iQuango.org News feeds

One of the things I wanted to do with iQuango.org is to make the news from NGOs searchable by topic across the NGO sector. A small start is scraping reliefweb and doing what was described as "better alerts", and also doing a best guess at adding links back to the source.

reliefweb drops that information and only gives the name (which it internally links to a useless page); so we take the headline and run it through google search to find the page (and include an "feeling lucky" link). We use the main google search page rather than Google news so that the links continue into the future; even when the post isn't news any more.

The plan is to start adding more (non-RSSed) sources to iQuango News as soon as the latest version of mellanrummet is done (which is next on my list. I'm planning on starting with the IMF and WorldBank. What else should I add my little list?

SpinDifferent.com addition

This year's BBC Reith Lectures were from Jeffrey Sachs talking about international poverty, growth and, in his final lecture, talked about international politics and its effects.

He considers whether a global network of Parliaments, connected by video conferencing and modern communications, could work together to solve current problems, and maybe, would those links have helped prevent the invasion of Iraq? When you have connections to the rest of the world, it's harder to act against the greater interest. When you look only to yourselves, it's far easier. Due to the nature of parliaments, what matters there is votes, not what people say. Whereas in the Executives, it's far more what you say than how you vote (as in the US and at the UN, the executive can't).

As a quick win following Sach's line of thinking, I've added links on the SpinDifferent results page to votes in the US Congress (via govtrack) and UK Parliament (via PublicWhip) for that topic. When UNDemocracy has vote search for the Security Council and General Assembly, I'll add that too...

The new MPtables

MPtables today relaunches with a new interface built in flash. MPTables gives you the numbers , counts and rankings various places have for MPs, and lets you graph one against the other to see what they look like.

The new interface, using meinedata from mySociety today lets you play those through time (where we have sequences of data for years) and you can merge in your own data for visualisatoin, both as single points and sequences for constituencies. For more details, see www.MPtables.com

The merging of custom data will be available shortly.

My sense of awe at what Gapminder has done for some UN statistics has been covered here before (and again today), and served as the design and inspiration for this. All the flash development was done at lightning speed by Steve McEntee

Meinedata, mellenrummet, and iQuango.org

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?

Meinedata, mellenrummet, and technical details

There are a stack of things I'd like to see added to mellanrummet (which is the iquango.org installation of meinedata), which I don't have the data for.

• Some sort of classification of country more detailed than by continent (gapminder has one)
• Data for additional indicators to add.
• I'd really love for someone to take on the job of tidying the data up. It's all automatically generated at the moment, so there is lots of scope for improvement (I can give you a big excel spreadsheet of everything which you can then edit).
  

All of the work building the flash was done by Steve McEntee, who has done an outstanding job of building it better and faster than I had imagined. There are a number of rough edges around design and which might be interesting for someone with design skills and flash knowledge to take a look at (contact Steve and/or myself).


While the XML schema used is relatively self explanatory, some notes are in CVS. if that doesn't answer your questions, please drop me an email and we'll improve the documentation. It'll be faster if you help, and we're eager to hear from you - please get in touch.

I've added some screenshots (1, 2) to my flickr account,so if you just want to make simple comments on display, you can do so there.

All the original code for this is in the mySociety CVS repository, and (soon) the CGI scripts for merging in additional data as for mptables. Soon to be available is a service where you can provide the URL for your own data and have it displayed in the flash for you. It's designed for relatively easy reuse, by just getting the flash and putting your data in (for merge, see the sites; upload of a spreadsheet without using any other data will be available after that if there's interest).