[wdmmg-discuss] What capital does the Government own? (plus watch Dispatches tonight!)

[Kathryn.Corrick]

Hi Francis,
This is fabulous! 
I think this should be a blog post ;-)
What responses have you had so far from the programme?

Kathryn

Sent from my phone.

On 7 Mar 2011, at 18:52, Francis Irving <francis at flourish.org> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> We (ScraperWiki) have made two data visualisations for Channel 4 News
> about what capital assets the UK Government owns.
> 
> 
> 1. The first is inspired by WDMMG's visualisation of Government
> spending. We call it "asset bubbles".
> 
> http://www.channel4.com/news/could-selling-off-britains-assets-cut-the-debt
> 
> 
> 2. The second is a map of brownfield land owned by local councils.
> 
> http://www.channel4.com/news/could-councils-sell-land-to-fill-budget-holes
> 
> 
> Dispatches is on at 8pm tonight, a whole programme about this subject.
> 
> Credit to Julian, Nicola and Zarino for making these visualisations
> so good. And to everyone at ScraperWiki working with the people at
> Dispathces.
> 
> 
> Datasets:
> 
> We couldn't find any detailed national asset registry more recent than
> 2005 (assembled in the National Asset Registry 2007). With a good
> accounting system, and properly published data all the way through
> Government, such a thing would constantly update.
> 
> In some ways there is less of a problem than with Government spending
> at needing drill down. There isn't the equivalent problem of wanting
> to know who the contractor for some spending is, or to see the
> contract. Instead, you want to know assesments of value, and what
> investment could happen in it - detailed in formation that probably
> the authorities often don't have.
> 
> The PDFs were mined by hand (by Nicola) to make the visualisation, and
> if you drill down you will see an image of the PDF with the source of
> the data highlighted.
> 
> The brownfield land dataset is also a few years old, 2008. It also
> contains lots of information about privately owned land, but we
> deliberately only show the local authority owned land.
> 
> Links to original sources are in the articles above.
> 
> 
> Some technical background:
> 
> The asset bubbles visualisation uses RaphaelJS, which you can think of
> as "JQuery for in browser SVG". Amazingly, it even works in (most)
> versions of Internet Explorer (using some VRML compatibility layer).
> 
> This has some advantages - you at least get iPad compatibility. It's
> also easier for people with other web skills to maintain than Flex,
> plus people can "view source" and learn from each other just like
> in the good old days of the web.
> 
> That said, on the down side, CSS compatibility with the stylesheets of
> the site it is embedded in were a pain. Perhaps next time should use
> an iframe :)
> 
> The NLUD map is more straightforward Google Maps and JQuery, although
> it does use a map pin clusterer. Part of the visualisation is text
> based - constructed sentences. Something I think could be used a lot
> more.
> 
> You can get the source code, GPL like all public stuff on ScraperWiki,
> on ScraperWiki here:
> 
> http://scraperwiki.com/views/nlud_map/
> http://scraperwiki.com/views/asset_bubbles
> 
> There are links from those views to the dataset scrapers behind them.
> 
> 
> I could do a guest blog post about it all for the OKFN blog, if people
> are interested. Since I'm CEO of ScraperWiki though, I won't just go
> ahead and do it unless Rufus or Jonathan or someone ask me to!
> 
> Francis
> 
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