[examples/openspending] - openspending v0.2 (#907)

* [examples/openspending] - openspending v0.2

* [examples/openspending][m] - fix build

* [examples/openspending][xs] - fix build

* [examples/openspending][xs] - add prebuild step

* [examples/openspending][m] - fix requested by demenech

* [examples/openspending][sm] - remove links + fix bug

examples/openspending/content/resources/mappingcommunity/case-studies-procurements/hutspace/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,79 @@
+---
+lead: true
+title: Hutspace
+authors:
+- Neil Ashton
+---
+<div class="well">Project: scraping, analysing and publishing procurement data. In progress, with version 1.0 scheduled for publication June, 2013.</div>
+<em>This chapter is based on an interview with Emmanuel Okyere, Hutspace (Ghana).</em>
+
+Emmanuel Okyere is running a project to scrape, publish, and
+analyse the Ghana procurement register, while working on his own
+IT startup.
+
+Emmanuel has built a database of contract awards for Ghana using Python
+scrapers and parsers, [Celery](http://www.celeryproject.org), and PostgresSQL. The
+preliminary result shows 4000 contract awards and 2000 current
+procurement opportunities. Future plans include building a searchable
+database and a flat CSV file download option in order to enable
+journalists and CSOs to work with the data.
+
+## Technical challenges
+
+### Cleaning data
+
+> “Cleaning the data has been a substantial issue for the
+> project. There’s a lot of validation, which we need to do before we can
+> publish it simply because the data appear to be inaccurate. As an
+> example, we might have unrealistically small amounts appearing in a
+> contract award, or a date might not make sense. This has been the most
+> substantial bottleneck for the project.”
+
+### Reconciling company entities
+
+> “Many companies appear with a variety of
+> entities, and so finding a good way to reconcile companies which are
+> actually the same has been difficult.”
+
+Emmanuel is planning to utilize a helpful codebase from the open
+parliament field, originally developed by MySociety for name
+reconciliation of parliament members, for reconciling the company
+entities.
+
+### Identifying the correct amounts
+
+A surprising problem in the procurement
+data has turned out to be the varying currency denominations appearing,
+such as GBP and USD. Finding appropriate historical exchange rates and
+calculating these has been cumbersome, but it is important in
+order to make the data as accessible as possible.
+
+## Community challenges
+
+Emmanuel points out that both the lack of knowledge about the
+availability of procurement data as well as the lack of skills to
+analyse it among journalists and CSOs are the main barriers for
+achieving more usage of the data.
+
+> “For much of the work to be done on the data, having skills to use Excel
+> would actually be sufficient for journalists in order to get to work
+> with the data. However, skills to use Excel for analysis are lacking
+> among almost all journalists today. When it comes to more challenging
+> tasks which require coding skills for analysing the data, I know
+> actually only one journalist. She will be involved in this project.
+
+> “Trainings could help equip more journalists to work with the
+> procurement data we are planning to release. We really need more people
+> to look and use the data, but that require that they have the skills. I
+> think that is what trainings like data bootcamps are for.
+
+> “As publishers of the database, we would like to build visualisations to
+> spot trends in the data. For instance, we have noticed that when new
+> governments get into power, we see this reflected in the procurement
+> data as new contractors appear while others vanish. This is analytical
+> work we can do which I think journalists will not be able to do on
+> their own.”
+
+**Next**: [Texty](../texty/)
+
+**Up**: [Case Studies: Procurements](../)