[OpenSpending-discuss] Guest post

Thu Nov 3 10:27:31 UTC 2011

Many thanks Paul, this is really helpful! Hi Chie, great to meet you,
would love to catch up when we both have a moment.

@Team - at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference that we
recently attended, we asked Paul to give us some constructive
criticism for how we could make OpenSpending more useful for people
investigating Spending, such as through Help Me Investigate, his
answers are below.

@Paul - some comments inline - would also welcome feedback from the list!

On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 8:04 PM, Paul Bradshaw <paulonhismobile at gmail.com> wrote:
> On the website front, I think it would be useful when the user hits a part
> where the spending breakdown is 'Unknown' (such as the entire University
> budget - http://openspending.org/classifier/cofog-2/09-4) there is some
> explanation of why that is.

Agreed. We've worked on this for a couple of datasets, and the answers
often have to come from the dataproviders. What would be really nice
is if there were an easy way to augment the data with additional
context after it has been loaded in. i.e. a user acquires this info
through Help Me Investigate / FOI request

> Beyond that it would be great if there was an opportunity for them to dig
> further (happy to provide Help Me Investigate as a link if that helps).

:) We should talk more about this

> Another thing that would improve the data is some contextual information -
> for example, on a geographical breakdown what were the populations of each
> region in that year?

Agree further. I'm wondering what the best way to do this is, whether
it is something that could be crowd-sourced? (we've been looking for
ways in which users can wrangle the data and add additional layers for
a while to make the site more interactive) or whether we should
eventually look at contacting e.g. National Statistics offices and
bringing in the data systematically?

Would welcome further input from the list!

Lucy

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