Workshop Notes

August 11th 2007

GroupNotesSaturday <-- feel free to add notes here

• Tantek Çelik: We Are All Actors workshop blog post on workshop start, pointers.
• Federal Budget Visualization  Federal Budget in Poster Format
• Pie Chart Approach Pie Chart Format
• 2008 Campaign Finance, State of the Union analysis - examples of data visualization from NYTimes.com
• opensecrets.org - providers of gov't data
• Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON)
• National Priorities Project analyzes and clarifies federal data so that people can understand and influence how their tax dollars are spent
• Consolidated Federal Funds Report (CFFR) draws together data from a number of governmental reporting systems and agencies, and provides data on expenditures and obligations for over a thousand federal government programs
• Journalist ethical standards for the New York Times; specifics for Web Pages and Web Logs

Lunchtime notes:

• Everything in the budget has at least someone that wants it. If you can harness that incentive, that desire for that item, and provide tools/services with low enough barrier to entry so that someone can annotate that item, it will naturally happen.

• I tried to find the federal budget online. I google'd for thomas federal budget and searched within the thomas website itself. Can someone find a link to the federal budget and post here? Many thanks!

Break Notes:

Issues of framing:

• Maybe rather than looking for consensus, as a first step we could try to achieve a 360 degree view of the problem from a wide variety of perspectives.
• The public's model for looking at issues is polemical debates, which are often emotional and not related to fact. Establishing discussion as dialog rather than debate helps people listen to each other and not look at discussions from a winner takes all perspective. (kettering foundation, public agenda)

August 12th 2007

• ...

Return to the FrontPage.