[openspending-dev] Who wants to help code OpenSpending.org? (was: Re: Hi, everybody...)

Tue Jul 31 08:38:33 UTC 2012

Hey,

general comment: hooray on all the issues. I want to emphasise that
this is a free software project, so while I agree that many of them
are very desirable there is no reason why we should just treat them as
tasks for OKFN staff - that's boring. Who else would be willing to try
out a bit of OpenSpending hacking? All of them seem like ideal and
simple ways to get into this. If anyone on this list wants to start
coding on OS, I'm happy to do walk-throughs on IRC or via Skype!

More comments inline...

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 5:55 PM, Lucy Chambers <lucy.chambers at okfn.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 4:49 PM, račan.sk <racan.sk at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I would like to ask several questions and discuss some proposals:
>>
>> Various:
>> - how can the form for browsing entries be customized? (to decide, which
>> dimensions should be in the main form and which in details etc.)
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you referring to which column names
> appear in the tablular view of the data? Names of departments etc will not
> appear in that view unless you enter them as a 'to' dimension. Does that
> help?
>

I suppose what you mean is customizing which dimensions show up as
columns in the first place. Vitor is currently working on this,
although we're also considering moving away from a tabular display
alltogether and showing entries as (Google-like) search results. That
makes more sense when you want to show results from multiple datasets
which may have different sets of columns.

cf. https://github.com/openspending/openspending/issues/478

>> - "You cannot edit dimensions while data is loaded...": would not it be
>> practical to have the choice to display the dimensions model at least in
>> "read-only" mode?.
>
>
> Agree, this would be useful from my perspective also, I've added an issue in
> Github here where we can have a proper debate with the developers:
>
> https://github.com/openspending/openspending/issues/480

FWIW Anyone can see the dimensions of a loaded dataset at
os.org/DS/meta and os.org/DS/dimensions already - we just need to link
there.

>> The dimensions which are used to slice the dataset by (facets in entries
>> browser):
>> - would not it be practical to arrange the order (layout) of the facets?
>> - would not it be practical to sort the values in facets in ascending /
>> descending order, and/or to enable finding or filtering values in the lists
>> (dropdowns instead of the list boxes?)?
>
>
> Again - added as Github tickets here: (feel free to do this with future
> feature requests and then drop a mail to the list for discussion, we can't
> promise when we'll get to them, but it's useful for us to have them
> documented in Github!)
>
> https://github.com/openspending/openspending/issues/481
>
>>
>> Visualisations:
>> - can they be modified/deleted?
>
>
> Yes! Underneath the visualisation in the bottom right, there is a 'change'
> button.

No, actually - Miro is right there :)

>>
>> - would´not it by practical to Save or Save As design changes made by the
>> user in the Change mode?
>
>
> Not sure I understand. It is possible to save and name a visualisation.
> Could you clarify?

We want to have editing, forking and deleting of visualizations. This
is a fairly important thing to get into, see: #477 and #478.

>> - I would appreciate a radio button enabling / disabling the Years filter
>> (there are case I would like to see complete data, not only data for a
>> specific year)
>
>
> Interesting point, we'd need to think how this played out in conveying the
> message of the data, but I've added a ticket for debate here:
>
> https://github.com/openspending/openspending/issues/482

Again, I agree with the proposal and it will be trivial to hack this
into the query editor as a checkbox next to the slider bar.

>> - TreeMap:
>>   - I would appreciate displaying time period, filter conditions and Total
>> amount

I don't get how this is different from the query editor - can you elaborate?

>>   - I would appreciate a radio button to switch between display absolute
>> values / percentage against the total
>
>
> Again, added:
>
> https://github.com/openspending/openspending/issues/483
>
>> Timeseries:
>> - will it be (in future) possible to display datasets as timeseries on the
>> OpenSpending.org?
>> (someting like these timeseries:
>> http://www.racan.sk/2012/05/rozpocet-mc-raca-2012-vydaje.html)

Yes! Basically, I'm trying to get Gregor to do us some nice time-based
graphs and hope that those will be done some time throughout the next
month. It's really a shame we can't show development over time at the
moment!

Cheers,

 - Friedrich