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congrats ffunction - Information Aesthetics

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Tracey P. Lauriault

congrats ffunction - Information Aesthetics

Congrats to Seb from ffunction who posted Expense Visualizer: Revealing the Canadian Travel and Hospitality Expenses on civicaccess.ca a few days ago has been featured on the information aesthetics blog - http://infosthetics.com/archives/2010/09/expense_visualizer.html

If you do not know this blog, take some time to enjoy it. There are some sublime ways to communicate complex ideas featured there.

--
Tracey P. Lauriault
613-234-2805

Drew Mcpherson

Re: congrats ffunction - Information Aesthetics

Looks interesting. Is the project complete now? I wonder if there is some way to collaborate with my governmentexpenses.ca project which was featured in last week's issue of Maclean's magazine and some upcoming media stories?

Cheers,

Drew Mcpherson

Bine Consulting Corp.

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Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2010 9:57 AM

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Subject: [CivicAccess-discuss] congrats ffunction - Information Aesthetics

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Drew Mcpherson

Re: congrats ffunction - Information Aesthetics

In reply to this post by Tracey P. Lauriault

By the way, is my mail getting through? I'm kind of wondering if it's getting filtered because I don't seem to get many responses and I had a radio station employee tell me that her work computer was filtering my email for some reason. Just curious if that might be the case here as well?

Regards,

Drew

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Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2010 9:57 AM

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Subject: [CivicAccess-discuss] congrats ffunction - Information Aesthetics

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Michael Lenczner

Re: congrats ffunction - Information Aesthetics

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 10:50 AM, Drew Mcpherson <[hidden email]> wrote:
> By the way, is my mail getting through? I'm kind of wondering if it's
> getting filtered because I don't seem to get many responses and I had a
> radio station employee tell me that her work computer was filtering my email
> for some reason. Just curious if that might be the case here as well?
>
> Regards,
> Drew

>From what I can tell, your emails are getting through without any problems.

Mike

> From: Tracey P. Lauriault
> Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2010 9:57 AM
> To: civicaccess discuss
> Subject: [CivicAccess-discuss] congrats ffunction - Information Aesthetics
> Congrats to Seb from ffunction who posted Expense Visualizer: Revealing the
> Canadian Travel and Hospitality Expenses on civicaccess.ca a few days ago
> has been featured on the information aesthetics blog -
> http://infosthetics.com/archives/2010/09/expense_visualizer.html
>
> If you do not know this blog, take some time to enjoy it. There are some
> sublime ways to communicate complex ideas featured there.
>
> --
> Tracey P. Lauriault
> 613-234-2805
>
>
> ________________________________
>
> _______________________________________________
> CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss
>
> _______________________________________________
> CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss
>

Michael Mulley

Re: congrats ffunction - Information Aesthetics

In reply to this post by Tracey P. Lauriault

Congrats Sébastien -- it's a lovely interface. (FYI, infosthetics got
the link wrong, and it's 404ing -- I imagine you'll want to set up a
redirect quickly!)

It took me some hunting to find the link to the dataset behind this.
If anyone else is looking, it's at
http://github.com/visiblegovernment/Expense-Visualizer/tree/master/dataset/
. It comes with a warning about errors and scraper omissions, but even
so this is a very nice dataset to have public.

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 8:57 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Congrats to Seb from ffunction who posted Expense Visualizer: Revealing the
> Canadian Travel and Hospitality Expenses on civicaccess.ca a few days ago
> has been featured on the information aesthetics blog -
> http://infosthetics.com/archives/2010/09/expense_visualizer.html
>
> If you do not know this blog, take some time to enjoy it. There are some
> sublime ways to communicate complex ideas featured there.
>
> --
> Tracey P. Lauriault
> 613-234-2805
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss
>

Jennifer Bell

Re: congrats ffunction - Information Aesthetics

Thanks, Michael. Yes, the data set was compiled in 2009, and only represents ~40 departments. VisibleGovernment's updated project page with the link to the data set is here:

http://visiblegovernment.ca/projects/expenses

Part of the intention of the scraping project was to get as many people involved in creating it as possible. Since the many, many gov't disclosure sites can change format at whim, I wanted to make a system where anybody -- even someone without much coding experience -- could submit updates to departments independantly. A presentation from the early days of the project is here.

http://www.slideshare.net/jenniferbell/visiblegovernmentca-expense-visualizer-pilot-montreal-on-rails-presentation

And the early 'scraper maker' -- for creating a scraper for a single department -- is on github here (though I notice the training videos are dead links):

http://github.com/jenniferb/hospitality-and-travel-expense-scraper-maker/wiki

The sql also contains a table of detected errors in the original scraped data -- which are interesting in themselves. The most agregious are corrected by hand in the database with a 'patch' layer so they don't disrupt the display.

I stopped activley working the project in 2009 as a) some other quick-win projects for the non-profit came up and b) various personal distractions over the past year.

I have to congratulate Drew & governmentexpenses.ca for finishing the data set -- it's a lot work. Congrats on the MacLeans interview, too!

Jennifer

--- On Thu, 9/16/10, Michael Mulley <[hidden email]> wrote:

From: Michael Mulley <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss] congrats ffunction - Information Aesthetics
To: "civicaccess discuss" <[hidden email]>
Received: Thursday, September 16, 2010, 3:28 PM

Congrats Sébastien -- it's a lovely interface. (FYI, infosthetics got
the link wrong, and it's 404ing -- I imagine you'll want to set up a
redirect quickly!)

It took me some hunting to find the link to the dataset behind this.
If anyone else is looking, it's at
http://github.com/visiblegovernment/Expense-Visualizer/tree/master/dataset/
. It comes with a warning about errors and scraper omissions, but even
so this is a very nice dataset to have public.

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 8:57 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <tlauriau@...> wrote:

> Congrats to Seb from ffunction who posted Expense Visualizer: Revealing the
> Canadian Travel and Hospitality Expenses on civicaccess.ca a few days ago
> has been featured on the information aesthetics blog -
> http://infosthetics.com/archives/2010/09/expense_visualizer.html
>
> If you do not know this blog, take some time to enjoy it. There are some
> sublime ways to communicate complex ideas featured there.
>
> --
> Tracey P. Lauriault
> 613-234-2805
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
> CivicAccess-discuss@...
> http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss
>
_______________________________________________
CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
CivicAccess-discuss@...
http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss