[wdmmg-discuss] Croatian open data transparency

[Marko Rakar]

Hello to all,

I have been lurking on the list for some time, but now I have something to
show.

Small team from brand new croatian NGO called Windmill (all references to
Don Quijote are there for a reason) launched our first small project which
is graphic visualisation of Croatian state budget.

http://proracun.pollitika.com/

It is fully in Croatian language, but basically you have two possible
treemap views of the budget, one is budget spending by user of the money
(grouped by ministries, agencies and offices) and another one is by cost
type (salaries, subsidies, services, material goods etc...).
We used standard open source libraries for visualisation, although we had to
modify them since croatian budget have more then 10.000 items and explorer
crashed on it.

This is very first time something like this was made in Croatia since we
really do not have any kind of government transparency.
Data used for this visualisation was obtained from unofficial channels,
since croatian state budget was (until few weeks back) published only as a
scanned PDF file and you wold be completely unable to use it for any kind of
analysis. Based on our push, government released limited version of budget
in excel format on their web site.

NGO is called Windmill (or "Vjetrenjača" in Croatian) and you can find our
site at https://vjetrenjaca.org, at the moment all content is in croatian
language but I belive that google translator will help if you are
interested. Windmill does not have professional staff and all we do is in
our spare time.

Our basic plan is to be financed with small donations from concerned
citizens as well as institutional donors; both will be hard since we do not
have culture of donating in Croatia and tax rules are not exactly favorable
(they are in part but not completely).

We are interested in expanding our work in the future and we sure hope to
see and meet you at Open government camp later in the year. We are also open
to networking and exchanging ideas.

kind regards to all, marko

p.s. some more info about my previous work you can find on google by typing
my name or more condensed on
http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/croatias-data-transparency-revolutionary-marko-rakar
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