• When: Saturday 3rd March, 11am GMT (12pm CET/6am EST) to ~7pm GMT (8pm CET/3pm EST)
• Where: Online (IRC, Skype) and also in person in London – ThoughtWorks Ltd., 9th Floor Berkshire House, 168-173 High Holborn, London, WC1V 7AA
• Who: Anyone! All skills are necessary and welcomed: coding, writing, illustrating, climate modelling or having concerns about the environment?
• How: Sign up on the MeetUp page and on the Etherpad.

Hackday Challenges:

• Reducing greenhouse gas emissions: DECC 2050 Pathways Calculator with representatives from DECC, who would like to develop an international version of the application.

• An app, which visualises different energy indicators for all countries from the WorldBank database, as in Europe’s Energy.

• Visualisation of deforestation data with a world map, which tracks changes in forest area and land use as well as carbon dioxide emissions… also relate them to economic indicators?

• Your ideas…

DataParty prior to the event:

You are also welcome to join the Energy and Climate DataParty on the February, 29th to data mine and mash up climate and energy data. Researchers and graduate students, who have worked on environment-related topics are also invited to share their dissertation datasets on theDataHub.

If you are interested in co-organising this event and have ideas about other challenges to take place during the Hackday, you are more than welcome!

Last year, the Open Economics Working Group submitted Yourtopia, a crowd-sourced indicator of social progress, to the World Bank Apps4Development competition and has been awarded the third prize. Yourtopia allows users to assign weights on different dimensions of development (e.g. economy, health and education). Based on the weights submitted by all users, we constructed a robust aggregate weighting, reflecting a global “consensus weighting”, which can used as a consensus measure of development. One year later and after more than 4,000 submitted weightings, where do we stand? And perhaps most importantly, how does our “consensus weight” compare to conventional indices, such as the Human Development Index (HDI)?

The results are quite remarkable: Compared to the default weights of the HDI where economy, health and education receive equal weights (33% each), our consensus weight assigns 30% to economy, 34% to health and 36% to education. Two things are worthwhile pointing out:

1) The HDI weights, even though ad-hoc and arbitrary, are nearly identical to the weights obtained by crowd-sourcing. Taking measurement errors into account, we cannot reject that our consensus weights are equal to the HDI weights. Despite the criticism, the HDI appears to be quite robust.

2) Looking at the point estimates only, the consensus weights also suggest that education is the most important dimension of development, followed by health. This is not surprising as human capital plays a crucial role in fostering economic growth. The economy is merely a means towards expanding capabilities.

Finally, we were also able to explore cross-country variation: By matching the IP addresses of the users against their country of residence, we were able to merge individual weights to country-level means. Correlating the country-level averages against other socio-economic variables enables us to address interesting questions: For example, are weightings associated with country-level variables? Are people from richer countries more likely to assign higher weights to economy, or vice versa?

The figure below plots a country’s GDP per capita level against the average country-level consensus weight for “economy”. A high value for the weight indicates that more importance is given to the economy as an indicator of development. The plot suggests a significant negative relationship: People in rich countries tend to assign less importance to the “economy” dimension, while people in poor countries perceive the economy to be more important. If this is indeed the case, we have another reason to re-consider GDP per capita as a measure of social progress.

Of course, the results should be taken with a grain of salt: The submitted weights are obviously subject to selection bias, which can be substantial in developing countries as access to internet is relatively limited. In addition, measurement errors are likely to confound the results as users were allowed to submit several times. While the large sample size can help alleviate some of these concerns, the results should be seen as tentative.

Are you interested in our project?

Help us analyze the Yourtopia dataset! We have released the dataset and are looking forward to more sophisticated analyses! We are also currently working on Yourtopia 2. If you would like to join the project or come along for a hackday, please contact us at economics [at] okfn.org.

Are you interested in what drives cities? Regional and city data can much more interesting than national averages, as it reflects the spatial agglomerations of economic and social activities. Analysing regional level data could deliver insights about the unequal economic development – whether patterns of development are due to geographical devisions or institutional factors.

What do you value personally in a city? Maybe the employment opportunities, the low crime rates, the environmental quality and good weather or the concentration of cultural and academic activities… Do you want to live in a densely- or sparsely-populated city, one with many schools and few car accidents? Probably you consider some of those factors really important and others not decisive at all. And you would be right to put a different weight on the various factors which constitute a city. Probably you would also like to know what your perfect city would be like. The next Open Economics project will build an application to determine the Best City in the World to submit to the BuzzData & EIU – Data Mash-Up & Visualization Contest: “Where is the best city in the world to live?”.

Spatial economists and econometricians, as well as interested data journalists and citizens are also welcome to join – building a dataset, based on comparable NUTS3 statistics of Eurostat for European countries, we can analyse the relationships between the labour market, education, health and spending. You are welcome to share and practice data analysis techniques and initiate follow-up activities.

Open Economics Hackday at the Barbican, London. Photo by Ilias Bartolini.

The following post is by Velichka Dimitrova coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group.

It is great to see people coming together and doing something cool on a Saturday. The Open Economics Hackday gathered more than thirty people at the Barbican and online, crafting fancy visualisations, wrangling data and being creative together.

The day was devoted to ideas in open economics, as a transparent and collaborative academic discipline, which presents research outputs in a comprehensible way to the general public.

We aimed at building Yourtopia 2, an interactive application showing the development of Italy on several key social progress indicators over time. Building on preceding experience with alternative non-GDP measures of human development (Yourtopia), the new project’s objective is to show how different progress can be in the separate Italian regions, as Italy is traditionally a country with stark regional inequalities.

Although originally used as a term for the gatherings of computer programmers, the Open Economics Hackday was open to people with different backgrounds and various skills. Programmers were creating bits of code, data journalists were gathering and processing data, economists were making sure the project concept addresses key problems in this field of research.

Would you like to help finish the Yourtopia 2 application? Please join the follow-up online meeting this Saturday at 2pm GMT. Confirm your participation by typing in your name on the Etherpad: http://econ.okfnpad.org/hackathon-jan-2011.

On Saturday 28th January we’re getting together for an Open Economics Hackday where we’ll be be wrangling data and building apps related to economics — all are welcome!

• When: Saturday 28th January, 11am GMT (12pm CET/6am EST) to ~7pm GMT (8pm CET/3pm EST)
• Sign up on the MeetUp page.
• Some people will also be around on Friday 27th (same times)
• Where: Online (IRC, Skype) and also in person in London – meet us at the public space coffee area in the main hall on floor G of the Barbican.
• Who: Anyone! Coder, data wrangler, economists, illustrator or writer …
• And here is the Etherpad.

As with all hackdays, exactly what gets work on gets decided on the day (you can add suggestions to the etherpad). However, one particular idea, which we could become a submission to Apps4Italy, is set out below.

One Idea for What We’ll Work On: ProgressVote

One of the most fundamental questions in economic research is: how do we measure social progress? Policy makers have come up with alternative measures accounting for environmental impacts, inequality, happiness and other indicators of human development.

However, the multiplicity of factors has caused another problem – how do we decide on the importance of each individual factor in a composite index? They could be either equally important (such as in the HDI) or they could be given different weights.

In our last project YourTopia – which was one of the winners of last year’s World Bank Apps4Development Prize – we offered one possible solution by letting you decide on which dimensions and aspects of economic development to prioritize.

However there are limitations to such an approach: faced with a myriad of technical indicators people are often overwhelmed by the complexity: Does life expectancy at birth matter more than the inflation rate or the M2 money supply? And what does M2 money supply even mean?

In ProgressVote, we’d like to improve on YourTopia in a variety of ways:

First, by combining proxy voting with the crowd-based Yourtopia approach: Instead of voting for indicators, people vote for expert statements that interpret the dashboard of variables. By doing so, it is hoped to strike a balance between expert judgements and the interpretation of the general public: Experts may be more able to interpret technical data, but in the end it is the citizens who decide which expert statement to endorse.

Second, we’d like to add support time series — so you can see how progress (or lack of it) has evolved over time — as well as better geo support — for example, so it is possible to look at regions as well as countries have performed (consider Italy for instance).

Interested? Then come join us on Saturday 28th January!

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!

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!

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

• When: 21st December 2011 @ 5-6pm GMT / 6-7pm CET / 12-1pm EST (join for as little or as much time as you want)
• Where: Virtual on irc and skype
• What: Get together to add economic datasets to http://thedatahub.org/group/economics
• Etherpad: http://econ.okfnpad.org/data-party

Everyone is welcome and all you need is an interest in (open) economics (or energy) data.

We’ll be collaborating on skype and IM — if interested please add yourself + skype id to http://econ.okfnpad.org/data-party you be added to the joint chat.

If you were unable to attend, you can still take part in the forthcoming activities:

Wednesday, December 21 – Data Party at 5pm GMT

This activity will be a brainstorming on how to advance the datahub and include a larger number of specific economic datasets.

In January/early February we are going to have the Apps4Italy Hackday. Please vote for the specific date here.