Lessons learnt building and maintaining National Treasury's open budget data viz portal

Track: Web

Type: Keynote

Room: Main Hall

Time: Oct 14 (Fri): 14:30

Duration: 1:00

We built an open data visualisation portal for National Treasury - https://vulekamali.gov.za/. Vulekamali had to make a range of structured and semi-structured data, and many other files, easily accessible to everyone in South Africa. And in ways that are meaningful both to experienced data analysts, as well as someone who never did high school accounting.

We built this using Django as a core component that manages and pulls together data from an open source Python data management system (CKAN) and an open fiscal data query platform (OpenSpending).

In this talk we share the architecture and implementation decisions that paid off, and the decisions we still regret, as well as our thoughts on how we could improve on them.

We'll cover things like building a system to to handle partial data, automating bulk file uploads, how hard it is to get people to format data correctly, and giving them helpful feedback automatically.

If you build systems where humans manage at least some of the data directly, you'll either learn something or teach us something in the comments.

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