[wdmmg-discuss] Turning WDMMG into OpenSpending

Tue Feb 15 17:31:17 UTC 2011

Thanks for writing this up Friedrich. It has always been the aim for
the project to go 'global' and now seems the time. It is also good to
be clear about the broad interest -- any kind of public finances
(including public corporate finances) should be in the remit. As it
says on the heading in the wiki:  "OpenSpending is about mapping the
money - Where it comes from and where it goes to"

I think we are now at a very exciting point where we really can start
to join up a lot of material and to see links between and across
countries -- to be able to 'map the money'.

Also, technically, the wdmmg 'platform' is maturing to a point where
it is much easier both for us to add new material and for others both
to use and extend the system. In particular feature, we've worked over
the last few months on the ability to have bespoke views oriented
about particular datasets or particular objects (like companies or
countries) which means we can have a central database (and all the
interlinking that allows) while simultaneously supporting bespoke
interfaces into that database (e.g. just my local area, just this
city, just this country, just these types of companies). This feature
is still at an early stage but I think it will be really important
going forward.

Lastly I think it is really important to emphasize that this has got
to be *community* project and a fun project. We should make it really
easy for anyone (who's interested) to get involved and have a part in
taking OpenSpending forward. One small initial step in this direction
is the establishment of our bi-weekly catchup / discussion call which
is currently scheduled for every other Thursday at 7pm UTC / GMT
(first one last week, next one next week!).

Regards,

Rufus

PS: I feel we want another blog post for all this!

On 15 February 2011 09:22, Friedrich Lindenberg
<friedrich.lindenberg at okfn.org> wrote:
> 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
>
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>

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