Disruptive Proactivity

Meinedata is a new gift from some of the mySociety volunteers. It’s a flash based tool for graphing data, which can be provided to it in the form of a spreadsheet (soon) or xml (now).

Very heavily inspired by and based on the Gapminder tools, it brings some of that style of data visualisation to abitrary data. Using the tool is the new MPtables.com which takes data about UK MPs and lets you compare them.

I’ve also loaded the UN Common Database in as part of iQuango.org (with the name of mellanrummet). As more and more data becomes available, there should be a tool for organisations to use to do comparisons on data, and allow their website visitors to do comparisons of data, that they’re interested in. This lets those with data easily allow other people to visualise that data and compare it with other data they provide; and everyone else to find a bit more about the world, and have a better understanding than the chimpanzees.

For more technical details, see the post which follows this one.

For all the similarities with Gapminder, we apologise for any regressions and very gratefully acknowledge the vast amount of inspiration, ideas, design and motivation from Gapminder, Hans Rosling (his blog), and, certainly as importantly, TED conference for sharing their “inspired” talks online, and showing what’s possible with one person’s vision…

What’s next?