Integrating www.iQuango.org/news into SpinDifferent.com

SpinDifferent covers news/briefings from the executives of UK, US and UN, and we have iQuango.org News which looks at news/briefings from the international NGOs.

Given the volumes of posts in iQuango, we can't just give them a the SpinDifferent column - as they'd drown out the executives as at least one NGO will be talking about that topic every day.

So how should we cross link the two?

Ideas and comments very welcome.

IMF and Worldbank updates to iQuango.org

iQuango.org now scrapes the International Monetary Fund and World Bank news pages and puts their news releases into RSS and email alerts, along with existing sources else, based on keywords.

We've also added a news list (and RSS feed) to each country page which gives the latest news mentioning that country. Of course, all the normal search functionality is there if you want to be more precise.

Directionless in the Guardian

Directionlessgov.com got a mention in today's Guardian.

With 30 million quid to spend each year, hopefully they'll have nice, useful things to show for it. For those keeping score, our state of financial accounting means we don't quite know how much Directionlessgov.com costs each year, but it's somewhere in the region of £8.89 - the cost of the domain name registration.

Looking at Direct.gov.uk's plans for the future, one thing that various people have talked about in a variety of places is a project called Bureaucracy Bingo or, less pejoratively, UK Feedback. Given the main comment usages of DowningStreetSays.com and theGovernmentSays.com there's really demand for a CSA conversation site. Although I don't particularly want to run that one, it's too depressing as it is.

Taking it a step further, there's apparantly a great site in the Netherlands which lets their civil servants talk about being civil while also serving. Doing that here would need a good name...

US knowledge

I've been interested in finding these numbers for a while, and so am putting them here so I'll be able to find them again

From The Myth of the Rational Voter, page 8:

"About half of americans don't know that each state has 2 senators, adn three-quarters do not know the length of their terms. About 70% can say which party controls the House, and 60% the senate. Over half cannot name their congressman, and 40% can not name either of their senators. Slightly lower percentages know their representatives' party affiliations".

Update to the heat theme maps for words

The heattheme service has been updated to now show a set of scores for the submitted text.

It's also been reimplemented in perl, so it moves from .php to .cgi, but all existing inbound links will just work, and will continue to work.

I should especially thank Tim Yao for his fog tool for all the ideas behind these enhancements.

One remaining task is to add support for the missing bits of output which you get from GNU diction. Anyone happen to know of a perl module which does this?

Meinedata (and mellanrumet) new version

An updated flash applet and source code are now in mysociety CVS. Updates include the ability to change colours based on the value of a third variable (previously a constant), and a variety of prettiness improvements and bugfixes.

We also announce a service where you can convert a Excel spreadsheet into the format used by the flash applet, which lets you put your data into the system.


The data behind mellanrummet is at http://www.iquango.org/data/mellanrummet-input.xls, and if someone fancies fiddling with the dot size so they're not mostly so big and ugly but have some resemblance to population size, that'd be appreciated.

Details for putting your data into meinedata/mellanrummet

When we started building meinedata, one of the aims was for the data to be reasonably editable by those who care about their owns bits of data.

Now available is a converter which takes an excel spreadsheet and turns it into the xml required by the flash code. This allows anyone to put their data into the system (and since it's all freely available, you can do it on your own websites.

Some notes about the spreadsheet follow.

• The spreadsheet consists of a top (first) sheet and one or more data sheets. All points to be plotted must be listed in the top sheet.
  
  
• Data sheets must have names. Each sheet contains a series unless the sheet name begins with the word "variable", in which each column is treated as separate variables. There can be multiple sheets of both varieties. Sequence sheets have the entryid in the column headers. Empty cells are treated as missing.
  
  
• Cell A1 in sequence sheets should be the full, displayed, name. All other cells in Row A and all cells in row 2 in all worksheets are reserved and should be empty.
  
  
• Column headers are on row3 of each worksheet.
  
  
• Column A of all data sheet must match an entry in column A or B of the first worksheet, otherwise they will be ignored.
  
  
• The column order in the topsheet must match the order in the examples. All columns must be present and should be filled with the exception of Column A.
  
  
• Column A in the topsheet is not displayed, but is used as a second field to match against if the name in a data sheet doesn't match in Column B. This allows you to use reference codes/identifiers in data sheets and still match against user friendly names. Column A in the topsheet is therefor optional.
  

If the above rules don't match the example spreadsheets, the examples are right (and tell me so I can fix the above).