[wdmmg-discuss] Croatian open data transparency

[Roy Peled, FOIM]

Looks wonderful, Marko, from the little I could understand. We're working on
something similar here, and you beat us too it. Maybe a small tip that might
or might not be relevant for your work - we teamed with a leading financial
newspaper to make this a joint project, and it will be on their website and
ours, so it gives it much more publicity. I think newspapers, and especially
financials, would be interested in such stuff anywhere, and it is important
leverage where you don't have the funds to run a whole PR campaign as maybe
some of the colleagues in other places have. We did something basic for now,
treemap in style, and trying to work on something closer to WDMMG to be
launched in the near future.

Roy
FOIM Israel

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 11:49 AM, Marko Rakar <mrakar at mrak.biz> wrote:

> 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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