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

Mon Feb 11 11:05:34 UTC 2013

On 9 February 2013 12:13, Friedrich Lindenberg
<friedrich.lindenberg at okfn.org> wrote:
> 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.

So sounds like agreement on a gallery / docs.

> 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.

Yes! Specific, small 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

Aside: we have to separate wheredoesmymoneygo.org repo as satellite
site template and wheredoesmymoneygo.org repo as
wheredoesmymoneygo.org ...

> 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.

There is no disagreement and my points about apps.openspending.org is
not to focus them there but just have to have somewhere *right now* to
put stuff. E.g. where does deficit and debt go, or california city
bankruptcies. There is no national site as yet where these go and in
any case many of them aren't country specific.

We also just need somewhere to deploy stuff *now*. The ideas of apps
(and I'm happy with another name) is somewhere we can do gh-pages
deployments. Often this will even be semi-internal but at the same
time the url-space is sharable and permanent (unlike
openspending.github.com ...)

Technical aside: I also have to say I'm not convinced about the jekyll
approach to building satellite sites. I think most people would prefer
e.g. wordpress (this was our experience with WDMMG v1). What you then
need is somewhere to deploy your JS apps so you can then embed them.
In this case you again need a deployment space for the apps.

> 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.

Very possibly true for OS too but we aren't there entirely yet and
right now we need somewhere to put stuff (such as apps in
openspendingjs etc).

What's the answer for that stuff?

Rufus