[wdmmg-discuss] £495bn vs £700bn

Thu Jul 29 20:55:01 UTC 2010

2010/7/28 Liz Turner <liz at iconomical.com>:
>
> On Jul 28, 2010, at 6:14 PM, Rufus Pollock wrote:
>
> 2. Data for 2010-2011 and possibly 2009-2010 (which are projection
> data for our data) is clearly missing a massive chunk of spending
> (this is missing in source CRA data). With a bit of examination you
> can clearly see this due to Local Authority info being completely
> absent (they don't do projections it seems)
>
> For me item 2 is a really big issue. We've discussed various options:
>
> 1. Remove these years from dashboard (or system entirely)
> 2. Put a clear annotation on the dashboard (how?)
> 3. Correct the data as best we can
>
> Very important to fix this. As a minimum, we should mark a clear cut-off in

Completely agree. I think I discussed this Dave quite a while ago,
especially idea of limiting time period show (so as to remove the
'bad' data).

> the visualization at the point from which the data is obviously incomplete.
> A good visual cue would be to make incomplete years look deliberately
> inaccurate, with fuzzy lines, or otherwise indicating deviations from
> expectations.

We certainly want a way to clearly indicate:

A. Data that is (probably) erroneous
B. Estimated/ballpark data

> The ideal would be to visualize aggregated spending, (which we have)
> overlaid with an expected projection (which we don't have).
> Do we have any way to predict those figures? Can we do a rough but
> inaccurate estimate based on the numbers from previous years? Work backwards
> from the estimated £700bn?
> ...

We can definitely do those things -- the issue is we are then no
longer presenting 'official' data but our own stuff. This is probably
going to happen to some extent anyway (at least with comments etc) so
we probably want to think right now about *simple* ways to start
indicating official/non-official (could just have a 'badge' of some
kind.

All really good points Liz. Thanks for thought-provoking suggestions.

Rufus