[openspending-dev] Improvement of offenerhaushalt.at

Thu May 2 10:45:21 UTC 2013

Hi again!

On fim 2.maí 2013 07:14, Krabina Bernhard wrote:

<snip>

> I'd be happy to do that if we can find a way of keeping the database in our installation. We have to do that for legal reasons (we will be putting data in that are not yet open).

Yes, that was the general idea. You can run your own instance of
openspending on a subdomain (so you'll be running your own database to
comply with the legal reasons and your CEO's wishes). You can then with
your satellite site point to that instance.

Later when you've opened up the data for all 2.354 municipalities we can
try to have them loaded into the openspending.org instance. When that
happens you would just need to do minor configurations to your satellite
site to switch the backend to the openspending.org instance. That would
mean you could then close down your instance (although you wouldn't
delete it in case you needed it again). That could save you both money
and effort :-)

This means we'd have to think about federation (how do we get data from
one instance into another, i.e. automatically transferring your open
data into the openspending.org instance). If we can get this up and
running you'd have a backup system on openspending.org for all of your
open data, which is also beneficial to you :-)

<snip>

> A generic approach will be of value to the openspending core, but we are simply interested in the feature, that our logged-in users of www.kdz.eu (Drupal based Website) are logged in automatically / or can log in with the same credentials in offenerhaushalt.at 

Logging in with the same credentials is the general idea of OpenID.
Although if you have users already on kdz.eu that would require some
effort of migrating them and/or putting up your own OpenID provider.
Using OpenID would also allow others (who have OpenID) to just log in to
kdz.eu (or offenerhaushalt.at) with their pre-existing credentials.

You can turn your Drupal instance into an OpenID provider with this module:
  https://drupal.org/project/openid_provider
I found this via a quick search so I don't know anything about this
module but there are a bunch of other modules (many of them linked from
the OpenID provider module) that relate to reusability of credentials.

Then there are some other alternatives which are quite interesting as
well such as Mozilla's Persona (also known as BrowserID). But that
requires changes to kdz.eu as well I think.

Another idea for openspending core would be to make the
authentication/user management modular so that it can be easily swapped
out for another module. That would mean you could develop your own
module that authenticates via your Drupal instance and openspending core
would continue to use its own.

Your module would just be a drop-in replacement in openspending core (an
extra step in installation/updates) so you could avoid working with your
own "fork" of openspending core and get all the goodness of the
openspending development by maintaining a small authentication/user
managment module which you use instead of the openspending one.

I'm excited about your work. I think your site can help openspending
take off in new and exciting directions (which is great and exactly how
free and open source software should be) but it's important to try and
keep your implementations in line with openspending to save us all of
bunch of extra work -- laziness is a virtue :-)

/Tryggvi