[openspending-dev] We've got apps and maps!

Thu Mar 21 10:08:43 UTC 2013

Rufus just created two repos I wanted to let all of you know about:

* openspending.github.com
* maps

openspending.github.com is CNAMEd to apps.openspending.com which Rufus
proposed in this email thread:
http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/openspending-dev/2013-February/000557.html

There's not much in that repo at the moment but we should create a
landing page that shows the apps we're proud of with some description of
how to use them. I would also like to propose that we try to decide on a
default way of creating these apps.

The repo utilises the gh-pages branch of the other repos in
github.com/openspending as long as they have a gh-pages branch (like
Rufus explained) so you can go to things like
apps.openspending.org/wheredoesmymoneygo.org to see that repo (not a
good example of an app maybe)

That's where the maps repo steps in. It's a repo with gh-pages that
therefore get served at apps.openspending.org/maps (take a look it's
pretty cool). I think this is a clever approach, especially with regards
to modularisation of the openspending project (self-contained external
modules but still a part of a bigger project). This is a good showcase
of how apps.openspending.org can work (and a structure of repos
(self-contained projects) we could use in the future for
openspending.org I think).

I'm just wondering about how easy/difficult it now becomes to reuse
these apps (which might require some configurations). This could be
something people would like to put on their satellite sites (e.g.
Germany might want to zoom in on Germany and show the cities/towns in
Germany that have data and forking the repo might not be optimal - url
parameters might).

Then there's the question of too many repos (but they all relate to
openspending so I don't see that as a problem) and it's hard to identify
them from the list of repos on github (you can't really see the branches
there) so we need the to put something up on the apps.openspending.org root

Anyway, just thought I'd let you know.

/Tryggvi