[wdmmg-discuss] Where does the spanish money go

[Rufus Pollock]

Hi David,

Really good to hear from you. Comments inline below.

On 12 November 2010 09:59, David Cabo <david.cabo at gmail.com> wrote:
[...]

>  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).

Yes, lots of that work has now been done so the system is much more
generic. The simplest thing to do to start with is to write a script
to load your data into the where does my money go store (or we can
help do that). If you've already got the data in a google spreadsheet
this should be pretty easy. For example here's the script for loading
some data from israel:

<http://bitbucket.org/okfn/wdmmg-ext/src/tip/wdmmgext/load/israel.py>

If you'd like more info on this, Anna Powell-Smith, our lead coder on
the data side of things (in cc) can probably help.

>  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.

It will be great to meet in person!

Rufus