Introducing Yourtopia.net

A coding sprint involving lots of Club Mate, pizza.de and confusion about Python, MongoDB and Flask/Genshi (how cliché) later, I can finally announce that we got a (sort-of) running version of Yourtopia, an improved version of EUtopia up and running. We even made the deadline for the World Bank Apps for Development competition: With help of OKFN (and particularly Rufus and Friedrich) we now have considerable hits and are looking good! You still get some bugs when you try to retake the quiz, but hey!

  

This is taken from the OKFN blog article I posted yesterday:

Development Economics has for a long time recognised the deficiency of GDP as an indicator of human development but with little reception in policy-circles. Recently, however, the debate changed and no month passes now without a high-level report on “Development beyond GDP”.

OKFN’s new Open Economics Group has now constructed an application to test two solutions to primary problems in this debate, and it is participating in the World Bank’s competition “Applications for Development“.

Measures of human progress beyond GDP either use so-called dashboards of indicators (e.g. WDI) or composite indices (e.g. HDI or MPI). An openness-problem with the first approach has been that dashboards were so complex that the public was de facto excluded from the debate. The second approach tried to simplify through combining different dimensions into a single index but then suffered from arbitrary assumptions on the choice of weights applied to indices and choice of proxies for different development dimensions.

These are significant problems and so we’ve created Yourtopia, as the first application that produces a composite index of human development (OpenHDI) without arbitrary choices of indicator-weights and proxy choices.

We circumvent these problems simply: by letting the user participate. Rather than the researcher selecting proxies and indicator-weights we let the user choose. The resulting index of human progress is then personalised and contains no arbitrary assumptions by construction.

While the constructors of the HDI, for example, was always attacked for their assumption that human progress just depends on education, health and income and that these each carried the same importance, we now let the user decide which dimensions of progress are important and how they compare to each other.

Get Involved: We’d love to improve YourTopia in lots of ways and we need help with design, coding (python or javascript), and writing (from both an economists and a layman’s point of view!) (for example what does GNI in PPP terms mean to most people — we need translators from jargon to English!).

If you’re interested in helping please either join the open-economics mailing list or send a mail to info [at] okfn [dot] org.