[wdmmg-discuss] Where are the cuts?: Results spreadsheet

Tue May 18 17:54:08 UTC 2010

I've embeddded our results spreadsheet at the bottom of the "cuts" page:

 	http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/cuts/

There really isn't anything to see at the moment - just some test data and 
one rather non-specific story about £6bn of "efficiency savings", which I 
cannot localise to either a government department or a government 
function. Surely we can find some data... ?

Anyway, at least you can see the data model. It's basically three columns 
for amount, function, dept, plus some metadata and some ungraphable 
free-form data. It is already clear that we're going to need a manual 
clean-up step before republishing the data properly, and the free-form 
data will be useful in that step.

We've had a few ideas for visualisations. The "swiss cheese" idea seems 
popular: show a bubble graph with holes cut out of it.

Other good questions:

  - What about tax rises? These are equivalent to spending cuts, and should 
be included.

  - What about speculation? We probably do want to track it, but how to 
handle it? At least a check-box for "This is definitely going to happen", 
plus an associated filter in the visualisation.

 	Alistair