[wdmmg-discuss] The Israeli Budget

Thu Jul 29 09:15:07 UTC 2010

2010/7/29 Rani Einav <rani at einav.com>:
>
> Hello,
> I'm new on this list.

Welcome.

> I'm from the Movement for Freedom of Information in Israel.
> www.meida.org.il.
> We've asked and received the Israeli budget in an excel file in order to put
> it online visualized.

That's amazing, great work Rani (and colleagues)!

> We've made a little research for visualization tools / applications and
> found wdmmg website to be our model for how a budget should be presented and
> visualized.
>
> You can download the excel file from here: www.meida.org.il/Israel state
> Budget 2009_2010 290710.zip
> This budget is in Hebrew, but we've translated the headers.

This is great. I've uploaded a sample of 1000 rows to google docs so
easy for people to look at and modify:

<https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Aon3JiuouxLUdGU0VmNuT0s4LUY0bE5SMUpxdkFQRFE>

(Unfortunately whole thing is too large for full upload). I've also
started a CKAN package (maybe you would like to add a brief
description to the notes):

<http://ckan.net/package/israel-state-budget>

> Columns A-H contain the name and code of each budget line.
> Note that each of the 4 levels in the hierarchy is represented by two
> digits in the code (so that there can be up to 100 branches in each level of
> the tree).
> Columns I-M contain  the budget of 2009; Columns N-R contain the budget of
> 2010.
> Columns S-V contain 2009's budget, adjusted for changes made during the year
> and its actual performance (here we have data for only some of the offices).
>
> I'd like to discuss 3 issues:
>
>   1. What should we do to build a website like wdmmg to represent the
> Israeli budget? Are there any guidelines / method / web architecture / CMS?

You could use our existing open source data store and frontend system.

Even simpler would be to load the data into our existing data store at
http://data.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/ and then to just pull out and
visualize your specific data in your own dedicated frontend (when we
load data into the store we load data into separate 'slices' so you
can pull just that set of data back out)

>   2. Is there a chance we can use wdmmg source files and adjust them to our
> needs?

Absolutely. All of the store code is open source as is the frontend.
Details of our source code repo etc here:

<http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/getting-started/>

>   3. We thought of adding a wikimedia to the "more info" window so users
> would be able to add their views/hints/knowledge/inside information about
> the different sections.

Great idea -- we really want this to: a way for users to annotate, comment etc.

> Please help me ask the right questions regarding this process. I'll be happy
> to answer yours.

It looks like this is a great chance to collaborate.

Rufus