How can I help my local government as a developer / designer?

If you are looking to join or form a local group with similar goals, this is probably what you're looking for: http://codeforamerica.org/brigade/

If you know any journalists, I'm sure they'll have ideas -- They are (in my limited experience) intelligent and incredibly busy people, leaving them with little time to really dive in to every topic they see that interests them. Also, news organizations have been slow to catch up to the internet age. At least in the US, there are only a handful of papers REALLY diving into the app side of things. Thankfully that number is growing.

I'd love to see what you and your friends are doing with open data. I'm finding it difficult to stay motivated in my own area, with few developers and little free time.

Glad to see that people world over are investing time in open data. :)

There is a "Code For Ireland" http://www.codeforireland.com/ - I imagine there are similar groups in other parts of Europe!

Hey there Lichine,

I can only answer from my perspective even though it'll look like a shameless plug (which it probably is).

I'm the technical lead for a project called OpenSpending (https://openspending.org/) which is a free/open source project that tries to track and analyse public expenditure and budgets throughout the world. We're always looking for people to help out.

You could either work on the main site to improve that for your government or help them get their budgets/expenditure datasets loaded onto openspending.org or, since you're a frontend developer you might be more interested in what we refer to as satellite sites (openspending.org can be seen as an analytical machine with an api).

Satellite sites are done mostly by people outside of the core team but use the api to visualise budgets and expenditure for citizens in a way that is easy to understand. Some examples of sites include: http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org (for Britain), http://budzeti.ba (for Bosnia) or http://openbudgetoakland.org (for Oakland, California). These sites use the openspendingjs library for visualisations (you could contribute new visualisations based on data from your local government).

Since I see you're based in Denmark you might be interested in this site from Politiken: http://kommune.politiken.dk/ which used our visualisations but not the openspending.org backend or an instance of the OpenSpending software (which is fine, but a bit weird).

You might also be interested in knowing that OpenSpending is now mostly led by Nordics. I, the technical lead, come from Iceland while the community lead comes from Denmark (but lives in Washington DC).

OpenSpending is a community project founded and facilitated by Open Knowledge which is an organisation you might be interested in. There are a lot of other projects Open Knowledge works on in various fields that most try to help either governments or citizens. Here's the Open Knowledge website: https://okfn.org/

Good luck finding an interesting project to do and you can ping me if you're interested in OpenSpending (I'm always around on OpenSpending's IRC channel for example).

Hey Duggan!

Thanks for the link. :-) It's nice to see that these initiatives also exist in Europe. In addition to the above, this really makes me think "Why the hell is there not something like this in Denmark?".