Need Ruby Developer to join team

[Uch]

Hi Boston Ruby Group,

My name is Uch. I'm a grad student in the Boston area. I'm of Nigerian
descent, and I'm currently working on a website, www.transparentnigeria.com,
that aims to curb corruption in the country by tracking the use of
public funds. Our anticipated launch date is June 22nd.

I'm working with a senior Ruby on Rails developer and we'd like to add
another Ruby developer to the team. The team member would be
monetarily compensated.

When the website is finished, the link will publicized on a Facebook,
Twitter, and LinkedIn network that together totals 40k. Needless to
say, I'm very excited!

Thanks so much for your help. Anyone who's interested shoot me an
email at u...@transparentnigeria.com.

Uch
u...@transparentnigeria.com

[Daniel Choi]

I wish you guys good luck. I recently started reading the book "Why Nations Fail" by Daron Acemglu and James Robinson & I appreciate the importance of what your website is aiming to do. - Dan

http://whynationsfail.com/summary/

[Uchechi Iweala]

Thank you Dan. We hope this website can help institute real change!

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Boston Ruby Group mailing list
To post to this group, send email to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to boston-rubygro...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/boston-rubygroup

[drelihan]

Hi,

I just started working on an app to help local communities more
informed and involved in their own budgets. The app would let a local
official/community leader enter a budget into our system and then be
able to disperse the budget to members of the community.
Each budget item could have its own page where people could discuss,
question, poll, etc. For example, say a town would like to buy a new
firetruck. The fire chief would be able to post and share a video
( along with along the technical specs and literature ) explaining how
the new fire truck would be used
and what the cost would be.

We just have a basic splash page set up now at democraticbudget.com,
but we are looking to launch by the end of the summer. I'd be very
interested in meeting you at some time to hear more about your website
and to see if our projects could help each other out in anyway.

- Dan

[Matt MacDonald (PRX)]

Hi,

Love the civic app talk.

Dan, budgeting tools are great but they require buy-in from local
government officials in order to be useful, I speak from direct
experience as someone who has spent the better part of a year learning
about the municipal budgeting process, speaking with city and town
manager, elected officials and listening to whatever my dad (a city
manager for over a decade) wanted to say about local government.

I break budgeting tools into a few areas:
Transparency/presentation/reporting and actual budgeting
forecasting/predictions/modeling and then participatory and community
driven budgeting. You'll find that as you approach the domain that
those are the three primary areas.

We ended up building an MVP presentation tool called Budget Vision:
http://www.budgetvision.com/ that has been ~ahem slow for adoption,
mainly because budgeting systems internally are a giant pain in the
ass and working with cities and towns to get their data into a
reasonable format is not small task.

I'd be happy to talk more about what we did and what we learned if you
are interested.

We haven't given up on the budgeting tools just redirected for a
moment to build another product while we sort that one out. We've got
another one up our sleeves that does have buy-in but not related to
budgets.

Thanks,
Matt

[drelihan]

Matt, Thanks for the feedback! We are looking more towards the
participatory budgeting area. I hear you about the buy-in problem and
we're trying to figure out ways around that as much as possible ( e.g.
focus on small parts of a communities budgeting process ). I'd be
happy to buy you a coffee some time and talk more about this.

- Dan

On Jun 5, 8:27 am, "Matt MacDonald (PRX)" <m...@prx.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Love the civic app talk.
>
> Dan, budgeting tools are great but they require buy-in from local
> government officials in order to be useful, I speak from direct
> experience as someone who has spent the better part of a year learning
> about the municipal budgeting process, speaking with city and town
> manager, elected officials and listening to whatever my dad (a city
> manager for over a decade) wanted to say about local government.
>
> I break budgeting tools into a few areas:
> Transparency/presentation/reporting and actual budgeting
> forecasting/predictions/modeling and then participatory and community
> driven budgeting. You'll find that as you approach the domain that
> those are the three primary areas.
>

> We ended up building an MVP presentation tool called Budget Vision:http://www.budgetvision.com/that has been ~ahem slow for adoption,

[Uchechi Iweala]

Hi Dan and Mike,

It's heartening to see that others are committed to shedding a little light on what goes on behind closed government doors. While Transparent Nigeria is starting from a top down approach with data provided from the Ministry of Finance, I definitely foresee a need for a bottom up approach where municipalities can freely publicize (and community members come to expect) financial data online. I imagine an eventual meeting in the center. I'll email you guys personally to further the convo. I'm always interested in more civic discussion. 

uch