"We were interested to know whether everyone suffered from similar problems in using the data - or whether some countries had a far easier time using the data. We found both statements to be true..."

->

I'd give a broader introduction to this section and the topics that are discussed - which isn't just about problems in using the data, but what people's interests are, problems they face (not just in using, but also in getting data), how people are using the data, and what people want to be able to do...

• Page history (like Edit this Page) - linking to git history on github
• Work out all redirects and implement them in _config.yml
• Front page - still needs some work (e.g. to link to core sections)
• Also should we auto-expand menu (may not be obvious to users)
• Tweak tagline - cf current community site ...
• Point to main database - people may have ended up here and wonder where the data is!
• sorting the main menu to have a sensible ordering
• content tweaks (e.g. i think we thought the help section could do with some refactoring)
• ensure RSS feeds work
• generate sitemap https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-sitemap

Note quite sure where this page came from: http://community.openspending.org/about/community-site/slide-deck-introduction/

I think this is a bit of an orphan and we want to delete and put slide deck on the front page or just delete and put slide deck on a page called "Presentations" or similar.

/cc @danfowler for your input as czar of the migration

Would it be useful to provide a link to an API query URL for views over data generated in the search interface for each dataset?

For example, if I search a particular dataset for a particular term and then select a few filters/facets, if we provided a link to the corresponding API call it would allow users to use openspending.org to build up a query/data view, and then grab a link that they could use to pull the data directly into another application.

This approach makes the API available to users who may be confident in consuming the data, or plugging an API calling URL into a library that can handle that data, but who struggles to make sense of the API documentation (or can't be bothered to read it...)

I'd rename this from "Case Studies - From international to local" either to something like "Case Studies - from local to global" (i.e. building up from local to global) or something that connotes drilling down into high level overview (e.g. international flows) into transaction level detail (e.g. local transactions).

The overview of this section doesn't seem to me to adequately capture what it is about. Can we say something about the logic and rationale here? Even mention the two examples by name and explain what thematically connects them? E.g. are we really talking about the next frontiers of mapping public money - by looking at, e.g. transport spending, university spending, etc?

I believe it is "CSOs", not "CSO's".

• Facebook http://facebook.com/OpenSpending
• Twitter https://twitter.com/openspending
• Forum https://discuss.okfn.org/c/openspending

Nice to have icons for them.

@mintcanary is there a way to make this reasonably generic / configurable. Also how would this work on individual pages (not front page) - would be nice to keep consistent but also reasonably clean.

• R OpenSpending library - https://github.com/mihi-tr/r-openspending
• List of all satellite sites

On API help pages (eg http://openspending.org/help/api.html ) the headings in the menu down the left hand side are often completely different to the titles of the page those pages load. For example:

Financial data types -> Financial data types in OpenSpending
How we store data -> How does OpenSpending store data?

Overview -> Loading Data into OpenSpending
Cleaning Data -> How Do I Clean My Data?
Extending Data -> How can I extend my data?

Overview -> Guide for developers and designers
Aggregation-> Aggregation API
Resources -> REST resources
Full-text search -> Search API
Personal Tax -> Tax share API
Dataset loading -> Data loading API

Do you want to help? -> Hacking on OpenSpending
Development process -> Foundations of the Development Process
Code review guidelines -> Lend us your eyeballs!

Some of the page titles have a general similarity to navigation menu link text, but some are way off, which creates confusion when trying to navigate the site.

It would be really useful to reconcile these some way - does anyone have any preferences or shall I just make changes as I see fit?

For consistency of experience, it probably makes sense to keep the navigation text and tweak the page titles?

http://openspending.org/resources/osi/appendix-open-budgets-open-data.html

Here's where I'd mention all of the confusion around 'open' and 'standard' language. And perhaps if we need to mention it in text above, we can just link here?

"We have looked in detail in this report at criteria which make it difficult for organisations to use data that has been released by governments." -> "In this report we have looked at obstacles to civil society organisations using data on public finance to support their mission."

Again I'd harmonise titles/nesting, which is currently somewhat confusing. Or hold the hand of the reader a bit more and guide them through narrative of the text.

@mintcanary just flagging it appears a page "title" and the h1 in the main content are the same size. I'd expect page title to be larger (and expect to be able to use h1s inside page content).

What do you reckon?

Last retrieval from the RSS seems to be 14 November. It must have broken somtime after this date:
http://openspending.org/datasets.rss

The RSS feed is really useful for alerting us to what is added to OpenSpending.

When sidebar is active on normal pages the list of funders wraps to two lines and looks bad.

I suggest we have list of funders on own separate line (e.g. second line after logo stuff).

Aside: we should add Hewlett Foundation logo.

Update: the in progress analysis and plan is in this google doc

• Review this repo
• Identify diff with current wordpress powered community.openspending.org
• Detail content migration
• Re-theme
• Detail other migration (e.g. DNS etc)

Detailed Items

Note: italics indicate less important items we could leave until later.

Blog migration

• migrate blog - see #34

Resources Section

The /resources/ links currently point to the old content as it already exists in the repo so they (with the exception of the EU report) are not yet formatted in accordance with the theme.

Sort resources section (i.e. get theme working for all sections, remove /refactor any irrelevant stuff e.g. the index page for resources section probably needs work)

Resources is currently a catch-all folder and I'm inclined to distinguish among different types of resources via YAML metadata (e.g. 'report: true', 'archived: true').

• resources/* - remove bespoke layouts and use default
  • check if any layouts do more than set breadcrumbs
  • think about markdownify-ing html
• resources/gift - can just use default layout for now and worry about bespoke layout later
• resources/gb-spending
  • ignore /report/ - just leave as is

Misc Other

• Should information about contributing go under both /help/ and /get-involved/?
  • Ans: No. I think contributing is probably under get-involved. All in all i think we could simplify a bit here.
• Front page - still needs some work (e.g. to link to core sections)
  • Also should we auto-expand menu (may not be obvious to users)
  • Tweak tagline - cf current community site ...
  • Point to main database - people may have ended up here and wonder where the data is!
• Edit this page / Contribute to this page on every page
  • We can leave off front page if not obvious where this would go
• Page history (like Edit this Page) - linking to git history on github
• _Work out all redirects and implement them in config.yml
• Put in place contribution guidelines (can borrow from e.g. opendatahandbook) - i.e. how do i edit this page
  • Shall we put these under a dedicated /meta/ section of the site i.e. at /meta/contribute/ or similar (there is other meta stuff we can have e.g. recent changes - see #33)
• Remove author display (do this in _layouts for present)

Actual Switchover

• commit CNAME file to repo: community.openspending.org
• shorten TTL before changing DNS records
• update CNAME in DNS records of community.openspending.org to point to GitHub
• undo redirection of blog.openspending.org to community.openspending.org
• redirect community.openspending.org/blog to blog.openspending.org (to catch old links)
• reset TTL after changing DNS records
• Google Analytics

Refactor old site

• Move current WP community.openspending.org to openspending.okblogfarm.org

Mark the stuff in http://community.openspending.org/resources/standard/ as deprecated prominently and point people at http://fiscal.dataprotocols.org/

Wrong repo mentioned here: http://docs.openspending.org/en/latest/install.html - @pudo do we still want people to be using these?

I'm really struggling to make even the simplest API calls based on the documentation shown.

Has anyone got a list of example URLs for calling the API (both search API and aggregation API) for a range of "useful" queries (it would be handy to have a line or two about what the dataset represents as well as the URL)? These are a great way of helping the 'try something that already works then hack it" approach to figuring out APIs;-)

I'd move the "Introduction to procurements" text underneath the main "Case Studies - Procurements" title, and standardise with other sections by fleshing out each one to a few paragraphs (e.g. explaining budgets and explaining spending, etc).

Again, a picture in these shorter sections would be good...

When a new report comes in, it might be nice to have a way to say, "hey, this is new" in addition to whatever blog post announces it. Perhaps a publish_date attribute on a new report index.md?

Can we do something simple like google custom search as per okfnlabs.org and integrate into top navbar

If you want more people to read this then I'd encourage you to have a stronger opening. :-)

Currently you have "In early 2012, we set out on a mission", then leap straight into detail, but don't explain why any of this might be interesting or relevant to anyone.

I'd start with a more compelling first line about the potential of information and technology for greater transparency, stronger democracies and holding power to account.

Then move on to a higher level statement like: "In this report we look at how citizens, journalists and civil society organisations around the world are using data on government finances to further their mission."

Then something like: "From [activity X in country A] to [activity Y in country B], we look at how civil society groups are using data on public finances, what tools they are using, and what their needs are in this area."

Then can go on to: "When we first started this work in early 2012, our aim was threefold:"

(including this one when completed)

May also need to work out what are the logos and whether we have all the ones we need (e.g. favicon, square one etc etc)

http://assets.okfn.org/p/openspending/img/

Note we have a square one on twitter i think ;-)

Aside: we have want to start storing assets in this repo (???)

A members section connected to the main Open Knowledge community directory at http://discuss.okfn.org/users/

• Badge setup - https://discuss.okfn.org/badges/116/openspending
• /members/ page exists and has info
  • Briefly what membership means
  • How to become a member - i.e. how to get listed on https://discuss.okfn.org/badges/116/openspending
  • Say that list of members is at https://discuss.okfn.org/badges/116/openspending (until we find a way to maybe inline)

Old

• Suggest we do a members / users page a bit like OK Labs one.
  • Naming would be "users" and hence /users/ rather than members
• Authors on pages should be usernames (if we have page authors at all ...)
• Can also have badging (e.g. esp showing roles - e.g. you are on steering group)

Questions:

• How does this relate to users on http://openspending.org/ itself?
  • Right now they are distinct and we live with that.
  • One day we hope these could be merged. However, for now can think of this as the "wiki" users separate from the app users.

With the recent restructuring of the OpenSpending.org site several URLs from the previous site structure ceased to work. For example, the page for the (now deprecated) data standard for transaction-level spending data no longer resolves and instead returns HTTP 404 Not found. Fortunately, the Internet Archive has some of the pages with broken URLs cached (e.g., A data standard for transaction-level spending data), but it would be better if the URLs continued to resolve to allow referencing them in the future.

For extra points hitting edit gives a popup with some brief instructions and then link back to the file in github repo

In this page, would like to get the pics smaller + align them to each description

https://github.com/openspending/dotorg/blob/gh-pages/about/steering-group/index.md

Part of a content cleaning I spotted several pages with old broken links.
I will remove the old video links in the help section. It definitely doesn't help any more:)
http://community.openspending.org/help/

If you spot any others (and that might be the case) report it here or replace depending on the cases

e.g. we have links on http://community.openspending.org/about/contact/

I suggest we now remove these mailing list links in favour of the forum. Note I'm not sure the forum link is super clear so I would repeat in the bullet point lists (i.e. basically replace mailing list item in the lists with a link to the forum).

I'd also suggest we repeat the irc link under developer section (or get rid of the developer section frankly ...)

I'd also change this from /resources/osi to something reflecting the content rather than the funder if possible, e.g. /resources/mappingcommunity or suchlike

"This report is deliberately short. We know that people seldom read page upon page of long winded explanation."

-> Don't think this is the best way to frame this. Actually most people in the transparency space will probably be digesting page upon page of extremely long winded text (namely legal and policy documents, consultation responses, reports and articles) before breakfast. I'd just emphasise how we wanted to keep the report succinct and readable so as many people as possible can dive into it and learn from the case studies and findings...

"We believe that there are some very quick ways to make the work that these organisations do a lot easier, more thorough and sustainable."
-> probably "more sustainable"

In list of bullets starting with "outline how the data could be improved in order to make it more usable" - I'd be inclined to capitalise the first letter of each bullet.

In 'Thanks' section I'd also be inclined to mention more of the orgs that you interviewed, other people who you met and helped you on your travels, and others who helped out in writing this report - e.g. Janet Haven specifically at OSI.

Also given that the timeline has its own section in intro, perhaps can remove it from here to keep intro as brief as possible?

http://openspending.org/resources/osi/case-studies-budgets.html

Given that we've identified that different people mean different things by the word 'budget' - could it be worth highlighting this here, and unpacking what the term means and how we (and others in the report) are using it?

Minor thing - but can we add line breaks between all of the titles and the body text?

A picture for all of these short sections would also be great...

As a reader I feel that the different chapters in this section are very different - some give overviews of projects run by particular groups, others give overviews of workshops we've run.

Any kind of overview of the kinds of questions that you're asking and issues that you're looking at in this section would be much appreciated, as would any kind of common structure/breakdown to the different chapters.

Are there plans to migrate the blog to Jekyll along with the community site?

I'd name this section consistently with the table of contents. So perhaps just "EU spending data", or - as this seems to be mainly the focus - "EU Structural Funds"

Also re: FT work, you might also want to link to: http://blog.okfn.org/2011/03/08/a-kafkaesque-data-trail-the-hunt-for-europes-hidden-billions/

Useful to have - Can just use githubActivity.js

Suggest we put this at e.g. /meta/changes/ (or just at /recent-changes/

http://openspending.org/resources/osi/

"How civil society organisations use technology to wrangle government spending data. " -> is this just about wrangling spending data? Given the threefold mission you mention in the introduction, isn't this more about how CSOs use data about public finances (and not just spending)?

Hence what about: "How civil society organisations use data about public finances"?

Also this should be updated in the image - whatever it turns out to be...

"Summary based on blog post by J. Félix Ontañón at OpenKratio" -> I'd move this to the bottom, in italics.

Can we discuss in this section why we're including this and why it is of more than merely technical interest (or nice for shiny university PR). I.e. are we saying there are opportunities for new types of engagement around how money is spent?

Given the focus of the report (needs and behaviours of CSOs, using data for accountability) I think we need to do a bit of additional framing to say why this is relevant, if we think it is - rather than just another demo of OpenSpending...

Hello,

while going through the site I wanted to open the map of spending projects.
But it is not there:
http://community.openspending.org/resources/map-of-spending-projects/

*Made by Anna Flagg using D3.js.*

[iframe src="http://www.annaflagg.com/os" frameborder="0" width="620" height="320"]

https://github.com/openspending/dotorg/blob/gh-pages/resources/map-of-spending-projects/index.md

The iframe is not displayed and the map at
http://www.annaflagg.com/os
does not work either.

Just letting you know :)

In the table of contents this says "Farmsubsidies in Mexico" -> there should be a space.

This is very short relative to other examples. Can we give any kind of screenshot or add any further detail to make the disparity between chapter lengths less apparent?

I'd unpack this to 'Open Knowledge Foundation Greece'.

"Identified challenges" - perhaps just "Challenges"?

Side menu is not "open" to the current page. This means that when you navigate around e.g. EU guide you lose "context".

@mintcanary any thoughts here? Does the issue make sense?

If we're going for an international audience, suggest we go with "over 30,000" instead of ">30.000" (comma instead of point).

Also as there will be lots of links in the report, can we do "target="_blank" or whatever to get them to open in new window so we don't lose people reading the report?

"Quantitative and qualitative growth of the awareness on the issue" - is a bit confusing. Can we say "Improving the number of people who are aware of this issue, and improving the quality of public understanding" or something else to break it down?

The "To achieve its objectives" text has been absorbed into bullet points above.

I just tried running this and got: Could not find activesupport-4.2.3 in any of the sources.

Overall this section (which is pretty crucial) is a bit confusing and in need of a bit of refactoring. There is a real mix of different things that are in the section, and the different header levels are not clear (and different types of capitalisation for subtitles which should be standardised throughout). Also there is no introduction - saying what this section is. Is it our findings? Distillation from our interviews? If so, can we break this down a bit better and make it a bit more clear/consistent what is happening? E.g.

• 'Highlights' -> should say 'Executive Summary'
• 'Status Quo' -> to what does this refer? I'd take this out...
• "Demand for data" -> 'There is civil society demand for better data on public money'? Can we add a summary of how people want to use this and what people want to do?
• Perhaps you could turn the overview of data types section into something like - 'Lots of data is still not available in many countries'
• The FOI point is so important, I'd be inclined to make this into a separate point and add more info. E.g. 'Access to information laws are still an essential mechanism for getting hold of information on public money'
• "Key Obstacles in Preventing Re-use of the Data" -> 'There are many obstacles to using data which is publicly available'
• The "Common vocabulary and language barriers" thing is such a minor point that I don't think it deserves its own section in the executive summary. You could turn this into a "There is a major opportunity for transparency and open data groups to work together" section and mention that these are different communities with different expertise and different focuses and lots of good things could happen if they were better connected (e.g. policy/advocacy/contextual experience of transparency orgs, tech/data wrangling/standards experience of data groups and civic hackers, etc). Could mention the language/culture thing here, but I think this could move to an appendix or the main body of the document.
• "When it comes to publishing standards- there are clear role-models to follow" - what about "More needs to be done to promote publishing standards and best practises between countries"
• "Offering civil-society-led, free technical help to governments may promote transparency" -> I'd frame this more as "Civil society engagement with government can lead to greater financial transparency and better data". I'd frame this less as technical help and more as constructive engagement - and spell out how each side benefits (e.g. gov gets tech help, CS gets more info/expertise from gov).
• "The training needs" -> I'd frame this as "Civil society groups around the world could benefit from training and support in key areas"

Other text specific comments:

"It is clear and undeniable that there is an unquenched demand for financial data about governments from Civil Society"

-> "From our interviews and discussions with civil society organisations for this study, we found that there is strong demand for more higher quality, machine readable data about public revenues and expenditures."

Why is some stuff highlighted in the bulleted list - are these the things which are most important? I'd be inclined not to bold these...

Do we also want to mention revenue? This is mentioned in the video interviews (e.g. from extractives) but not in the list.

In the "This should be" list, I strongly recommend adding "published as open data to enable reuse".

I don't see how "Arbitrary release thresholds" constitutes an obstacle to reuse, and suggest we remove from this list.

As with Executive Summary I think this section needs some work, as it will be one of the most read bits. Headers are a bit confusing (either we need table of contents, more consistent headings, or something to make this easier to understand what is going on!).

Generally, clearly a lot of work has gone into this report, and here is the bit where we present our findings - the major themes, areas that need attention, opportunities for progress - not just cobble together various points that the people we spoke to have made on lots of different topics. Hence this should be streamlined, edited, and thematically clear, with some kind of narrative to guide the reader through the various points.

Can we do a better job at linking the points we're making to the case studies we have? E.g. when we make a claim about something being an issue, can we point to case studies that mention this, and really spell out links between this section and other sections of the report?

I'd be inclined to remove two tiers of headings, and just have one subtitle size, and flesh out each subtitle to really spell out what our finding was (and how this relates to subject of report - CSOs and their use of spending data).

Comments on text:

"key takes" -> key points

"Demand for data" -> are we basically saying 'these are the types of data that we've found people are interested in'? also - as noted in another issue - do we want to mention revenue (which came up in a video interview)? In which case we might want to call this "What kinds of public financial data are civil society organisations interested in?", and say a bit about generally what different groups found most interesting, why and what the obstacles are for each kind of data?

Again thing about subtitles with different levels.

"(* See note)" convention is a bit weird. Can we either do this in a conventional footnote, or work into text?

typo: "information biographical information"

"Proactive spending release doesn’t necessarily make strong civil societies" -> I think this is a point that should be sufficiently self-evident to most people reading this (at least from the transparency side, but also from many on the open data side), that I wonder if we can think of a better way to reframe it so we're saying something more unexpected? Sometimes there are users without data, and sometimes there is data without users. This isn't necessarily just because of technical literacy issues, I think also it may be the case that for many groups spending data isn't sufficiently interesting to merit attention (in a world where this is in finite supply) - especially relative to other things, like advocacy around important issues, or looking at meatier documents/information sources, not to mention good old fashioned human sources. Perhaps our narrative can be something like 'in order to achieve accountability through information on public money you need the right kind of data (about issues that matter, sufficiently granular, etc) and data literate users who are able to make sense of it to do something' - and turn this into something about training needs and citizens and civil society organisations being able to coalesce around and use data effectively.

"Data supply" and "There are clear leaders amongst governments regarding publishing practices" - as this is a report about CSOs, I think we should frame this in terms of CSO engagement with governments, rather than as recommendations for governments (which it currently reads as).

"A few improvements on spending transparency occur for reasons other than public pressure" - perhaps change this to "There are a wide variety of factors that lead to the release of better spending data" or "Public pressure is only one of many reasons to the release of better spending data"

Can we combine "No bulk download" and "Governmental PDF release policies" into "Lack of machine readable, bulk downloadable data is an obstacle to transparency and accountability". Also would be good to mention specific examples of this from case studies above.

"Privacy Concerns" - again can we flag anything about this from the report above? Otherwise it just looks like this is something we think is important, rather than this being about CSO needs/use of fiscal data. Could we turn this into being about privacy vs transparency balance and mention Farm Subsidy legal case and how this is an emerging area of importance?

"Arbitrary release thresholds" - > perhaps we can turn this less into something about how these thresholds were arrived at, and more about engaging civil society around the transparency policy-making and commitments? We could allude to the OGP here.

"Don’t reinvent the wheel" -> perhaps mention how we need better mechanisms to exchange experience and expertise around civil society projects on public finance. I wouldn't make this about tech, but also about sharing knowledge (e.g. also on tactics, FOI, as well as engagement around data). Then we could rename to something like "Better exchange of expertise and experience between civil society groups working with information about public money".

"More community mapping projects!" - suggest integrating this into point above.

"Teach people" - can we flesh this out into something about civil society data literacy/data skills?

"several skills are repeatedly emerging" -> skills are lacking?

"While the pool of skills is hugely diversity across the community, key parts of the data pipeline from data retrieval to data cleaning are major hurdles, which steal time from activism and other parts of an organisation's work." -> bit confusing, perhaps too many different metaphors going on here (pool, pipeline, cleaning, hurdles)

"On the methodology and terminology" - I'd collapse this all into a section on how we need to join up CSO community (traditional transparency and more tech/data oriented groups/orgs) and turn this into something about collaboration, and shared understanding, not just about words like 'open' and 'standard' (which are really very minor points).

"So please if you are a polyglot, who can help bring an otherwise undiscovered project to the fore, put us in touch (info [at] openspending.org)." -> feel this is somewhat misplaced and we should take this out. Generally I don't think it is appropriate to ask for volunteers throughout text - as this should really be about CSO needs, not OpenSpending project needs!

To finally conclude are there any specific recommendations we can make (e.g. to funders, to transparency orgs, to data/tech/civic hacker groups?), or next steps we can suggest? Would be nice to distil what we have learned from this report right at the end, so others know what we think needs to happen next if we want to maximise impact of CSOs using spending/public finance data...

• Take into account most recent changes in response to public comments
• Determine whether to represent Funds/Datasets databases as Jekyll collections or not
• Replace remaining Google URL redirects (a symptom of working in Google Docs)
• Add navigation
• Re-add formatting (bold, italics)
• Add @pzwsk to repo
• Make sure Markdown supports footnotes
• Remove old EU report from /resources/eu/
• Create scaffolding for new content
• /resources/eu/img/ = directory for all images
• review /resources/eu/ - base page. Front matter plus exec summary plus table of contents
• review /resources/eu/glossary/ = “glossary section”
• review /resources/eu/overview/ = “at a glance” section
• review /resources/eu/revenue/ (or /resources/eu/where-does-money-come-from/)
• review /resources/eu/expenditure/ - Who Manages and Spends the Money, and How? section
• review /resources/eu/transparency/ = How Transparent is the EU Budget?
• review /resources/eu/research/ = Journalistic Investigations and Transparency Projects to Follow the Money
• /resources/eu/funds/ = Funds Database
• /resources/eu/datasets/ = annex 2.

Funds Database

home page:
content from p.19-20 - “where does the money go”
only addition - at bottom after 5 special funds have separate / new heading and then add list of all funds with link and brief description maybe (auto generate by iterating over funds)

Individual pages e.g. /resources/eu/funds/cohesion-fund/

let’s download the spreadsheet and convert to individual pages - 1 per fund. suggest naming in obvious way.
all metadata becomes frontmatter except column P which becomes body
we probably need to clean this up later
feel free to drop columns and we can re-add later
for 5 special funds with their own section - overwrite content with the longer content

page layout for each fund like the sections in the main section (e.g. p. 20 - cohesion fund)
summary box then content
summary box will likely not have all frontmatter info atm

Datasets Database

Then one page each (mini db again) for each dataset

Only rows 2,3,4 of spreadsheet
Financial Transparency System /resources/eu/datasets/financial-transparency-system/
Grant and contributions awarded in the field of humanitarian aid
Horizon 2020 (CORDIS)

• the following
  common-agricultural-policy-cap
  common-fisheries-policy-cfp
  european-regional-development-fund-and-cohesion-fund
  Only have col B,C,D,F,L as frontmatter and description as body