[wdmmg-discuss] Proposal for initiation of Internationalization Phase of Where Does My Money Go (Open Knowledge Foundation)

Sun Feb 21 22:26:06 UTC 2010

 Hello from across the big pond to Lisa, Alistair, William, Francis, Liz,
Rufus, and John (hope I didn't miss anyone),

Being new to the group, please let me start by congratulating you all on an
excellent prototype for a great project! It appears I joined this group at
an opportune time because the detailed discussion thread from Alistair
answered many questions and indicates that the timing is excellent for this
idea.

I'll provide feedback on the Jan 14th planning session and Alistair's Feb 16
status review as separate emails with appropriate headers.

*Proposal*:

In his Feb 16 project status email, Alistair indicated he “can ...
relatively easily … construct a customisable framework for presenting the
data sets ...(with).. a straightforward generalisation of the WDMMG
prototype to support multiple (unrelated) data sets.”

I propose we add a tab for US spending data to the current visualization
prototype for UK data. We could consider this, and market it, as the first
step in the internationalization phase of the WDMMG project. Data and
product enhancement will be evergreening processes, while early data model
generalization will support all phases of project development. Thus, a brief
project focus on international deployment could significantly accelerate
overall project development.

Financially, this proposal presents an exceptional PR and fund raising
opportunity in the US for the WDMMG project and the OKF organization for a
very low cost. US political and social timing is ripe for an appropriately
targeted marketing campaign delivering this type of online data and service.
In addition, we would likely obtain free coverage of the deployment from at
least CNBC, MNBC, and the AP networks.

I'm willing to organize and deliver the US data in a loadable format to help
accomplish this goal. This means creating a pre-formatted data file,
gathered from online US government sources, that maps the US naming
conventions to the current WDMMG db descriptors. Given a sample input file
format and the naming attribute lists, I should be able to prepare the US
data in a spreadsheet or non-proprietary file format within a few weeks.

Regards, Steve Adcock
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