[wdmmg-discuss] Turning WDMMG into OpenSpending

Tue Feb 15 09:22:12 UTC 2011

Hi all,

having spent quite a lot of time in WDMMGs engine room over the last
two months, Rufus, Stefan W & M (who've been working on WDMMG code for
a week now), and Nadia finally managed to brainstorm about the future
of the site a bit last week.

Our primary goal has to be to grow WDMMG as an open platform, similar
to Open Street Map: while on OSM you sketch out your local streets,
WDMMG should become the place to upload and analyze your local or
state governments spending. Therefore, our priority has to be
providing the right tools to allow people to contribute to this effort
themselves: either by loading data, annotating spending or visualizing
it in custom ways.

As such transparency is needed not only in the UK but all over the
world, we want to re-label the data part of the site (what is now
data.wdmmg.org) to the more international OpenSpending. This would
both serve as an accessible means to handling financial data and as a
backend to more specific sites, such as the UK's WhereDoesMyMoneyGo
visualizations and Germany's OffenerHaushalt.

I'd like to invite all of you to follow up on the remainder of our
discussion, which is archived at
http://wiki.openspending.org/Status_2011-02-10 and to contribute your
own thoughts.

Looking forward to hear what people think,

 Friedrich