URL: guardian.co.uk/datablog/…infovis (fullscreen version)

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about public spending, amidst a global recession, countries in crisis and the emergency budget.

The Guardian has been following this closely and, when the UK Treasury released “Coins“, its huge database of Government spending, the Guardian invited a small group of programmers and experts to work with them and help unravel the hidden stories buried beneath the data.

Brought in by Rewired State, I worked with others from the Open Knowledge Foundation and MySociety on data visualisations and articles for the Guardian Data Blog.

Expenditure per Government department

This interactive visualisation, which I created with Rufus Pollock, shows the relative amounts of spending, per Government department. You can left-click a department to see the distribution of spending per geographical region (and right-click to get back again).

It’s worth seeing this fullscreen, to catch the numerous small departments.

This type of visualisation is called a “tree map” and is written in pure JavaScript, with the help of an excellent piece of open-source software, the JIT.

The Coins Explorer

I also produced an article for web developers, about getting more from the Coins Explorer. The Explorer lets you search for particular types of spending, and export subsets of the data to use elsewhere. It was pulled together by the Guardian’s razor-sharp team of developers in just a matter of hours.

Appreciation

Big thanks go out to Emma from Rewired State, Mike, Simon, Giles, Michael, Daniel and Matt from the Guardian, and all the developers there with us.

At the weekend, I helped mentor a group of tech-minded teenagers at the community-led event, “Young Rewired State“. Held at Google’s London HQ, this was a two-day, action-packed programme for 15-18 year olds to build something better with government data on the web. And the results were truly impressive.

Young people are sometimes written-off as being apathetic, or handed patronising websites and services to interact with. Here was their chance to show the kinds of services they really want and to demonstrate that, given access to the right kinds of data and a little support along the way, they are more than capable of building it themselves.

In just two days, they created a plethora of new web apps: a mobile service to give real-time info on London buses (“TFHell“), interactive maps with routes to school that avoid local crime hotspots (“SchoolRoutr” and “Step Safe”), sexual health advice (“Blab to Betty”), a service matching new tech talent with employers (“Will Work For Peanuts“) and many others.

The team I assisted were a politically minded trio. Ben, Joe and Richard came down from Manchester and built a website that grabs the latest bills passing through parliament and attempts to show the emotional response to these bills from blogs around the web. The results are shown graphically, using the Google Charts API. The result of this blogs / politics experiment is: “Blog-o-tics“.

Although they weren’t awarded a prize, Blog-o-tics was given a “special mention” by the panel of judges, who had come from government, the tech industry and beyond.

The field of “sentimental analysis” is growing and, although Blog-o-tics was just a quick proof-of-concept, it does hint at the possibilities. Craig Elder noted its similarities with the concept for YourOwnDemocracy.

Other mentors came from Last.fm, the BBC, Yahoo, Moo, My Society and small businesses around the country. I think we were all pretty much blown away by, not only the standard and focus of the work produced, but how entirely natural everyone seemed with the stack of technologies being used. Here is a generation of people who have grown up with computers, the ubiquitous Web and the programming languages used to harness it. Government could really benefit from their input.

The original Rewired State event, dubbed “National Hack the Government Day“, had been held at the Guardian‘s offices earlier this year. It was such a success that many of us who attended were invited to the Cabinet Office to explain just what the government should be doing with its web properties, and we were given suggestions on ways through what can sometimes seem like a maze of bureaucracies.

Since then, no less than Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the Web) has been invited by the prime minister to help open up government data, to help bring transparency and to simply help those who want to solve problems get access to the data they need. The young hackers from Rewired State are off to a fine start.

Other reports on Young Rewired State

• BBC
• Yahoo
• Guardian
• Public Strategy
• The H
• Conservative party
• the Twitter conversation
• the Flickr photos