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.

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).