[wdmmg-discuss] Croatian open data transparency

Tue Sep 14 11:03:27 UTC 2010

Thanks,

I am communication consultant so we hve been covered pretty well (three out
of three national networks covered us in their evening news, 40+ web sites
and god knows how many printed and radio stations).

All of our moves are carefully tailored for maximum impact and publicity.

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 11:52 AM, Roy Peled, FOIM <roy at meida.org.il> wrote:

> 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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>>
>
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