Data parties are becoming a tradition in our activities: there are so far 30 datasets in our Economics Data Group on the DataHub and we would like to see this number grow with your help. If you have a dataset lying around, which you would like to share, please come to a data party and we can show you how to put it in the Datahub – it’s easy and fast and this way you could support the work of fellow researchers and students around the world.

The next data party will take place this Wednesday, January 18 at 5-6pm GMT / 6-7pm CET / 12-1pm EST. On the data party etherpad, add your skype id and I will be able to add you to the conference. All the data we can gather in the Google Spreadsheet.

This week’s topic is “Measures of social progress in Italy”, which is a preliminary meeting for our January 27-28 Apps4Italy Hackathon. Italy as one of the countries hit hardest by the 2008 economic crisis, has one of the highest levels of public debt – 118% of GDP. But how does Italy compare with the rest of Europe on income, social inclusion and living conditions? How do people value social progress and what are its dimensions?

Help us gather disaggregated data on these measures this Wednesday during our data party and learn more about Italy.

Ci vediamo!

You are welcome to join our next DataHub data party on January 18 at 5-6pm GMT / 6-7pm CET / 12-1pm EST. On our regular data parties we would like to assemble more datasets to add to our economics datahub database.

For the next data party however, we have a particular objective, related to our work on the Apps4Italy submission. The topic will be gathering data about Italy – different measures of progress, at higher frequency and at more disaggregated levels. We will work together on the following spreadsheet.

If you would like to participate, please enter your name and skype-id on the Etherpad: Looking forward to gathering Italian data together!

Dear Open Economics participants,

In preparation of the upcoming hackday, we are currently searching for the data on which we will base our measurement of progress in Italy. Could you kindly help finding data series? If so, please contribute to filling this spreadsheet.

You will find there data that Italy, jointly with its European partners, has identified as key to social progress (the EU2020 targets). Most of this data is available at Eurostat but only in annual frequency and with great statistical delays. We hence need to look for sources directly in Italy, where we hope to locate it in higher frequency and with shorter delays. Could you search with us on Italian/international sources and add them to the spreadsheet?

In case we cannot locate some of these official progess indicators, we are also looking for alternative, high-frequency data series that are generally accepted as key to social progress. If you have data/suggestions for such alternatives, please add them to the spreadsheet as well.

Please let us all check this out, so that we can soon start drawing up data series for our app.

Best wishes,

Dirk

Just a quick reminder that the Hackday for the Open Knowledge Indicator will be on the 23rd of August, from 10 AM to 11 PM (UTC+1). I’m sorry if some cannot make it at this date but I hope you will be able to join at a later stage – this certainly doesn’t mean you’re excluded!

We’ll be setting up a Etherpad – for joining, please add my Skype address guoxu_voip so I can put you on the group chat.

This contribution is from Dirk Heine, Working Group Advisor at Open Economics

In the OpenEconomics phone conference yesterday we decided to go forward with building a cross-country Open Data Index (see previous discussion). We now need everyone to sign up to participate for a 1 day collaborative index construction. On this day we will all try to already finish a preliminary version to test the concept.

What day would be best for you? Please participate in this doodle to determine it.

Collaboration will be online with everyone contributing from wherever you are based. We need people with different skill sets: data researchers, programmers, economists, people generally knowledgeable about sources of open data and people with aesthetics skills. So please do participate!

A note on the timing: There will be people from various time zones participating, so please try to accomodate the time window as good as possible: It is just hard to match people across time zones so we all need to be a bit flexible to make a collaborative production of the OKF Open Data Index possible.

This is a contribution by Anders Pedersen.

There has been quite a lot of discussion about the relaunch of the Transparency Register of the European Commission.

The register contains information submitted on a voluntary basis from NGOs, lobbyists and associations who spend money influencing the decision making process in the EU.

Before you check out the map below, you should take a few things into account:

• The reported amounts are voluntary judgements from the organizations them selves. The Commission is not obliged to monitor or control the statements from companies or associations. Most often organizations leave the field blank or submit a vague indicator (ie. € <50,000).

• This map only contain only a share of the 3,000 organizations, which were in the register by March 2011, when I obtained the data. The data available from the Commission is in a format, which has been time consuming to crack and thus quite a bit of organizations are missing.

• Please take into account that I have not cross checked the entire data for their precise location, and thus you will might find a few errors where google misplaced locations.

With that in mind – here are the organizations of the Transparency Register, mapped

Source: European Commission, Data as of March 2011.

A few members of the Open Economics Working Group will be attending the Open Knowledge Conference 2011 in Berlin, 30th June to 1st July. There will also be a presentation of Metametrik.

We have also been able to cooperate with a related project in the pre-OKCon Open Science workshop, working on a crowd-sourced data inputation system which could serve as a component of the Metametrik framework.

If you plan to attend the OKCon, please do contact us and have a chat! Looking forward to seeing you there.

We are hosting a Skype meetup to take stock and discuss future projects on the:

23rd of June 2011, 7pm GMT+1 (British Summer Time)

We would like to invite you to join in – the Skype meeting will also be a great opportunity to learn about the Open Economics Working Group and explore the various ways in which you can contribute. To participate in the meeting, please drop a mail to guo.xu@okfn.org along with your Skype-id, so we can add you to the session. In the meantime, feel free to join our mailing list to stay updated.

A few months back, we launched a simple app that allows anyone to say what kind of world, what “YourTopia”, they would like to live in. Created with the help of the new OKF Working Group Group on Economics, we submitted the app to the World Bank Apps4Development competition: Two days ago, the World Bank President Zoellick finally announced the winners of the competition and we are delighted to say that Yourtopia has been awarded the 3rd prize at the World Bank Apps4Development competition, chosen among over 100 other submissions.

(Photo: © Frank Vincent / World Bank)

As an OKF project, the award ceremony also gave us the opportunity to promote open data initiatives. Dirk Heine, who represented our team at the ceremony in the World Bank HQ in DC, was also able to present Yourtopia to a wider audience of stakeholders (including Robert Zoellick, Justin Lin and other IFI officials). Overall, there was great interest in Yourtopia: The idea of an open indicator for human development appealed to many people, ranging from reporters to researchers and policymakers.

Encouraged by the positive feedback, we are planning to build on the momentum and move forward with Yourtopia. We are also volunteering the prize money for future projects. Again, we would like to encourage anyone interested to join or suggest new ideas. If you are interested, please sign up for the OKF Open Economics mailing list or just send a mail to guo.xu[at] okfn [dot] org.