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).
First off, that's one awesome "shameless" plug. :-) I've been looking for a site / project that does this for so long, you can't even imagine. So thank you for sharing that, I will be checking it out more thoroughly later.
Second, that sounds like a great invitation, I might just jump aboard when I begin my "sabbatical". I actually have seen the site at Politiken (small world, huh?) and it's awesome to see that there are initiatives working on more economic transparency.
Thanks for the Open Knowledge link, that's definitely something I will look more into. On a sidenote, for the past couple of years I've taken an interest in medical science and how merging it with the digital industry could benefit society (think, real-time blood analytics for scientific research, modern overviews of disease and the teams currently working cures, etc.), so it's nice to see that a well-established organization do exist.
I will definitely ping you, also on any updates that might be relevant to you and your team (don't forget to say hi from me!).
Keep up the good work and thank you so much for sharing with me (and the rest of HN)!
Not adding anything to this discussion but by the looks of it, the Icelandic government was trying to imitate this stunt but misunderstood the "Start Trek" in "Star Trek" economics.
Here's a picture of the Icelandic prime minister and the Icelandic minister of finance as Kirk and Spock (this is a real thing they did as part of an auction for cancer awareness):
I set this up after my first child was born so that my wife and I, along with all of the other family members could post pictures and videos of our daughter (and our family) on a machine I control. When someone babysits her and takes pictures/videos they too can post them.
This serves us in many ways. For instance, we have all of the pictures in one place, not spread over many services depending on where family members post them -- although some family members also post to facebook :( For the grandmothers and grandfathers we just give them the url instead of trying to explain a YouTube channel to them. They know how urls work, not how YouTube works.
This also serves as a backup. The server is hosted outside our apartment so the pictures we put there can be easily fetched in case something happens to our apartment (and computers - but this can also be fixed with a backup server, this is a side effect).
Basically, family album in one place -- no matter who the photographer is (and backup).
It's not an automatic backup system... and it's not a copy of all photos/videos on our computers.
The pictures/videos we want to keep (would not want to lose in a fire) we upload to our MediaGoblin instance. MediaGoblin saves them in a folder on the server (the original media files and the processed ones). If something happens to our home, we'll be able to easily fetch the most precious images from the server.
The only thing I'd have to work around is that every media file is stored in a separate folder along with the processed files so I would have to write a script to "go into each folder and fetch the file that doesn't end with medium.[ext] and thumbnail.[ext]". Come to think of it, it might be worth it to just write a "Download all originals" plugin since MediaGoblin already knows the originals... but since our apartment hasn't been destroyed I'm not in a hurry.
What a refreshing article when I'm about to defend my PhD this Friday :)
My experience of the PhD was that it didn't break me but I come out of my studies having completely lost all respect for academia.
I finished my dissertation in about two and a half years (the main contribution and content of it) and then I waited for about three years to be able to defend it. No matter how often I pressed things and asked whether something was missing or lacking nothing happened (I actually blame my advisor). It wasn't until after I talked to the department head and said that I would not university registration fees (we have to pay them every year) unless something happened. Some other professor was put in charge and that made my advisor angry and everything got delayed again and now I'm finally finishing.
What bothers me is that I'm defending based on knowledge I had three years ago and I'm not allowed to add to it since that's not a part of my dissertation (and I've been really afraid of some other individual having published similar or same finding in those three years - I haven't really been following all research since I lost all interest in academia).
Hey, tryggvib. There are a lot of comments I can make in this thread (I'm 50 years old, Ph.D. in physics, despised classes but loved research), but I'm only going to make this one, to you: Good luck Friday!! Remember, YOU are the world's expert in this specialty. Remain calm, and don't let them rattle you.
On the bright side there is one thing my lack of respect for academia results in (I hope I'm not offending anybody and I'm mostly directing this at my university): I'm not at all stressed for the defense.
I'm defending my PhD on friday too! Good luck to us.
The article strikes a chord with me and what I see around me. There are serious structural issues and being a PhD student is a surprisingly weak position. I am glad you are finally managing to finish.
This is awesome and really great to be able to read the source (like other have said). Why is it called an "open source" app? It doesn't seem to have any software license in the GitHub repo.
This means it's just a "source available" app but normal copyright applies. I think this can be a bit misleading but nonetheless congratulations!
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).