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

[Rufus Pollock]

Dear George,

Sorry for the slow reply! This got swept away in the barrage of email,
travels to HM Treasury etc last week! Comments inline below.

On 21 February 2010 22:26, George Adcock <gsaintheusa at gmail.com> wrote:
>  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.

Indeed it is!

> 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.”

That's something we definitely hope to do :)

> 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.

Quite right, and so we would definitely welcome input on this front.
It may not be that hard, with a small amount of effort to make
everything much more general.

> 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.

Sounds great.

> 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.

Sounds great George. In terms of immediate efforts can you look around
and see if you can find any US spending data with COFOG
(classifications of functions of government) tags attached? If you
want to know more about COFOG just ask :)

In terms of a spreadsheet what would be best to start with a simple
total spending by function/subfunction (COFOG) or
department/subdepartment for a given year. How hard would that be to
do?

Regards,

Rufus
-- 
Open Knowledge Foundation
Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age
http://www.okfn.org/ - http://blog.okfn.org/