[wdmmg-discuss] Introduction

Tue May 3 18:23:02 UTC 2011

Hi Florin,

Thanks for getting back in touch. Answers are inline:

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 12:43 PM, Florin Cojocariu
<florin.cojocariu at arsit.org.ro> wrote:
> Hello everybody!
>
> My name is Florin Cojocariu  and I am running a Romanian taxpayers association: ARSIT. One of our key projects is to build a
> web application simmilar to WDMMG aplication, to display the Romanian yearly budget and spending.

Great! We would love to speak to you more about this. We have a
meeting on Thursday 5th May (7pm UK (6pm UTC) / 8pm CEST) if you could
make it to discuss it further.

If you would like to participate, please simply add your name and
Skype ID to the etherpad below:

http://wdmmg.okfnpad.org/meeting-2011-05-05

We have now also produced some documentation to help people get started:

http://wiki.openspending.org/Getting_Started
http://wiki.openspending.org/Data_Format

> We are also interested to learn how to decipher government data and how to manage volunteers to help us.

Our experience is that it works best to give volunteers really
concrete, manageable tasks to help them get started. We use Google
forms to help people get in touch and then catch up with them briefly
on Skype to see what they are interested in doing / where their
expertise are.

Often, after a big media release (e.g. Italy had a big release with
their spending data) you will get an influx of volunteers from a
particular country, so it would be good to get a sample piece of data
which you could then publish (you really don't need very much to
start!).

An example of the concrete tasks we have brainstormed for active
communities such as Italy can be found here:

http://wiki.openspending.org/GetInvolved

I hope that that has answered at least some of your questions. It
would be really great to talk this over further - perhaps we could
organise a time to suit you if you cannot make the OpenSpending
general meetup?

Best wishes,

Lucy

-- 
Lucy Chambers
Community Coordinator
Open Knowledge Foundation
http://okfn.org/
Skype: lucyfediachambers