We’re starting a work on Colombian government spending by scraping information of contracts from a public government site which has them but not in a machine readable form. Pieces are there: the scrapper is on Github, the visualization of “Silence Maps” has an alpha, but I think that we need a more inclusive, plural and articulated place to have conversations instead of a Google Group. I think that here is that better place with the side advantage of getting a panoramic view of what’s happening in other places/languages on the same subjects that we’re trying to promote here (Open Data, Open Knowledge, Science and Research), so this very infrastructure can work as a “green house” to help this initiatives to blossom, specially now that they’re young in almost all the world.
For that we will need a new kind of category about Local/Language Groups, so people interested in particular places can have a conversation in their language on the different projects and initiatives. May be subcategories can be by language and then by country, to have a broader conversation with links to the related initiatives in English, so we can articulate local and global in a two ways talk.
I have two concerns about this proposal: 1) Taking to long to be discussed/approved, because creating a google group is cheap, so despite discourse and OKFN being a “better place” for conversation most people will trade best for quickness. 2) The lack of support for mailing integration as I see is being discussed here on Meta, which is also given by default on Google Groups.
So, the Colombian group on government spending and open data is young and we don’t have a lot of legacy discussions on any place. We could start here quickly, beta test and give feedback.
Is this possible?