

Show HN: Understanding public spending – 700 tables of data in one diagram - dandare
http://wikibudgets.org/w/uk/london/greenwich/2015/

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anigbrowl
This is fantastic - I hope you'll get in touch with the people at opendata.gov
in the US.

My only grumbles are with the main landing page:
[http://wikibudgets.org/](http://wikibudgets.org/) \- there's no obvious way
to search for other datasets, and the tone of the copy seems oddly
adversarial; I don't see myself in a fundamentally oppositional relationship
with public administrators even when I'm critical of them.

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dandare
Thanks! The whole project is ver very early beta, we hope that one day the
landing page will show data right away, similar to Google Maps. When it comes
to the tone, it's not about the administration, I read that as a startup I
should "take a stance, don't be neutral". [campfire?]

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danbruc
The German Federal Ministry of Finances publishes earnings and spending on a
dedicated website [1] since 2012, also allowing you to drill down.

[1] [http://www.bundeshaushalt-info.de/](http://www.bundeshaushalt-info.de/)

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dandare
Thanks!

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dandare
Blog post explaining what you see:
[http://blog.wikibudgets.org/2015/03/understanding-public-
spe...](http://blog.wikibudgets.org/2015/03/understanding-public-
spending-700.html)

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bshimmin
It's a while since I've seen a Sankey diagram. I really don't find it a very
helpful way of displaying information, especially not in this zooming format,
which seems incredibly unintuitive - indeed, it took me several minutes to
realise that the "arrows" were actually clickable!

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dandare
I know what you mean, it's just that after year of research we came to a
conclusion that this is the best/only possible way. There are two main
problems, 1/ the money flows in multigraph, not a simple tree as many people
think, there is no better tool than Sankey for multigraphs. 2/ there are
astronomical size differences, the same node can have flows in millions and
hundreds right next to each other, the zoomable interface is our best answer.
I understand it's unfamiliar but trust me, it's better than 720 tables in
PDFs. Also I believe nobody has successful simplified/visualised public
finance yet, well maybe except
[http://demonocracy.info/infographics/eu/debt_greek/debt_gree...](http://demonocracy.info/infographics/eu/debt_greek/debt_greek.html)
:)

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aravan
is that d3 charts, can you talk about technologies used behind?

