[wdmmg-discuss] Where does the spanish money go

Fri Nov 12 09:59:20 UTC 2010

 Hi,

 This is my first post to the list, although I've been lurking here
for a while, so a quick introduction: my name is David Cabo, and I'm a
member of Pro Bono Publico [1], a (young) spanish organization
promoting Open Data and government transparency. We organized an Open
Data hackaton/rumble back in April, AbreDatos [2], the first of its
kind in Spain.

 I'm very interested in "the money side" of transparency, and I'm a
big fan of wdmmg, so a few weeks ago I started parsing our national
budgets for 2010-2011 and comparing them. Technically the parsing is
not too difficult, as the files are HTML, but the data is presented in
a very fragmented way and without much context. We've got to the point
where we have the data, we're confident it's correct, and we're
thinking about the best way to present it in an easy-to-understand way
(i.e. visualizations). There's not that much to see yet, only a
text-based comparison of the budgets [3] for our own use. (Google
Translate does quite a nice job [4], although it breaks the sortable
tables.)

 When I looked at the wdmmg front-end code a while ago, the Flash
object was very dependent on the particular structure of the UK
budget. But there was some discussion in this list about having a
generic wdmmg front-end working with a 'pluggable' data store, so I
was wondering if that is still in the roadmap. Since we've got very
limited resources on our side, reusing parts of wdmmg would be
fantastic (and the new version looks great btw).

 I also wanted to say I'll be attending the Open Data Government camp
in London next week, so happy to chat about this or any other matter.
I won't be alone: Jacobo Elosua, who's analysing the budget data and
working on the communication side, will be attending too.

 See you soon then,

/david

[1]: http://blog.probp.org/
[2]: http://www.abredatos.es/
[3]: http://pge.heroku.com/
[4]: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=es&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fpge.heroku.com%2F&act=url