UN and email alerts

Julian does an outstanding job (mostly alone) on UNDemocracy.com parsing all the PDFs they hide away, and making it all googletastic.

One of the big lessons from TheyWorkForYou.com was to push stuff out to people - RSS for the more geeky types and for reuse, and email alerts for everyone else who are the vast majority of people.

While it's not yet visible on the undemocracy.com site (which will be when Julian gets back from caving), we now include rss feeds of whatever new material appearing in UNDemocracy.com matches your search query http://www.undemocracy.com/rss.pl?search=America.

While RSS is hip and cool in the tech community, most people have never heard of it, and just want something to land in their mailbox. It's an easy lesson to learn that putting stuff on the website is not enough, you have to push it out to people who are interested. If what you want is the perception of transparency, without the hassle and work that comes from actually being transparent; then the UN is a prime example. While it puts the documents online (in multiple languages), it hides them quite well - no outreach - you can't find them in google, let alone RSS or email alerts. If you want to pretend to do transparency, just put stuff on the web where no one will find it. If you want to really do transparency, create a mailing list, so those who are interested get minutes in their mailbox - they just appear somewhere that people are checking anyway. Putting them on a website is a good way of making sure that only people who really care go looking for them.

I'll include the new material in the email alerts we send from TheUNsays.com (and will work out with Julian how to do signups for email alerts from the UND site when he's back).

Takedown requests

So far, TheGovernmentSays.com has had two (informal) requests to take items down.

Neither of these were from the Government, but for items in other related data sources (one from the bailii feed, one from the petitions feed). Of course, we don't store whole articles, just an extract of these items (the cache is only for GNN sourced articles).

In general, my principle is, if there are legal issues involved, follow those. Where there aren't, I don't take it down.

While anyone has the opportunity to speak, and can later extend or revise their remarks, should people get the opportunity to hide the fact that they said anything?

Should we have multiple standards, and if so, for whom?


Comments and discussion on the above are very welcome. While the TGS issues are trivial, it may become a future issue with iQuango.org/news.

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.

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?

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).

Directionless Gov Games

Government makes available large amounts of numbers about other levels of (local) Government. It locks them up in boring spreadsheets, with dull tables, in much the same way it buries useful information behind the clunky direct.gov.uk portal.

Some of this data is dull, some of it is quite interesting. And when it's all made available in machine readable formats, it becomes easier to fiddle with it and do nice things which it wasn't actually ever intended to be used for - such as be the input to a card game. The aim is to win all the cards, by selecting a better metric than your opponent (the computer). Thanks to Matthew for the code

Why do this? Because we can (and I needed an example for the NeSS API although didn't end up using it due the lack of a postcode lookup file for each LA) and because it's useful to learn about the country as it is, rather than how we think it is (or we thought it was). There's much more than can be done in this area.

For that reason, I've also done one based on country information (see the iQuango announcement post (which escaped when I pressed the wrong button, so is incomplete - sorry)).

Introducing iQuango.org

iQuango.org will have two parts.

Firstly, in the same way that theUNsays.com makes what the Secretary General says alertable and commentable (like theWhitehouseSays.com and DowningStreetSays.com), we can extend that to the many, many International Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations who operate on behalf of the world community (IMF, WorldBank, IAEA et al) with substantial public interest in what they say, and potentially divergent or contradictory. The unspun announcements from the original source, easily linkable and commentable.

Once we have a few of those (starting with the easy ones and moving up) it's then possible and easy to draw together the announcements on things of interest, made by many NGO's working internationally. Many organisations work in similar geographic areas or on similar themes (or both) and put out press releases and announcements on their topics of interest, but it's not something we get to see (watch tonight's news, and see how many times Tibet is mentioned). And unless you can look across multiple areas, you get very different suggestions about what's going on in one small part of Africa - for example - and that's just 3 view points, and doesn't reflect a diverse continent. How much richer would that be with MSF, World Food Programme and other agencies included, showing what they said and when they said it.

The idea is based on Larry Brilliant's design for a global health monitoring system. This is slightly narrower in terms of inputs (english announcements from NGOs), but much simple and wider in terms of outputs (any keyword you want to search for). Not all of it needs to be (or will be) on this site - the above DSS/UNSays/WHsays/SpinDifferent model shows it can be distributed and things get pulled in. Adding an individual organisation isn't complicated and isn't time consuming - it just needs someone to care about that organisation. While some NGOs might help, most wont. It'll be faster if you help.

If you're interesting in lending a hand to cover your favourite NGO, drop me an email.