Last week we had several planning sessions for our Where Does My Money Go? project – to discuss where to go next and what our priorities will be for the next major release.
We had some excellent feedback from the launch of our prototype before Christmas – and the release was covered in the BBC and in the Guardian!
In addition to continuing to improve, fix and add to our prototype as it is, we have been thinking about:
- what new features we should add
- what new data we should incorporate
- how best to piece together the data we want to collect
- how we can improve the visualisations and user interface
- how we can personalise what is shown to each user
In particular, we’re looking into:
- having a dedicated ‘data store’ for raw data, as well as an open API
- how to drill down into spending: more fine grained data, greater disaggregation
- collecting and aggregating more local information (my town, my region, etc.)
- spending per person
- breaking down the jargon (making it as easy as possible to understand how money is spent)
- deep linking and embedding visualisations in external services/applications
- search and querying
We’ve also started:
- A new discussion list, wdmmg-discuss – so that anyone can follow what we are doing, make suggestions or get involved.
- A new wdmmg group on CKAN. Until now we’ve been maintaining a list of UK public spending data we’re interested in on a Google Docs spreadsheet, but we’ve decided that its about time we started using CKAN, our open source registry of open data. (Did someone say dogfood?) Give us a shout if you’d like to become an administrator!
For anyone who is really curious, we’ve also uploaded our flipchart notes:
Could we also use this to benchmark against other countries.
The open API should certainly help here, but it would get really interesting once we can start seeing whether spending x% on health is a lot or a little relative to international standards.