe data.
>
> 2. JSON. I did not feel very comfortable with it and it was good that
> I could use the model from the Israeli budget as a template. Looking
> at the model and then at the result helped me understand it better
> than the description in the wiki. It would be very helpful to have a
> JSON template with the main sections and an example of a typical
> record in it. I might propose one if you like the idea. Also any
> recommendation for an editor and syntax checker/highlighter is
> welcome.
>
> 3. Decentralized info. Initially I was a bit confused between the OKFN
> sites. I wanted to achieve something like WDMMG, but I was told I need
> to look into Openspending, starting from CKAN. In the meantime I
> wandered to sites like Open Data Commons and Open Government data and
> OKFN site. I believe I found the wiki with google and there was the
> loading diagram. So please, link more to it - it is very helpful.
>
> 4. Loading data. I used the irc based loading protocol and it worked
> good, but can be made better. The data wranglers should be able to
> help share this responsibility, because it is not always possible to
> interrupt your work to answer a question from a confused newbie.
> Thanks to borior and pudo's irc support I was able to not only load
> the data but also understand some of the platform concepts. I hope to
> contribute back and make their time with me well spend.
>
> 5. Bubbles. As childish as it may sound I wanted the bubbles
> visualization from the very start. It was only because of pudo's hints
> and links that I could find the examples and the documentation. More
> links, more docs more functioning examples would be great. If I can do
> more visualizations, it would be even better.
>
> 6. People. At this point the usage of the platform is very dependant
> on human interaction. I would have been lost if I had to rely on the
> published info to use it. Using irc  support has obvious downsides,
> but it allowed me to somehow get more into the idea and should thank
> borior and pudo for it.
>
> 7. The result. As I've told you and wished on irc, this time i would
> not ask another stupid question, but will present the result - a
> visualisation of the Bulgarian budget spendings:
> http://peio.org/bgbudget/bubbles/bgbudget.html I hope to present it to
> some politicians in order to get promises for more data and perhaps
> even get the promises fulfilled.
>
> Peio Popov
>
>
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