This is fantastic - I hope you'll get in touch with the people at opendata.gov in the US.
My only grumbles are with the main landing page: http://wikibudgets.org/ - there's no obvious way to search for other datasets, and the tone of the copy seems oddly adversarial; I don't see myself in a fundamentally oppositional relationship with public administrators even when I'm critical of them.
Thanks! The whole project is ver very early beta, we hope that one day the landing page will show data right away, similar to Google Maps. When it comes to the tone, it's not about the administration, I read that as a startup I should "take a stance, don't be neutral". [campfire?]
It's a while since I've seen a Sankey diagram. I really don't find it a very helpful way of displaying information, especially not in this zooming format, which seems incredibly unintuitive - indeed, it took me several minutes to realise that the "arrows" were actually clickable!
I know what you mean, it's just that after year of research we came to a conclusion that this is the best/only possible way. There are two main problems, 1/ the money flows in multigraph, not a simple tree as many people think, there is no better tool than Sankey for multigraphs. 2/ there are astronomical size differences, the same node can have flows in millions and hundreds right next to each other, the zoomable interface is our best answer. I understand it's unfamiliar but trust me, it's better than 720 tables in PDFs. Also I believe nobody has successful simplified/visualised public finance yet, well maybe except http://demonocracy.info/infographics/eu/debt_greek/debt_gree... :)
It's interesting how exposure to certain type of UI/UX can shape our intuition. I see [this type of graph] in Google Analytics on a regular basis, so jumping into this felt very intuitive.
My only grumbles are with the main landing page: http://wikibudgets.org/ - there's no obvious way to search for other datasets, and the tone of the copy seems oddly adversarial; I don't see myself in a fundamentally oppositional relationship with public administrators even when I'm critical of them.