[openspending-dev] Apps.OpenSpending.org - A Proposal

[Friedrich Lindenberg]

Hey guys,

I think its useful to distinguish generalised and non-generalised apps. The
bubbletree, treemap or daily bread are fairly generalised and there's docs
for how to apply them to virtually any dataset. I agree with Vitor that
these should live on OpenSpending.org in a nice gallery - and in
OpenSpendingJS. Basically, OpenSpendingJS can have a Jekyll project in it
which renders out to the gallery, so that everything is in one place.

But I agree with Rufus that OS should do more non-generalised apps, simple
hacks and visualisations that relate more to a story than to general budget
visualisation methods. Maybe some of these can be productised, but that's
something that can come later (and only if there is commercial demand or
community code contributors). Examples of this include stuff like Ist/Soll
in Germany, California Municipalities, UK Cuts, Farm Subsidies and many
other things.

What I disagree with you about, Rufus, is how to present those: I still
think they should live with the country portals (like Where Does My Money
Go, OffenerHaushalt or on some topic-specific subdomain) and only be linked
from the OS portfolio (which needs to be more in the foreground of OS). We
want visitors to our national sites - i.e. normal citizens - to see them,
not keep them into the tight bubble of the OpenData/OpenGov nerds (which is
who OpenSpending is for). More fundamentally, OS should frame its apps with
regards to their contents, not around the API they may happen to use.

We both like the OSM metaphor a lot, and I think it serves well here: there
is no apps.openstreetmap.org because the coolest things that OSM does are
not about OSM.org but about things like turn-by-turn nav in my car, a cool
map layer for some dataset or just mapping someone's holiday photos.

My $.02,

 - Friedrich


On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 11:54 AM, Vitor Baptista <vitor at vitorbaptista.com>wrote:

> Hi Rufus,
>
> I like the idea. We talked about something similar last week. We wanted to
> create an Examples Page (i.e. https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery),
> with the different visualizations that we've done for the sattelite sites,
> that are not "widgetized" yet. Mostly the openspendingjs apps.
>
> I think we should do both.
>
> How you're thinking in splitting openspendingjs?
>
> Cheers,
> Vítor.
>
> 2013/2/8 Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I want to raise again the proposal from my mail in January [1] to create
>> apps.openspending.org.
>>
>> [1]:
>> http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/openspending-dev/2013-January/000533.html
>>
>> *Aside: I'm not specifically worried about the domain so if people have
>> a suggestion for a better name please say.
>> *
>> *In a nutshell: A space for lightweight (HTML+JS) apps associated to
>> OpenSpending*
>>
>> This would be building stuff off the API (mainly in JS + HTML) plus
>> possibly some stuff that was just standalone (but was OS related). I'm
>> thinking of the sorts of mini apps already in openspendingjs but you could
>> think of plenty more.
>>
>> If no-one pipes up to say this is a bad idea I can have a go at booting
>> this in the next few days ...
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Rufus
>>
>> *## Implementation*
>>
>> Boot https://github.com/openspending/openspending.github.com and CNAME
>> to apps.openspending.org
>>
>> This means any repo in this org with gh-pages becomes
>>
>> apps.openspending.org/{app-name}<http://apps.openspending.org/%7Bapp-name%7D>
>>
>> We could also use repo as an "overall" repo where people can list ideas
>> as issues so you can link to this to give people a starting point
>>
>> *Aside: Could allow some full-on apps to get deployed via heroku and at
>> xyz.apps.openspending.org*
>>
>> *## Extras*
>>
>> - have the base site (apps.openspending.org) to have a nice listing of
>> satellite sites and apps.
>>
>> - split out openspendingjs apps straight away ...
>>
>> - provide some common css and js (openspendingjs?) so things have
>> a common theme by default (and all link back to apps and OS.org etc)
>>
>>
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