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

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* [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
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---
authors:
- friedrich
redirect_from: /2011/03/where-does-my-money-go-goes-international-welcome-to-openspending/
title: "'Where Does My Money Go?' Goes international. Welcome to OpenSpending."
---
**This post is by [Friedrich Lindenberg](http://okfn.org/members/pudo), one of the developers working on OpenSpending.**
Our primary goal has to be to grow WDMMG as an open platform, similar to Open Street Map: while on OSM you sketch out your local streets, WDMMG should become the place to upload and analyze your local or state governments spending. Therefore, our priority has to be providing the right tools to allow people to contribute to this effort themselves: either by loading data, annotating spending or visualizing it in custom ways.
<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7151/6481368965_29d1650856_z.jpg" title="OpenSpending goes global. Open budgets and spending data. " class="alignnone" width="640" height="410" />
As such transparency is needed not only in the UK but all over the world, we want to re-label the data part of the site (what is now data.wdmmg.org) to the more international OpenSpending. This would both serve as an accessible means to handling financial data and as a backend to more specific sites, such as the UK's WhereDoesMyMoneyGo visualizations and Germany's OffenerHaushalt.
I'd like to invite all of you to follow up on the remainder of our discussion, which is archived at
<http://wiki.openspending.org/Status_2011-02-10> and to contribute your own thoughts.

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2011/03/uploading-data-to-openspending/
title: Uploading Data to OpenSpending
---
The amount of datasets that are available on [OpenSpending.org](http://www.openspending.org) are growing fast and we want more! Currently the process looks like this:
1. You give us data.
2. We look at it, try to understand it, possibly ask you some more questions.
3. We write a custom loader script to load the data.
To make this process easier for us and faster for everybody, we offer an alternative process that requires a bit more work from you. But if you know how to transform your data to our CSV format, you will have your spending data online on OpenSpending more quickly and we can spend more time developing features! Here is how it works:
1. You create a CSV file that is formatted according to our [CSV schema](http://wiki.openspending.org/CSV_Schema). [Here is a really simple example of a CSV file][csv_example].
2. You use [our new web based uploader](http://www.openspending.org/sources/add) that automatically checks your CSV file for errors and stores it along with some meta data.
3. Contact us and we will do the final step and load the data into OpenSpending.org.
[csv_example]: https://spreadsheets1.google.com/ccc?hl=en&amp;key=t8rduOMdinCo0smZjQvQUow&amp;hl=en#gid=0
The schema and this alternative process are by no means set in stone: any feedback is appreciated! Most important: if you have spending data, but can't provide it in our CSV format, don't worry and just contact us. We always prefer some data over no data!

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2011/10/thoughts-from-the-global-investigative-journalism-conference/
title: Thoughts from the Global Investigative Journalism Conference
tags:
- Data Journalism
- Spending Stories
---
**This post is by [Lucy Chambers](http://okfn.org/members/lucychambers), community coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation, and [Friedrich Lindenberg](http://okfn.org/members/pudo), Developer on OpenSpending. They recently attended the Global Investigative Journalism Conference 2011 in Kyiv, Ukraine, and in this post, bring home their thoughts on journalist-programmer collaboration...**
# The conference
The Global Investigative Journalism Conference must be one of the most intense yet rewarding experiences either of us have attended since joining the OKF. With topics ranging from human trafficking to offshore companies, the meeting highlighted the importance of long-term, investigative reporting in great clarity.
With around 500 participants from all over the globe with plenty of experience in evidence gathering, we used this opportunity to ask many of them how platforms like OpenSpending can contribute, not only to the way in which data is presented, but also to how it is gathered and analyzed in the course of an investigation.
# Spending Stories - the brainstorm
As many of you will be aware, earlier this year we won a Knight News Challenge award to help journalists contextualise and build narratives around spending data. Research for the project, [Spending Stories](http://blog.okfn.org/2011/06/22/spending-stories-is-a-winner-of-the-knight-news-challenge/), was one of the main reasons for our trip to Ukraine...
During the data clinic session as well as over drinks in the bar of "Hotel President" we asked the investigators what they would like to see in a spend analysis platform targeted at data journalists. Cutting to the chase, they immediately raised the key questions:
### How will it support my work?
It was clear that the platform should support the existing journalistic workflow through publishing embargos, private datasets and note making. At the same time, the need for statistical and analytical heuristics to dissect the data, find outliers and visualize distributions was highlighted as a means to enable truly data-driven investigations of datasets. The goal in this is to distinguish anomalies from errors and patterns of corruption from policies.
### What's in it for my readers?
With the data loaded and analyzed, the next question is what value can be added to published articles. Just like DocumentCloud enabled the easy embedding of source documents and excerpts, OpenSpending should allow journalists to visualize distributions of funds, embed search widgets and data links, as well as information about how the data was acquired and cleaned.
### What do I need to learn to do it?
Many of those we spoke to were concerned about the complexity required to contribute data. The recurring question was: should I even try myself or hire help? It's clear that for the platform to be accessible to journalists, a large variety of data cleansing tutorials, examples and tools need to be at their disposal.
We've listed the full brainstorm on the [OpenSpending wiki](http://wiki.openspending.org/Spending_Stories_Ideas#GIJC_Brainstorm)
You can also see the mind map with concrete points below:
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/okfn/6254141727/sizes/l/in/photostream/"><img alt="" src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6151/6254141727_fe12468a67_b.jpg" title="Spending Stories brainstorm OpenSpending" class="alignnone" width="1024" height="507" /></a>
## Hacks & Scrapers - How technical need data journalists be?
In a second session, "Data Camp" we went through the question of how to generate structured data from unstructured sources such as web pages and PDF documents. We tried to emphasize the value of easily machine-readable data over less structured information by pointing to some examples on ScraperWiki.
As we went through basic steps needed to scrape a web page, the questions began turning towards the purpose of the exercise:
> "So why do we need to learn how to scrape? Can't we just hire someone to do this for us?"
Our answer went something like...
> "Well, yes - you can actually, <strong>but</strong>..."
...it may be a good idea to have some understanding of which data can be easily retrieved and what difficulties and errors you might encounter in the extraction process. This includes:
1. Understanding the possibilities and limitations of various data structures on the web to understand how to approach programmers and what to ask for (and importantly, what it is reasonable to pay).
2. Understanding how to quality-check data extracted from the internet and where errors could be introduced.
3. Appreciating that programmers are expensive and that having a basic understanding of some of the principles behind screen scraping yourself could save your organisation quite a lot of money for simpler tasks
The notes from the scraping session are available on this [pad](http://pudo.okfnpad.org/scrapetutu)
### So how do I hire a hacker?
The final thing that became blatantly apparent in sessions such as "Journalist or Programmer? Do Reporters Need to become Coders?" was that there is a huge void that needs to be bridged between the hacker and journalist world. If I had a pound for every time someone at the conference asked me how they could find a hacker, would be mighty happy. We pointed people in the direction of Hacks and Hackers meetings but there is clearly a need for a more extensive 'address' book of reliable contacts is obvious.
I will attempt to pull together some of the thoughts we had about how to find (and trust!) your hacker in a separate post to address some of these needs. If you have further advice or anecdotes on this subject, please don't hesitate to get in contact via the [OpenSpending mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/wdmmg-discuss).

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2011/11/new-translation-documentation-for-openspending/
title: New Translation Documentation for OpenSpending
---
There's been a lot of demand for us to document the translation procedure for OpenSpending, so this is now up and live on the [wiki](http://wiki.openspending.org/Translations)
For reference, I've also briefly included the steps here:
## In order to translate OpenSpending, please follow the following steps:
* Create an account on [Transifex](https://www.transifex.net/home/)
* Email info [at] openspending.org with your Transifex Username and ask to be added to the group for your language of translation.
* Proceed to the following [link](https://www.transifex.net/projects/p/openspending/resource/openspendinguipot/)
* Click 'Add a translation' and follow the instructions on-screen.
## When you have finished your translation...
* Drop us an email to info [at] openspending.org and we will include it into our next release.
## Things to be aware of
* With each new release of the code, you may need to update your translation, to make sure all the new commands are accounted for...***We are currently building up to a big code release and will inform the list when the strings are stable. If you are eager to get going, you may start translating, most of your translation should be preserved, but there will be a little additional work to do before the release.***
**Happy translating, drop me an email if you have any questions via the [mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).**

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---
authors:
- friedrich
redirect_from: /2011/11/openspending-v0-11-released/
title: OpenSpending v0.11 Released
tags:
- Releases
---
We are happy to announce the release of the latest version of OpenSpending. Most of our work has been to improve how we store and or organise spending data. Users will notice that the web frontend has been refreshed and is now much better integrated.
<img alt="" src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6055/6350321577_a96d5e8fc1_z.jpg" title="OpenSpending site redesign" class="alignnone" width="640" height="403" />
## New features include
* New backend using a conventional relational database allowing clean separation of datasets, and better scalability. The database backend is also much more familiar to developers than the previous backend
* [OpenSpending Developer Documentation](http://openspending.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html)
* Lots of documentation for API users and visualization hackers
* [OpenSpending Data Wrangler Documentation](http://openspending.org/help/api.html)
* New theme based on twitter's bootstrap framework
* Begun support for i18n/translation of the frontend
* Better validation of input data and model.
Feedback on the new site and features are welcome. Please drop us a line via the [mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2011/11/openspending-visualisations-featured-in-the-guardian/
title: OpenSpending visualisations featured in the Guardian
---
**This post is by [Lucy Chambers](http://okfn.org/members/lucychambers), Community Coordinator on OpenSpending.**
On Friday, the Guardian Poverty Matters blog published [a piece on the Uganda visualisation](http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/nov/25/uganda-aid-confusion-analyse-spending?newsfeed=true) that the OpenSpending team had been working on with [Publish What You Fund](http://www.publishwhatyoufund.org/).
<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7024/6417743801_4a67740798_z.jpg" title="Uganda Aid visualisation Guardian Publish What You Fund" class="alignnone" width="640" height="335" />
## From the article
> "The [Publish What You Fund campaign group](http://www.publishwhatyoufund.org/) and the [Open Knowledge Foundation](http://okfn.org) have now produced a [visualisation of Uganda's aid and budget data for 2003-2006](http://www.publishwhatyoufund.org/uganda/uganda-with-data.htm#/^/2004/~/aid-and-domestic-spending-in-uganda-br----ugx-), billed as the first time both sets of data have been displayed together in a way that is easy to explore. A quick look shows just how big a piece of the puzzle aid spending is – more than 50% of overall resources available in Uganda for 2005-2006. The vast majority of this $1.1bn in aid was spent directly by donors on various projects, with only a third given to the government to spend along with its domestic resources. Interestingly, aid money made up only a small proportion of resources for education, while accounting for the majority of resources for health, agriculture, water and the environment."
## Busan Aid effectiveness meeting
The release of the visualisation comes ahead of the [Busan aid effectiveness meeting](http://www.aideffectiveness.org/busanhlf4/) and highlights some of the key benefits of opening up spending data, both to the donor organisations and the governments of the recipient countries themselves:
> "Four years ago, researchers at the [London-based Overseas Development Institute](http://www.odi.org.uk/) took up the enormous task of trying to figure out how dozens of donors were spending aid in Uganda, and how that compared with where the government was allocating its own resources. The results were striking: it turned out the Ugandan government was only aware of half the aid being spent in the country, despite routinely requesting this information from donors."
It is hoped that visualisations such as these will make it easier to digest complex datasets of this type, where a government receives support from multiple sources. It is also hoped that discussions around the topic will result in the more timely and regular release of data to help highlight practices that will lead to aid money being most effectively spent.
**Read the full Article in [the Guardian Poverty Matters blog](http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/nov/25/uganda-aid-confusion-analyse-spending?newsfeed=true).**
**Have data similar to this you would like to create a similar visualisation for? Drop us an email via the [OpenSpending mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).**

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---
authors:
- martin
redirect_from: /2011/12/how-spending-stories-spots-errors-in-public-spending/
title: How Spending Stories Spots Errors in Public Spending
tags:
- Data Journalism
- Spending Stories
---
*This article was originally published on [MediaShift Idea Lab](http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2011/12/how-spending-stories-spots-errors-in-public-spending328.html) and was co-written by Martin Keegan, project lead for Spending Stories and Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator for OpenSpending.*
How public funds should be spent is often controversial. Information about how that money has already been spent should not be ambiguous at all. People arguing about the future will care about the present, and if data about past or present public spending is available, many will certainly look at it. When they do, occasionally they will find errors, or believe themselves to have found errors.
[OpenSpending](http://openspending.org/), which aims to track every (public) government and corporate financial transaction across the world, encourages users to:
* augment the existing spending database with additional sources of data
* use that data -- e.g., to write evidence-based articles and formulate informed decisions about how their society is financed.
[Spending Stories is our effort](http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2011/09/spending-stories-to-help-journalists-analyze-spending-data258.html) to make OpenSpending a natural way to do data journalism about public spending.
<img alt="openspending.jpg" src="http://www.pbs.org/idealab/openspending.jpg" width="500" height="170" class="mt-image-center" style="text-align: center; display: block; margin: 0 auto 20px;" />
## The Problem
**FACT 1:** Errors occur in data, no matter how official the source.
**FACT 2:** Data wrangling (manipulating or restructuring datasets to correct inaccuracies, remix with other datasets to augment the data, or perform calculations on the data), *generally* improves data quality, for example, through reconciling entities and flagging amounts that are obviously incorrect.
**FACT 3:** Data wrangling can also *introduce* errors if not tackled correctly.
Crucial to ensuring the use of this data in articles or ensuring re-use by concerned citizens is the ability to show that the data is valid. In addition, maintaining a good relationship with public bodies who are confident that they are not being misrepresented in the data is vital to ensuring the data continues to be released in the first place. In practice, this means that the provenance of the data has to be clear including:
* where the data originally came from (preferably a URL)
* whether anyone (e.g., government, community data wrangler, or OpenSpending) has worked on the data since it was published, and what steps they took to change the data (i.e., these steps should be reproducible to produce the same result)
The OpenSpending team has gone to lengths to retain enough information to say who was responsible for both of the above.
OpenSpending is a system, somewhat like a wiki, which allows you to track back through the data wrangling process and work out what changes were made to the data, when and by whom.
## Error reporting in practice
OpenSpending recently received a pointed inquiry from the U.K. Treasury disputing the claims we were making about the payment of British public money to a private company. Believing that an error had been introduced, we attempted to retrace our steps and find out where this had occurred, and who was responsible.
As we discovered, the payment *had* actually taken place, but the the OpenSpending descriptions used to label the transaction were not sufficiently detailed to accurately reflect the item in question.
With Spending Stories, we were able to retrace our steps because we had preserved a copy of the software tools we used for collecting the data (the data is published by about 50 public bodies, and must be downloaded, stitched together, and firmly molded into shape). These tools had been also made available to the public, so the Treasury and other concerned citizens could have checked our work themselves; the availability of this kind of check keeps all participants in the fiscal debate honest.
What had gone wrong was a problem of terminology: The transactions existed, but ambiguous language had been used to describe them, glossing over the distinction between the government department reporting what money had been spent and the government agency which actually spent the money. The bodies in question were the Department of Health and a regional health care trust; this distinction is certainly one which a concerned citizen would expect to be made clearly -- so we should make sure our system makes it easy to know which question is being asked.
## Checkpoints in OpenSpending
In the short term, we are mitigating the problem of data errors as follows:
* **Data provenance** - is the source identifiable and the process reproducible? OpenSpending encourages people to add modified datasets to a "package" in the Data Hub. This allows other users to see the original document alongside any modified documents and track the chain of changes made to see clearly which points errors could have been introduced.
* **Crowdsourcing feedback** on spending data.
* **Permitting re-use of the structured data** we present, so that it can inform decisions in other fact-checking systems.
Ultimately, we will build our part of the ecosystem to provide feedback to the political process, by improving democratic discourse about the public finances.
*Lucy Chambers is a community coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. She works on the OKF's OpenSpending project and coordinates the data-driven-journalism activities of the foundation, including running training sessions and helping to streamline the production of a collaboratively written handbook for data journalists.*
*Martin Keegan is a software engineer and linguist, currently leading the Open Knowledge Foundation's OpenSpending project. He is also on the Open Knowledge Foundation's board, and has worked for SRI, Citrix, University of Cambridge and co-founded and worked for various civil society organizations.*

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---
authors:
- mark
redirect_from: /2011/12/data-seized-sanitised-and-sanity-checked-open-data-day-2011/
title: Data = Seized, Sanitised and Sanity-checked. Open Data Day 2011
tags:
- CKAN
- events
- IATI
- Open Data Day
- Publish What You Fund
---
**This post is by Mark Brough, Research Officer at [Publish What You Fund](http://www.publishwhatyoufund.org/), [Lucy Chambers](http://okfn.org/members/lucychambers), Community Coordinator for OpenSpending, and [Irina Bolychevsky](http://okfn.org/members/shevski), Product Owner for CKAN. It is cross-posted on the [OpenSpending Blog](http://blog.openspending.org/2011/12/10/data-seized-sanitised-and-sanity-checked-open-data-day-2011) and the [Open Knowledge Foundation Blog](http://blog.okfn.org/2011/12/12/data-seized-sanitised-and-sanity-checked-open-data-day-2011) and Mark Brough's contribution is also featured on [aidinfolabs.org](http://www.aidinfolabs.org/archives/786).**
**Saturday, December 3rd was Open Data Day, and London took the challenge to throw a hackday to help data be opened, cleaned and shown off to the world...**
Fuelled only by enthusiasm, caffeine and 5 packets of ready-made popcorn, the CKAN, OpenSpending and IATI teams, along with some new faces, joined forces to liberate as much data as they could...
<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7157/6471082237_b687e15771_z.jpg" title="Mark Brough hard at Work on IATI wrangling" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
## OpenSpending + IATI + CKAN
As part of the IATI Open Data Day challenges, Mark Brough did some work to get the existing IATI Data into OpenSpending. David Read, from the CKAN team, and a new face to the data wrangling crew, Johannes, scraped data on aid donations from France and Austria that were locked-up in web apps in order to help fill in the gaps in the global aid data jigsaw puzzle. You can see the results on OpenSpending.
* France: <http://thedatahub.org/dataset/france-afd> and on OpenSpending: <http://openspending.org/afd>
* Austria: <http://thedatahub.org/dataset/ada>, on OpenSpending: <http://openspending.org/ada>
The French (AFD) and Austrian (ADA) aid data appears to be incomplete: the AFD's [2010 Annual Report]<http://www.afd.fr/jahia/webdav/site/afd/shared/PUBLICATIONS/Colonne-droite/Rapport-annuel-AFD-VF.pdf> suggests that South Africa is the biggest recipient country, receiving €403 million, but in the data, Morocco is the biggest recipient and there are no transactions in South Africa.
The Austrian Development Agency data was carefully cleaned by Johannes, with region and country codes being added for all entries to create a tidier dataset. However, the original data contained, for example, four different spellings of Bosnia and Herzegovina, suggesting that countries are being manually entered rather than selected from an existing list. [For 2010]<http://openspending.org/ada/?_time=2010&_view=country>, the second biggest recipient of the Austrian Development Agency's aid (after aid not going to a specific country) appears to be Austria.
Nevertheless, despite the issues surrounding data quality, it was a useful exercise to show both the value of open data - that if you release your data, you can do pretty cool things with it - and the costs of keeping it locked away, namely that the data then has to be scraped from sites in quite a labour-intensive way.
These, along with many other datasets discovered on the day via tweets and emails have been added to the [Open Data Day Group](http://thedatahub.org/group/open-data-day) on [theDataHub.org](http://thedatahub.org).
On the same day, we worked to get the data released as part of the International Aid Transparency Initiative into OpenSpending. You can see the results of the IATI wrangling process on [OpenSpending.org/iati](http://www.openspending.org/iati). This following section is written by Mark.
### 1. Getting the data
Downloading the existing IATI data has already become quite a big task; with 19 publishers so far, the data currently amounts to over 750MB with 1169 packages. Fortunately this is made easier by the IATI Registry, which provides an API to access all existing datasets, and a simple script (links at end) can retrieve all of the data.
### 2. Extracting the data
Extracting the data from the XML files is more complicated. Although IATI data uses a standard schema, there are a few cases where publishers have either used the markup incorrectly, or else interpreted the definitions slightly differently. This can be simple problems such as stating that an organisation is “implementing” rather than “Implementing”, or placing the date within the text of the <activity-date> tag and not the “iso-date” attribute of that tag, or more significant problems such as placing implementing organisations in the “accountable” organisation field.
However, these problems are still fairly limited and follow fairly regular patterns, so they are not too hard to overcome. There are more significant problems when some donors have for example used three-letter (ISO-3) country codes, rather than two-letter (ISO-2) country codes. (This is considered below in “next steps”.)
### 3. Wrangling the data
OpenSpending is designed to show spending data, and has a powerful aggregation system to show large collections of transactions in a meaningful way. However, IATI data is organised by activities, with transactions nested within activities (projects), and – reflecting the business models of funders – activities sit within other activities (e.g., projects within programs), although they are not nested in the actual XML. Furthermore, one of the significant advantages of IATI compared to other aid data formats is that it permits multiple sectoral classifications, allowing you to assign a proportion of the value of an activity to each sector. So, you might have an activity that is 50% related to health and 50% to education.
To prepare the data for OpenSpending, each transaction inherits the properties of its activity (and, if that activity has a parent, that parent activity’s title and description). Then, the transaction is broken out into mini transactions, with the proportion of the activity assigned to each sector used to assign a proportion of the value of the transaction to each sector. So, from transactions, you get mini “sector-transactions”.
This takes about 40 minutes to compile, and then one final step remains: to convert the currencies to a single currency. Currently, USD, EUR and GBP amounts are used in the IATI data. All data is converted to USD using the average for 2010 from the OECD’s Financial Indicators (MEI) dataset. (This is also considered below in “next steps”.)
### 4. Loading the data
OpenSpending’s new web-based loading interface makes it relatively easy to load data in, although you currently also have to write a model and views (links at end).
### Results
The results can be viewed in the OpenSpending IATI dataset. You can explore the data by recipient country, sectors, funding organisation, and drill down through the data to see the data for an individual country.
### Problems with the data
So far I’ve noticed the following problems:
* “Unknown” recipient location is incorrectly marked as “South Sudan”
* Recipient countries are listed twice, as Spain has used ISO3 rather than ISO2 country codes.
* Sweden is listed as “Ministry of Foreign Affairs” (this is how they have listed themselves as the Funding Organisation in the data)
* Sweden’s implementing organisations have been lost as they placed them in the accountable organisation field.
Please let me know if you see anything else problematic, if you have and criticisms of feedback of the way the data has been presented, or if you think there are other ways you’d like to be able to explore the data, based on the available dimensions.
### Next steps
As mentioned above, there are some problems with the data which should properly be dealt with at the level of the donor agency. But there are others that will probably have to be dealt with by users of the data:
* Mapping between different sector vocabularies, so that you can see all “Health” projects, and not only the health projects according to a single vocabulary
* Mapping between countries and regions, so that every project in a country has a related region
* Correctly converting currencies using the “value-date” column to get a more precise (at least month-specific) conversion.
**What else have you noticed with the data? Is there anything else that should be changed? Anything interesting?**
You can contact Mark about this data via the [OpenSpending mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending)
### Useful Links
* [IATI on OpenSpending](http://www.openspending.org/iati)
* [Data wrangling scripts and tools](https://github.com/okfn/iatitools)
* [Mapping spreadsheets](https://github.com/okfn/iatitools/tree/master/mapping)
* [Etherpad from Open Data Day - attendees and projects they worked on](http://ckan.okfnpad.org/opendataday)

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/01/civil-society-and-spending-data-who-is-mapping-the-money/
title: "Civil Society and Spending Data: Who is mapping the money?"
tags:
- Contribute
- OSF
---
**This post is by [Lucy Chambers](http://okfn.org/members/lucychambers), Community Coordinator on the OpenSpending project at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The post is cross-posted on the [Open Knowledge Foundation blog](http://blog.okfn.org/2012/01/12/civil-society-and-spending-data-who-is-mapping-the-money/).**
We're excited to announce that, thanks to the generous support of the Open Society Foundations, OKFN's activities around financial transparency will expand to include a second pillar: next to the OpenSpending platform, we have just started a 6 month project to map the technology needs of Civil Society Organisations in relation to public spending and budget information.
## We're going to be working on...
* **Identifying CSOs around the world who are interested in working with spending data** - building on the existing network of contacts from the OpenSpending.org project.
* **Connecting these CSOs with each other**, with open data communities and with other key stakeholders to exchange knowledge, experiences and best practices in relation to spending data
* **Establishing how CSOs currently work with spending data**, how they would like to use it, and what they would like to achieve - including:
1. what existing tools are being used
2. what current technical needs are unmet
3. what would be required to meet these needs and how feasible is it to tackle them
* **Creating a registry of spending datasets**, from official and unofficial sources in theDataHub.org
* **A Spending Data Manual** - A wiki-like, community driven manual on acquiring, working with, publishing and archiving spending data, based on input and exchanges with CSOs we talk to.This will augment and reference existing publications from numerous organisations as well as channelling the results of our research into two areas:
* **A section to help CSO’s clarify their demands towards governments:** e.g. guidance on open licensing and structured data formats, applicable for spending data.
* **A section focused on best practice for CSOs when using and reusing spending data:** for example collaborative processes such as data-sharing.
&nbsp;
* **Running Spending Analysis Sessions with CSOs**, both in person and virtually. We’re interested in learning from about what data people are trying to acquire / having difficulty in doing so, how they plan to use the data to further their mission and learning what barriers, legal, technical and otherwise could be removed to make their jobs easier.
* **Getting Spending Data from numerous countries loaded into OpenSpending.org** - with the support of CSOs, OKFN developers, and volunteers from the open data community. We we're interested in are using the OpenSpending.org tools, and collect input from them on how these could be improved to meet their needs.
<img alt="" src="http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6166/6270108254_5875c8a7ed_z.jpg" title="Kaitlin Lee talking at Open Government Data Camp" class="alignnone" width="640" height="426" />
## Vision: Improved Spending Data Literacy, Sharing and Re-use amongst CSOs around the world
We are very keen to help more groups and individuals around the world to use and work with spending data more effectively to do the things they care about - whether this is investigative journalism, evidence based policy-making, political campaigning, budgeting or creating new useful applications and services.
In particular, we would like to document and spread best practices in the legal and technical aspects of reusing public information, and enabling re-use and better collaboration around this material.
### Ultimately we would like to:
* **Build stronger, broader communities** of groups and individuals who work together to acquire, use, and openly share spending data
* **Increase ‘literacy’ around spending data** - enabling more CSOs to understand and work with large and complex spending datasets to help them to pursue their objectives
* **Encourage more CSOs to publish datasets which they acquire**, use or create in machine readable formats, under open licenses, to avoid duplication of effort and enable CSOs to build on each others’ work, to harness external expertise more effectively and to facilitate stronger collaboration between different organisations who are interested in spending information
## How can I get involved?
* **Join the Working Group on Spending Data**. The working group will bring together data experts and CSOs who will help to weave a community of best practice around spending data, collect and provide feedback on material for the manual and help to develop the network of those collaborating around and sharing spending data. More details about the working group can be found on this [wiki page](http://wiki.openspending.org/Working_Group).
* **Write for the [Spending Data Blog](http://blog.openspending.org)** - we're interested in posts by and about CSOs who work with spending data, observations on the current status quo on releasing data in your area. Anything from short comment pieces to full proposals for what could be done, legal, technical or otherwise, to improve the situation in the sphere where you work. Contact details as above.
**If you would like to get started, or know of organisations we should extend the invitation to: drop us an email via the [mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending) or contact me directly via info [at] openspending.org. **

22
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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/01/open-bookkeeping-what-role-can-accountants-play-in-open-spending-budget-projects/
title: "Open Bookkeeping: What role can accountants play in Open Spending & Budget Projects?"
---
The next OpenSpending online community meeting will take place on *Thursday, 19th Jan - 6pm GMT*.
## The topic
Accountants spend their entire working lives mapping the money:
* How can their expertise be put to good use in Open Spending Data projects?
* What interesting initiatives are going on around the world which could benefit from the input of accountants?
<a href="http://blog.openspending.org/files/2012/01/money.png"><img src="http://blog.openspending.org/files/2012/01/money-300x212.png" alt="Via OpenClipArt" title="money" width="300" height="212" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-96" /></a>
All are welcome! If you'd like to contribute to the discussion by joining the call, please just add your name and Skype ID to [the pad](http://wdmmg.okfnpad.org/community-2012-01-12)
Please feel free to share with colleagues friends and other communities.
N.B. Over the next weeks, we'll be trying to theme the discussions and proactively invite people along to join them. If you have a suggestion for a topic you think the group should discuss, please drop us a line via the [OpenSpending mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).

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---
authors:
- fabiano
redirect_from: /2012/01/transparency-and-technology-in-brazil-linking-politicians-to-bad-entrepreneurs/
title: "Transparency and technology in Brazil: linking politicians to bad entrepreneurs"
tags:
- Data Journalism
- Spending Stories
---
**This story by Fabiano Angélico, who formerly worked at Transparencia Brasil, is about how technology and the help of coders can be used to highlight links between politicians and corrupt entrepreneurs. It is followed by a brief "Behind the News" interview which shows some of the time costs of datawrangling and problems faced when getting the story out.**
How can transparency and technology point out connections between politicians and bad entrepreneurs? Well, first of all you will need some information about the politicians and about the entrepreneurs.
In Brazil, in spite of the historical lack of transparency in governments (Brazil's freedom of information law was sanctioned just late last year), the Electoral Court has been proactively providing information on political candidates since 2002. One piece of info is the financial donation to the candidates, containing info about who is donating to whom and how much. Although this database is released only after the elections -- the info would surely be more powerful if it were released DURING the political campaigns --, one must admit this is a rich source of information.
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/elaws/3883627250/sizes/z/in/photostream/"><img alt="" src="http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2542/3883627250_067b94c247_z.jpg" title="Roger Schultz via Flickr (CC-BY)" class="alignnone" width="640" height="425" /></a>
January, 2010. Elections for President and for the Parliament, as well as for State Governors and State Parliaments, would happen in only 9 months time, in October. However, many people were already discussing them.
At that time, 2010 had just begun, I was at work, thinking of how to find rich and useful information on the candidates. Then I was reminded of the so-called ["Dirty List"](http://www.mte.gov.br/sgcnoticia.asp?IdConteudoNoticia=6680&PalavraChave=lista%20suja) -- this is a list regularly published by the Ministry of Labour which indicates the companies and farmers who are caught by government officials using workers in very lousy conditions, similar to slavery.
The list published in the Ministry's website is in not-so-friendly PDF format, but it has a plus: there is not only the name of the companies or the entrepreneur/farmer, but also their registry numbers within the government. I remembered that in the Electoral Court one can also find the numbers. That was important because having the registry numbers would avoid ambiguities.
I had both lists: the donators to the previous elections (2008, 2006, 2004 and 2002) and the "Dirty" companies. But I had a problem; I did not know how to matchup the datasets. My tech knowledge allowed me to transform the PDFs into CSV, but I could no go further without help.
I then sent the datasets, in CSV format, to [Transparencia Hacker](http://thacker.com.br/), a Google Groups list which now gathers over 800 people interested in the connections between transparency and politics/public administration.
Within 2 days, the guys made the datasets talk, and we found that 16 politicians had been elected with the help of "Dirty" money in the 4 previous elections. Other 13 politicians had received donations from the "Dirty List" but had not succeeded in winning the elections.
[A local newspaper told the story](http://www.agenciasebrae.com.br/noticia.kmf?canal=36&cod=9376495&indice=0).
In October 2012, there are local elections in Brazil. Hope we can shed even more light in the candidates.
# Behind the news:
## Roughly how long did it take you to extract the data from the PDFs? Do you know how long the guys from Transparencia Hacker spent working on the data?
This was kind of easy. It took me just some minutes. The "Dirty List" is a 20-page PDF. I always use a website to convert it into xls or csv (I like [Cometdocs](http://www.cometdocs.com/) for this work).
[Here](http://portal.mte.gov.br/data/files/8A7C812D3374524E0133835496AF7D72/CADASTRO%20DE%20EMPREGADORES%2008%20de%20novembro%202011.pdf) is the Dirty List, in PDF (last updated on the 8th of November, 2011; the list we used is in CSV but it it very outdated because it was due to January 2010)
Here are the Electoral Court pages for the list of donators: [2002](http://www.tse.jus.br/internet/eleicoes/2002/prest_blank.htm), [2004](http://www.tse.jus.br/internet/eleicoes/2004/prest_blank.htm), [2006](http://www.tse.jus.br/eleicoes/eleicoes-anteriores/eleicoes-2006/prestacao-de-contas-eleicoes-2006), [2008](http://www.tse.jus.br/eleicoes/contas-eleitorais/candidatos-e-comites/prestacao-de-contas-eleitorais-2008) and [2010](http://spce2010.tse.jus.br/spceweb.consulta.prestacaoconta2010/pesquisaCandidato.jsp).
What I asked the Transparencia Hacker community was to check whether the CNPJs (companies register number within the governments) in the CSV would match any item in the Electoral Court webpage. The guys worked on the data for 2 days.
## Is sufficient data available to visualise the total amount lobbyists donated to political campaigns, and would it be useful to / no? If you were to visualise the info - what would the priorities be to show? Would any tools be useful to explore the data?
Yes, there is enough data. And YES, it would be very useful to visualize those links. I would prioritise the presidential and governor candidates as well as some Congressmen who hold top-positions in both Houses of Congress. Also, the donations to political parties (not to individual politicians) would be a plus.
A search form would be very useful. The search could have filters for position (Presidential candidate, governor candidate, political party etc), geography (Brazil, states) and donators (with no filters, just a blank for writing)
## In your ideal world, in time for the impending elections - what would be done differently from last time? Any additional data you would like to see released?
I'd have to think more carefully to respond that, but concerning additional data: the number which identifies the market (the field) in which the companies work.
*Interested in writing a "Behind the News" piece for the OpenSpending blog? Get in touch via our [twitter account](https://twitter.com/#!/openspending) or email **info [at] openspending.org**.*
Some useful links (mainly in Portuguese):
* [Brasil adopts access to information law](http://www.article19.org/resources.php/resource/2862/en/brazil-adopts-access-to-information-law)
* [View the Dirty List in Full](http://www.mte.gov.br/sgcnoticia.asp?IdConteudoNoticia=6680&PalavraChave=lista%20suja)

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---
authors:
- friedrich
redirect_from: /2012/01/updates-from-the-openspending-dev-team/
title: Updates from the OpenSpending Dev Team
tags:
- Releases
- Spending Stories
- Updates
---
# What are we focusing on this week?
* Working on implementing [Collections](http://wdmmg.okfnpad.org/collections) <- draft notes, beware.
* Prototyping the Compar-o-tron [Mockup 1](http://www.flickr.com/photos/okfn/4623584907/), [Mockup 2](http://www.flickr.com/photos/okfn/4624190848/).
* Continuing work on Embeddable widgets for Spending Stories.

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---
authors:
- friedrich
redirect_from: /2012/01/hakuna-my-data-nbo-data-bootcamp/
title: "Hakuna My Data: NBO Data Bootcamp"
tags:
- Data Journalism
- events
- Kenya
- NBO
- x
---
**This post is by [Friedrich Lindenberg](http://okfn.org/members/pudo), developer on OpenSpending.**
>"My Name is XXXX, I am a member of the Kenyan parliament for the constituency of XXXX in the 2007-2012 election cycle. During my time in parliament, I have positioned myself against taxes for MPs.
>Of the Development Funds allocated to my constituency, I have spent 12mn KSH in 2010 and 8mn KSH in 2009. Since 2007, I've funded 201 projects, of which 72 (9mn KSH) related to Education, 56 (7.2mn KSH) related to Health and 20 (4.2mn KSH) to Infrastructure.
>The largest projects I have funded include... "
Auto-generated, spending data-driven campaign speeches like this are just one of the many ideas of the Data Bootcamp that took place in Nairobi last week. Invited by the African Media Initiative and the World Bank Insititute, about 70 participants - both journalists and developers - met on Strathmore University's campus to learn and practise both the skills and tools required for data-driven reporting.
The four-day programme combined tools training with practical work in small groups. Elena Egawhary (BBC NewsNight) gave a workshop on data analysis in Excel, Sreeram Balakrishnan (Google Fusion Tables) introduced both Refine and Fusion Tables. Team members from both the Kenya data portal and the World Bank finance site presented their respective offerings, while Gregor and myself from the OpenSpending team gave intros to web scraping and advanced
map visualisation.
<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7009/6789058651_9a25483ba0_z.jpg" title="Hakuna My Data" class="alignnone" width="640" height="478" />
During group work, journalists and developers teamed up to try their newly learned skills in different domains ranging from sports (football player profiles) to education (missing toilets in schools, "The Shit Ordeal") and the financial transparency story-telling mentioned above.
The workshop also served as a community-building event for Kenya's young and impressive Open Data initiative. Future events, aimed at civil society organisations and polictical actors will help to further promote the re-use of government information released through the initiative.
All this is happening in a place where transparency is an essential tool to be developed: Not only is the access to information now guaranteed by the 2010 Kenyan constitution, there are also major political issues that deserve close attention from local and international watchdogs. These include not only the ongoing incursion of Kenyan troops into Somalia in an effort to fight Al-Shebab terrorist groups, but also the upcoming nationwide elections in December 2012. The elections will instate a new bicameral system of government, with many previously unknown candidates standing for office. In the previous 2007 vote, bad polling station data had quite literally led to widespread unrest and thousands of deaths across the nation.
In all, it was a fantastic to get in touch with the Kenyan participants of the workshop and to see how the organizers of the event - a brilliant team including Craig Hammer, Justin Arenstein and Jay Bhalla - are working to foster an open data community in this bustling developing nation.Given the great ideas generated during the team sessions, I'm sure this work will soon bear its first fruits.

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---
authors:
- michal
redirect_from: /2012/02/the-czech-budget-on-line-the-half-success-story/
title: "The Czech budget on-line: the half success story"
tags:
- Working Group
---
**This post is by Michal Škop, of KohoVolit.eu.**
<em>The half-success story of implementing <a href="http://openspending.org">OpenSpending.org</a> and <a href="http://otwartedane.pl">OtwarteDane.pl</a> into <a href="http://budovanistatu.cz">BudovaniStatu.cz</a> ('Building of the State', the name referes to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Peroutka">Peroutka</a>'s book)
</em>
It all started almost 2 years ago. Our partner NGO <a href="http://nasipolitici.cz">NasiPolitici.cz</a> started to think about putting the Czech public money data on the web and asked us at <a href="http://en.kohovolit.eu">KohoVolit.eu</a> if we were interested. And we said yes, we always wanted to do something 'about money' (we used to be a parliamentary watchdog only till then).
We found out that there is a <a href="http://wwwinfo.mfcr.cz/cgi-bin/aris/iarisorg/index.pl">huge amount of public financial data</a> available on-line. Every single public organization has to fill several detailed accounting forms every year, the oldest data are from 1994 (not published, but they are there). And it is available even in <a href="http://wwwinfo.mfcr.cz/cgi-bin/aris/iarisxml/index.pl">xml</a>. Can you ask for more?
Later on, we found that there were some serious catches. The Ministry of finance, which provided the data, severely limited the number of downloads from one IP. It would have taken us a couple of months just to download everything (some 60 GB of data). The Tor and mobile connection (changing IP) came in useful. The forms were in xml, but mixing raw basic data with sums with no clear distinction between them at all. Funny. They changed the system for 2010. Et cetera. We were progressing rather slowly, with no financial support at all.
<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7189/6876765321_195864d782_z.jpg" title="Budovani Statu" class="alignnone" width="640" height="388" />
Finally, help from <a href="http://www.nfpk.cz/en">Anticorruption Endowment</a> came and we got funding for about two month (developer) to build a site connecting (just) the government budgets with the politicians. That was important, I could not just show the data in some nice way, I needed to do other things with the application – showing historical data, connecting to politicians.
I spent a month just fiddling with the data, trying to find a suitable
a) data storage and
b) application to build on.
I tried <a href="http://openspending.org">OpenSpending.org</a> first, but I was not able to set up the data there. I tried to tweak <a href="http://community.kohovolit.eu/doku.php/api">our parliamentary API</a>, but it was just too much work, I would not be able to finish it in time. After a few weeks, I still was not sure if I would get the results using <a href="http://openspending.org">OpenSpending.org</a>. The guys behind <a href="http://otwartedane.pl">OtwarteDane.pl</a> were very helpful and so we decided to store the data with them.
I did not use OpenSpending.org's API, but their <a href="https://github.com/okfn/bubbletree">bubbletree chart</a> was good. I needed to catch a few bugs, but it took me just a few days to get it running more-or-less in a way I wanted (well yes, I still need to clean the code for 'pull request'). And – importantly – it was possible to build our application(s) on it.
I think, we have hit the bubbletree's limit on number of bubbles there. It runs rather well with data we limited it to later (about 3600 bubbles), but it takes javascript about 10 sec on my medium computer to process the full data, 24000 bubbles for 2010 year, Opera cannot handle it and IE had problems, too (try it on <a href="http://budovanistatu.10dragons.org/bubble?scope=full">our development site</a>).
And how about the '<a href="http://budovanistatu.cz/bread">where does my taxes go</a>' app? Well, it was rather easy from the developer's view. I could copy the British idea, just program it in Javascript instead of the Flash. The hard part was the economics here. We could not use just the income tax as it accounts for about 10 % of all the taxes only (the VAT, the health tax, the social tax are more important). The taxes are messy. The general financial reporting is a mess, too. I have found about 15 % difference in 'public taxes' in different financial reports from <a href="http://czso.cz">Czech Statistical Office</a>. So which one to use to calculate the overall taxes? But this is just one reason more why <a href="http://openspending.org">OpenSpending.org</a> will be useful, to standardize this mess.
For the future, we will update the project once the 2011 data is available. We shall solve the problem with bubbles' scaling. We will write analyses based on it mainly push others to do it. And I already have the Prague 2012 budget data ready to bubble...

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---
authors:
- friedrich
redirect_from: /2012/02/thekit/
title: Announcing the Where Does My Money Go? Assembly Kit
tags:
- Releases
- Updates
---
Over the past few months, we've made a lot of progress on OpenSpending. The core of the application is now mostly stable and it is getting ever easier to load data into the platform through the web-based dataset editor. Yet, inevitably, this raises a simple question: I've imported my data, what next?
Thanks to our [API](http://openspending.org/help/api.html), there can be an infinite number of answers. With the [BubbleTree](http://okfnlabs.org/bubbletree/) diagram, the [Daily Bread](http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/dailybread.html) application and the transactional spending browser, we have a few simple answers.
But as [Michal Škop blogged recently](http://blog.openspending.org/2012/02/15/the-czech-budget-on-line-the-half-success-story/), up to now it has been fairly difficult to use both these widgets and the OpenSpending API to create custom front-ends.
To make things easier, we've now created the [Assembly Kit](https://github.com/openspending/wheredoesmymoneygo.org). The kit is in fact the source for a newly styled version of the [Where Does My Money Go?](http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/) site that has gone live yesterday. [Contained in this](https://github.com/openspending/wheredoesmymoneygo.org) is a clean set of templates that can anyone who knows basic HTML can easily use to make a lightweight, white-label budget visualization site, styled according to your own wishes.
<a href="http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7201/6886198003_781374afa7.jpg" width="500" height="263" alt="Screen Shot 2012-02-16 at 2.35.48 PM"></a>
A set of widgets are included and can be adapted to another dataset with just a few edits. And since everything runs against the OpenSpending API, you don't need to run your own database. Instead, you can [load your data into OpenSpending.org](http://wiki.openspending.org/Loading_into_OpenSpending) and then customise the user facing side - for example, you can just use a generic blog or a set of static HTML files.
Our next step in March will be to make it easier for users - especially Journalists - to create custom configurations for the visualizations via a graphical interface, save specific views and share them through a simple embed code. We'll also work to roll out the mapping support more widely and to create more custom apps on top of the API.
Our goal is to make OpenSpending the easiest way to publish and analyze a government finance dataset - with your help! So please provide us with feedback and contribute your own visualizations to the OpenSpending platform.
* [Assembly Kit](https://github.com/openspending/satellite-template)

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/02/how-spending-stories-fact-checks-big-brother-the-wiretappers-ball/
title: How Spending Stories Fact Checks Big Brother, the Wiretappers' Ball
tags:
- big brother
- Data Journalism
- pbs
- privacy international
- Spending Stories
- spending stories
- surveillance
---
**This piece was co-written with Eric King of [Privacy International](https://www.privacyinternational.org/) and comes as Privacy International launches a huge new data release about companies selling surveillance technologies. It is cross-posted on the [MediaShift PBS IDEA LAB](http://www.pbs.org/idealab/)**
Today, the global surveillance industry is estimated at around $5 billion a year. But which companies are selling? Which governments are buying? And why should we care?
We show how the [OpenSpending platform](http://openspending.org/) can be used to speed up fact checking, showing which of these companies have government contracts, and, most interestingly, with which departments...
## The Background
Big Brother is now indisputably big business, yet until recently the international trade in surveillance technologies remained largely under the radar of regulators and civil society. Buyers and suppliers meet, mingle and transact at secretive trade conferences around the world, and the details of their dealings are often shielded from public scrutiny by the ubiquitous defence of 'national security'. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this environment has bred a widespread disregard for ethics and a culture in which the single-minded pursuit of profit is commonplace.
<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7179/6780224656_976bcdee9a_z.jpg" title="Big Brother Inc" class="alignnone" width="640" height="390" />
For years, European and American companies have been quietly selling surveillance equipment and software to dictatorships across the Middle East and North Africa - products that have allowed these regimes to maintain a stranglehold over free expression, smother the flames of political dissent and target individuals for arrest, torture and execution.
They include devices that intercept mobile phone calls and text messages in real time on a mass scale, malware and spyware that gives the purchaser complete control over a target's computer and trojans that allow the camera and microphone on a laptop or mobile phone to be remotely switched on and operated. These technologies are also being bought by Western law enforcement, including small police departments in which the ability of officers to understand the legal parameters, levels of accuracy and limits of acceptability is highly questionable.
The data that has just been released on the [Privacy International Website](https://www.privacyinternational.org/big-brother-incorporated/countries) included the following:
1. An updated list of companies selling surveillance technology, and
2. Naming all the government agencies attending an international surveillance trade show known as the wiretappers ball.
Some names are predictable enough: [the FBI](https://www.privacyinternational.org/big-brother-incorporated/countries/United%20States/US_Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation_FBI_-_OTD), the [US Drug Enforcement Administration](https://www.privacyinternational.org/big-brother-incorporated/countries/United%20States/US_Drug_Enforcement_Administration_DEA_-_ONSI), the [UK Serious Organized Crime Agency](https://www.privacyinternational.org/big-brother-incorporated/countries/United%20Kingdom/UK_Serious_Organised_Crime_Agency_SOCA_) and [Interpol](https://www.privacyinternational.org/big-brother-incorporated/countries/International/Interpol), for example. The presence of others is deeply disturbing: the national security agencies of [Bahrain](https://www.privacyinternational.org/big-brother-incorporated/countries/Bahrain/Bahrain_National_Security_Agency) and [Yemen](https://www.privacyinternational.org/big-brother-incorporated/countries/Yemen/Yemen_National_Security_Agency), the embassies of [Belarus](https://www.privacyinternational.org/big-brother-incorporated/countries/Belarus/Belarus_Embassy) and the [Democratic Republic of Congo](https://www.privacyinternational.org/big-brother-incorporated/countries/Belarus/Belarus_Embassy) and the [Kenyan intelligence agency](https://www.privacyinternational.org/big-brother-incorporated/countries/Kenya/Kenya_National_Security_Intelligence_Service), to name but a few. A few are downright baffling, like the [US department of Commerce](https://www.privacyinternational.org/big-brother-incorporated/countries/United%20States/US_Department_of_Commerce) or the [US Fish & Wildlife Service](https://www.privacyinternational.org/big-brother-incorporated/countries/United%20States/US_Fish_%2526_Wildlife_Service) and [Clark County School District Police Department](https://www.privacyinternational.org/big-brother-incorporated/countries/United%20States/Clark_County_School_District_Police_Department).
Now, with the aid of OpenSpending, anyone can cross reference which contracts these companies hold with governments around the world. The investigation continues...
## Using OpenSpending to speed up fact-checking
Privacy International approached the Spending Stories team to ask for a search widget to be able to search across all of the government spending datasets for contracts held between governments and these companies (until this point, it had only been possible to search one database at a time).
The Spending Browser is now live at <http://opendatalabs.org/spendbrowser>. And, as the URLs correspond to the queries, individual searches can be passed on for further examination and, importantly, embedded in articles directly. [Try it yourself](http://openspending.org/) against the list of companies listed in [the Surveillance Section of the Privacy International Site](https://www.privacyinternational.org/big-brother-incorporated/countries) (Just enter a company e.g. 'Endace Accelerated' into the search bar).
The Spending Browser will become increasingly more powerful as ever more data is loaded into the system.
Want to help make this tool even more powerful? [Get involved](http://openspending.org/getinvolved) and help to build up the data bank.
## Coverage
You can read more about the background to these stories on the Privacy International Site and recent coverage by the International Media:
* [Privacy International investigates the sale of surveillance technology](https://www.privacyinternational.org/big-brother-incorporated)
* Guardian [Surveillance trade shows: which government agencies attend?](http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/feb/07/surveillance-shows-attendees-iss-world)
* Wall Street Journal [High-Tech Surveillance Comes to Small Towns](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/02/06/high-tech-surveillance-comes-to-small-towns/?KEYWORDS=privacy)

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/02/open-meeting-software-for-participatory-budgeting/
title: "Open Meeting: Software for Participatory Budgeting"
tags:
- pb
- Updates
- Working Group
---
There are already shining examples of direct forms of democracy and deliberation going on around the world but many of them are small scale, local and idiosyncratic solutions. Can technology help to take these discussions to the next level and offer templates for solutions that could be applied all over the world?
* **When**: Today, 5pm GMT
* **How to join**: Add your name and Skype ID to the [etherpad](http://wdmmg.okfnpad.org/pb)
We're also conducting a **Software for Participatory Budgeting Census** - if you know of examples which should be in there please add them [to this spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvoV_cBqwo28dE9fZy02NEt2UGxPTnRQMTEzaUhTOGc#gid=0)!
<img alt="CC-BY St Peter&#039;s Community News" src="http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4022/4512444887_3a28560518.jpg" title="Participatory Budgeting " class="alignnone" width="500" height="357" />
Suggested topics (please feel free to add to these in the etherpad):
* Personal experience with using software for PB:
* Any shining examples stand out?
* Any frustrations
* Case Studies
* Geographical focus (idiosyncrasies we need to take into account)
* Mobile
* Web
* Measures of success
* PB has many pieces, which software is best for which piece?
* Setting up a common framework for impact evaluation
* Scalability
* Penetration
* User retention
* Epistemic value
* Relevant topics for PB?
* deliberation on entire budgets at once
* local / national
* demand and supply of services & infrastructure
* problem-solving (a la fix my street - requests for more funds to be directed to solve a problem)
* allocating resources for area regeneration
* directing statutory funds to voluntary sector organisations
* Structural funds - national co-funding
* Exploring tradeoffs
* Which stages of the PB cycle to focus on?
* Probably no universal solutions - but what are the minimum common principles which can be identified and is there a tech solution for them?
* Low-hanging fruit - what are the next steps in coming months to take this to the next level?
If you can't make the call - please feel free to contribute to the discussion via the [Participatory Budgeting Google Group](http://groups.google.com/group/participatorybudgeting?pli=1).

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---
author: $authornamehere
redirect_from: /2012/03/calculating-portugal's-taxes/
title: Calculating Portugal's taxes
tags:
- Contribute
- portugal
---
**This post is by Nuno Moniz, who has recently developed an application to allow citizens in Portugal to calculate where their taxes go. Portuguese citizens can see how much they contribute to the State on a daily, weekly and monthly basis [here](http://www.nunomoniz.com/orcamento/) and if they live in the Azores Autonomous Region they will also be able to see how much they contribute at a local level [here](http://www.nunomoniz.com/orcamento/acores/).**
During this last year or so, Portugal has been submerged in a vigorous discussion that concerns the economy, finances, social issues… but above all, money. The debt, the obligations, the budgets...
Although in the latter years the Portuguese Government has shown some improvements in terms of e-democracy, mainly related to the public administration, when it comes to open data only now can we see some light at the end of the tunnel. The new Government Data Portal was launched in November, and it already has some data available. It presents a great opportunity for the open data community in Portugal to start joining efforts. Some projects had previously been developed, and I believe the most significant was http://demo.cratica.net, a parliament tracker.
In the late October, when the first draft for the 2012 Portuguese State Budget was delivered to the Parliament, and inspired by a considerable number of interesting projects that I have been following regarding open data, I thought about developing a simple and different way to visualize what the Budget holds. Soon I found out that thanks to OKFN’s BubbleTree the work load could be really reduced. Great news and great help.
That enabled me to launch a Portuguese 2012 Budget Visualization in a week. It took around two days only to extract the data from the budget document. This shows exactly the difficulty of understanding one of the most important State documents. In addition to most divulged projects of this sort, I added some additional information which that would be fun for people to see: the monthly, weekly and daily contributions to the various objects of the State Budget. It was very interesting to see the final result, so I continued and replicated the initiative to the Azores Autonomous Region of Portugal also.
I’m currently working on my thesis regarding open legislation. By the summer we’ll have about three years of open Portuguese legislation available :) In the meantime, the Government Data Portal holds some data that would be very interesting to push the growth of the open data community in Portugal. And since no one seems to discuss anything else than economy in the news, I have also started working on the Public Contract and Direct Adjudications (celebration of contracts without public auction). Let’s see what it will show.
Please send any feedback or questions you have for Nuno via the [OpenSpending mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/03/participatory-budgeting-and-technology/
title: Participatory Budgeting and Technology
tags:
- GIFT
- Working Group
---
**Last week we held our first Open Meeting on [Software for Participatory Budgeting](http://blog.openspending.org/2012/02/29/open-meeting-software-for-participatory-budgeting/). We just scratched the surface of this huge topic, but here are the first notes. A full write up in blog-post form will follow after a few more calls**
You can contribute to and edit these notes directly via this [wiki page](http://wiki.openspending.org/Meetups/Participatory_Budgeting)
If you are interested in joining the next call, **Thursday 8th March, 5pm GMT**, please add your name and Skype ID to the [etherpad](http://wdmmg.okfnpad.org/pb2). In the meantime, discussion will continue via the [Participatory Budgeting Google Group](http://groups.google.com/group/participatorybudgeting?pli=1).
## Outline of discussion (more detailed notes on the wiki)
* We worked a lot around the PB budget software census - please continue to add examples and thoughts [here](http://bit.ly/y7uyEI)
## Topics raised
* Before examining technical approaches, what should we bear in mind? [Notes in Wiki section](http://wiki.openspending.org/Meetups/Participatory_Budgeting#Before_examining_technical_approaches.2C_what_should_we_bear_in_mind.3F)
* Personal experiences and lessons learned in using software for PB. [Notes in Wiki section](http://wiki.openspending.org/Meetups/Participatory_Budgeting#Personal_experiences_in_using_software_for_PB.)
* Classification of PB tools in the census. Please feel free to comment on and edit the classifications in the [wiki page](http://wiki.openspending.org/Meetups/Participatory_Budgeting):
* **Deliberation** - *Allows user input, crowdsourcing ideas and facilitating discussion e.g. collecting ideas for projects *
* **Simulation** - *Allows participants to explore how certain spending/revenue choices impact the budget. Such applications are usually educational.*
* **Cuts and Additions** *Users given simple choice to prioritise a given choice more or less highly. Can be used to propose politically unpopular activities (i.e. Poison List).*
* **Trade Offs** *Users given context on the impact of proposed choices and asked to assess relative benefits *
* **Personal Impact** *Users shown what the impact on them personally would be (e.g. increasing spending above budget levels increasing the amount of tax they pay as an individual)*
* **Problem Fixing** *Ask for allocations of more money to solve particular problems that people care about (e.g. on a Fix My Street model)*
* **Invite to offline-participation** *No survey conducted online, but technology used to issue invitations e.g. to town hall meetings where projects will be discussed*
* **Kickstart/Pledgebank** *If additional funds required to get a project off the ground - feedback and the opportunity for citizens to make in-kind or cash contributions*
* **Long Term** *e.g. capital investments*
* **Immediate Term** *e.g. for the next year's budget*
* Tools to aid comprehension of the budget process: How do we ensure that people casting their vote through this system genuinely understand the choices they are about to make? [Notes in Wiki section](http://wiki.openspending.org/Meetups/Participatory_Budgeting#Educational_tools.2C_how_to_better_aid_comprehension_of_the_budget_process)
* Who are the users? [Notes in Wiki Section](http://wiki.openspending.org/Meetups/Participatory_Budgeting#Who_are_the_users.3F)
Clear feeling amongst participants that any application that is built must address the needs of the entire spectrum of users. *I have added a key in a tab on the PB census called 'User Key' - where we briefly attempted to categorise the types of users who may be expected to interact with this system - I would be grateful to anyone who would like to add to it and also help me to complete the 'Types of user' column on the main sheet! *
## Where Do We Go From Here?
You decide, but I would suggest:
* Planning a followup call (**5pm GMT, Thursday 8th March**, please add agenda items to the [etherpad](http://wdmmg.okfnpad.org/pb2))
And in the meanwhile:
Please share your thoughts on the discussion (please add anything if I have forgotten) via the [Participatory Budgeting Google Group](http://groups.google.com/group/participatorybudgeting?pli=1):
* Categorisations and
* User groups section of the census

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---
author: $authornamehere
redirect_from: /2012/03/uk-25k-spending-data/
title: UK 25k Spending Data
---
Since the question just came up about what's going on there, figure
this is a good day to tidy this up and send it out...
Most people who managed to submit sources sent in data that was
substantially correct, with the only inconveniences being:
- arbitrary variation in spelling of column headers. Standardise this
- reporting of VAT: some include it, some exclude it, some do both, and most do not say which they do
- currency of amounts. Talk to accountants and come up with a good
way to report this; it is clear that the bulk of sources just want to
use GBP, but some departments that operate overseas have complexities
and no clear exchange rate.
- reporting of VAT numbers is rare. We should reconsider whether this
is worth bothering with
- reporting of dates: invoice date, or payment date?
Many people included too many or too few fields. Standardise on a set
of mandatory and optional fields. Strongly discourage the inclusion of
data not in the optional set, because people tend to add extra columns
reflecting their opinion of how the data should be structured, and
neglect the recommended ones. 20% of submitted sources used exactly
the recommended columns without prompting; let's get this number up.
Most people wanted to include a unique transaction reference
number. Add this to the set of standard columns.
Some people wanted to include a narrative/description field. This
should be encouraged; add as optional field.
Some people wanted to include commentary or cover notes in their
spreadsheets. This should be strongly discouraged. It needs to be
emphasised that they are supposed to be releasing *raw* data for
analysis, not documents for people to read.
Invalid data is heavily skewed towards the same errors:
1. The URL supplied to data.gov.uk does not point to a csv or
spreadsheet. This accounts for about 10% of all entries on data.gov.uk
and in the bulk of those cases, the URL simply points to nothing; the
largest remaining case is a URL pointing to a web page that talks
about the data or lists places it can be downloaded, instead of
pointing directly to the data files.
This could be eliminated entirely by fetching URLs when they are
submitted to data.gov.uk, and rejecting anything that is not a csv or
spreadsheet. A simple check of the first few bytes of each file is
sufficient to identify almost every error immediately and reject URLs
which are obviously wrong, and this would eliminate over 90% of bad
submissions. No other action could be so valuable in terms of data
gained from time spent, so this should be done first and soon. I would
estimate the engineering cost to be substantially less than a day for
a person familiar with the code.
A subset of these cases will be URLs that were once valid, but the
files have since been removed. Data sources should be reminded of the
need to maintain a permanent archive of this data at fixed
URLs. data.gov.uk should regularly revalidate URLs and automatically
mail responsible people when they go away.
2. Automated data extraction/reporting that went wrong - spreadsheets
full of formulas or errors. Automated reporting is a good idea; nobody
looked at these files before uploading them because they are obviously
wrong. It should be straightforward to get them fixed if anybody ever
tells the creator.
Errors not falling into the above two categories are mostly cases of
complete nonsense or lack of understanding from the data
submitter. These should be handled on a case-by-case basis.
There is no evidence of widespread difficulty or need for
education. Clear and precise guidelines about the format to release
data in, and validation of submitted URLs, should be the focus. Only a
tiny number of submitters (<10) had an ignorance problem, and these
are likely to be a simple case of the problem being dumped on a junior
employee because nobody thought it was important.
Areas for further work after everything above this line has been done:
- unique identification of suppliers. Name isn't very good at
identifying companies, and we should be able to link in other data
about companies
- what value should be in the departmentfamily, expensearea, and expensetype fields?
- character set of submitted data

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authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/03/technology-for-fiscal-transparency-where-next/
title: Technology for Fiscal Transparency, Where Next?
---
## Who is using technology to follow the money? The hunt is on...
Over the last month, we have been working on a report entitled "Technology for Transparent and Accountable Public Finance" for the Global Initiative on Fiscal Transparency.
<a href="http://blog.okfn.org/files/2012/03/5475524201_fe360c8606.jpg"><img src="http://blog.okfn.org/files/2012/03/5475524201_fe360c8606.jpg" alt="by imtfi on Flickr" width="500" height="333" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-9113" /></a>
We are hoping to identify the most promising projects around the world that are using technology (web, mobile or otherwise) to further aims of fiscal transparency. Of particular interest are projects that aim to:
* Publish more or better data related to fiscal processes (aid, revenues, budgets, audits, etc. -- see below),
* Help understand this data through the creation of better visualisation and data analysis tools,
* Educate citizens about fiscal processes, and assist civil society organisations promoting accountable governance,
* Facilitate direct participation in fiscal matters through participatory budgeting, citizen auditing and the like,
* Provide policymakers with complete and reliable data relevant to their work, enabling them to make better decisions.
We're particularly interested in efforts to improve transparency in 3 main areas:
* <strong>Looking at where the money comes from</strong>: In revenue processes (taxation, extractive industry, etc.),
* <strong>Monitoring where the money goes</strong>: The budgeting process (participatory budgeting, comparisons of planned and retrospective budgets) through to auditing of expenditure, and everything in between.
* <strong>The invisible money</strong>: projects that aim to improve public understanding of state owned (or semi-owned) enterprises, sovereign wealth funds and contingent liabilities - information on which often are not published as part of current budgeting practices.
There will be particular focus on the questions 'Who are the users?' and examining their motivations for getting involved, the scalability and applicability of given solutions to other contexts.
The report will also aim to highlight gaps - so please feel free to think outside the box; if there is cutting edge technology being used in other fields besides public finance, please feel free to suggest it - maybe no-one apart from you has thought of it yet!
## Over to you
We are now opening up to the community to let us know if there are any projects we should be aware of and include in the report.
If you are aware of any projects that we should cover in the report, or if you have any more general observations on the above, please let us know. We have created a [Google form](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGZ1anpCaVZWTTBmR2JQWXFGc0pxeEE6MQ#gid=0) which you can use to give full details and look in more detail into some of the areas we are focussing on.
For more general comments or observations, and notes of people to contact, please don't hesitate to drop us a line: lucy.chambers [at] okfn.org and velichka.dimitrova [at] okfn.org.

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/03/voting-systems-for-e-participatory-budgeting-upcoming-call/
title: Voting Systems for E-Participatory Budgeting - Upcoming Call
meta:
_edit_last: "239"
tags:
- Working Group
---
What are the best systems for voting in tech-solutions to Participatory Budgeting? Join upcoming call to contribute to the discussion.
The Doodle Poll is out [here](http://www.doodle.com/f6upt8utu6ifds8f#table) - please fill it in if you would like to join to help us schedule the call.
If you would like to join, please also add your name and Skype ID to the pad [here](http://wdmmg.okfnpad.org/pb-voting) - then I will add you on Skype before the call. As usual, please feel free to add to and modify the agenda.
<a href="http://blog.openspending.org/files/2012/03/andrea_S_checkmark_on_circle_1.png"><img src="http://blog.openspending.org/files/2012/03/andrea_S_checkmark_on_circle_1.png" alt="" title="andrea_S_checkmark_on_circle_1" width="250" height="250" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-210" /></a>
## Suggested topics for the call
* Best practice (for different stages of pb process) - current examples
* Preventing:
* Bias in decisions offered
* Undue influence from special interest groups
* Gaming the system
* Herding effects
* Promoting:
* Voting after sufficient deliberation
* Maximum participation
* Maximum information
* Come-back-next time
* Personal profiles and authentication
I hope you will be able to join us. Please contact me via lucy.chambers [at] okfn.org if you have any questions.

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/05/GIFT-report-released/
title: Technology for Transparent and Accountable Public Finance
---
In early March, we embarked on a project to map out projects which use [technology to further the aims of fiscal transparency, accountability and participation](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/03/12/technology-for-fiscal-transparency-where-next.html). Today, we are happy to announce the official release of the resulting report, Technology for Transparent and Accountable Public Finance. Preliminary findings were presented at last month's [GIFT](http://fiscaltransparency.net/) meeting in Brasilia. Since then, we've been building on the comments, follow-up questions and feedback from the session.
Looking at government revenue, expenditure and off-budget information - we have attempted to identify projects from both governments and civil society which use innovative approaches to:
* Publish more or better data related to fiscal processes (aid, revenues, budgets, audits, etc. -- see below),
* Help understand this data through the creation of better visualisation and data analysis tools,
* Educate citizens about fiscal processes, and assist civil society organisations promoting accountable governance,
* Facilitate direct participation in fiscal matters through participatory budgeting, citizen auditing and the like,
* Provide policymakers with complete and reliable data relevant to their work, enabling them to make better decisions.
We focussed in particular on the question: 'Who are the users?'. We examined their motivations for getting involved, the scalability and applicability of given solutions to other contexts. The report also aims to highlight gaps that prevent users from taking up these tools.
### Report now available online
Today, the first edition of the report is published on [OpenSpending.org](http://openspending.org/resources/gift/index.html). It is also available for [download as a PDF](http://content.openspending.org/resources/gift/pdf/ttapf_report_20120530.pdf). Accompanying the report is a [project database - bit.ly/TTAPF-projects ](https://bit.ly/TTAPF-projects) which contains many more projects that publish, analyse and demystify fiscal data.
The section on participatory budgeting deserves special mention. We discovered so many projects that they merited their own listing, which can be found [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvoV_cBqwo28dE9fZy02NEt2UGxPTnRQMTEzaUhTOGc#gid=4). As we go through, we are building up a catalog of government finance portals in [the 'finance' group of datacatalogs.org](http://datacatalogs.org/group/finance). There's still a lot of work to be done there, but the group already contains the portals mentioned in the report.
As our work continues, we'd love to maintain these connections and hear updates from the projects and learn about new projects. If you have come across an interesting project and think we should feature it, [please let us know](mailto:gift-report@okfn.org)!
### Key Findings
We have tried to highlight specific roles which GIFT could play in promoting the good practice requirements of the report. The slides from the session can be found below:
<div style="width:620px" id="__ss_12607771"> <strong style="display:block;margin:12px 0 4px"><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/lucyfedia/gift-presentation-12607771" title="Gift presentation" target="_blank">Gift presentation</a></strong> <iframe src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/12607771" width="620" height="517" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen></iframe></div><br/>
Read about the highlights in context in the [Highlights, Gaps and Recommendations section](http://openspending.org/resources/gift/chapter1-3.html)
### Read the report
See below for a quick overview of the contents:
* [Chapter 1 - Introduction and Methodology](http://openspending.org/resources/gift/chapter1.html)
* [Chapter 2 - Publishing Fiscal Data: Government Perspectives](http://openspending.org/resources/gift/chapter2-intro.html)
* [Chapter 3 - Using Fiscal Data: Civil Society Perspectives](http://openspending.org/resources/gift/chapter3-intro.html)
* [Chapter 4 - Standards for Fiscal Data: Towards an international framework](http://openspending.org/resources/gift/chapter4-intro.html)
* [Chapter 5 - Case Studies - Where Does the Money Come From?](http://openspending.org/resources/gift/chapter5-intro.html)
* [Chapter 6 - Case Studies - Where Does the Money Go?](http://openspending.org/resources/gift/chapter6-intro.html)
* [Chapter 7 - Case Studies - The Invisible Money](http://openspending.org/resources/gift/chapter7-intro.html)
* [Chapter 8 - Putting the Parts Together, OpenSpending and Publish What You Fund](http://openspending.org/resources/gift/chapter8-intro.html)
* [Final Observations and Review](http://openspending.org/resources/gift/chapter9-intro.html)
* [Further Resources](http://openspending.org/resources/gift/bibliography.html)
* [Appendix](http://openspending.org/resources/gift/chapter10-intro.html)
### Get involved in the next edition
This release is version one, and we hope that the research will be ongoing as the OpenSpending community grows and the tools and network develop. As this happens, we'd really love your input. Some suggestions:
1. Feedback - let us know what you thought of the report and suggest improvements, particularly feedback for GIFT, what role would you like to see them play in this important field?
2. Keep your eyes peeled for interesting projects. We're hoping to feature information about new projects in the blog, so drop a line to the [mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending) if you know of any we should feature.
3. Help us build up the [finance group on datacatalogs.org](http://datacatalogs.org/group/finance) and review the sites for their usefulness. Ever tried to get fiscal information out of a portal? Did you get what you were after? And importantly, could you use it once you had it? Let us know [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGNXNVFXdDlPNlRDaXB2bXc0aGR5UVE6MQ#gid=0).
Follow up posts on the findings in detail coming soon!

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---
authors:
- mark
redirect_from: /2012/06/IATI-on-OpenSpending/
title: Aid Data - From XML to Visualisations
---
Are the World Bank and Department for International Development (DfID) spending money on projects in similar sectors and countries? Does all aid to Kenya go the North-East? How much aid in total did India receive last year?
Until recently, it was impossible to know. But now, thanks to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), we've been able to start to answer these questions - making the aid process more transparent, which is crucial for making it more effective.
[IATI](http://aidtransparency.net) is a political agreement by the world's major donors - including international banks, private foundations and NGOs - on a common way to publish aid information. It also defines a technical standard for exactly how that information should be published, IATI-XML.
So far, 29 donors representing 74% of Official Development Finance (ODF) [have committed to publishing](http://aidtransparency.net/implementation) to IATI. A further [13 donors](http://iatiregistry.org/group) representing 45% of ODF have already published, and 12 NGOs and foundations have published their own data.
This post details how we converted each donor's data, using simple scripts and open source tools, from raw XML data in the [IATI Registry](http://iatiregistry.org/) into a consolidated dataset and then, via loading into [OpenSpending](http://openspending.org/) to visualisations like those shown above and an easy-to-use RESTful API.
#### From this....
<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7086/7242714654_13d481e785.jpg" width="500" height="337" />
#### ... to this.
<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7092/7242078030_d2240d7c10_z.jpg" title="To this" width="640" height="575" />
## Getting the Data Together
Full details of how we got the data together are in this case study on OpenSpending ... but to summarize:
* We grabbed a list of all the IATI data files via the IATI Registry API (the IATI registry is running [CKAN](http://ckan.org/) so this is very easy)
* We converted the data to an SQLite database and a simplified CSV format and posted these on the [IATI dataset on the DataHub](http://datahub.io/dataset/iati-registry)
* Modelled and loaded it into OpenSpending, creating views to visualize it in basic forms.
## What you can see
You can now explore the complete dataset of [aid data released so far through IATI, exploring the aggregate and detailed data on OpenSpending](http://openspending.org/iati/). You can drill down through the data and look at it from different perspectives, from exploring the largest sectors in a country, to different implementing organisations in that sector, to looking at all the projects implemented by a single organisation.
#### Drill down from one layer...
![IATI 1](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7092/7341296378_c6ae9b8d6e_z.jpg)
#### ... to the next - we're zooming in on China here, breaking down by flow type...
![IATI China Zoom](http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8006/7341296584_1dfbd5ac5a_z.jpg)
#### ... and you can switch between breakdowns - slicing data here up by organisations implementing the aid...
![IATI China Implementing Organisation](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7232/7341296452_857af887ba_z.jpg)
#### ... and here by funding organisation
![IATI China Funding Organisation](http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8024/7156094599_a2e8c531e2_z.jpg)
## More details
We've also just put together a [briefing on how we worked with the IATI data on OpenSpending.org](http://openspending.org/resources/iati/index.html). The briefing covers in depth what IATI is, using the IATI registry, consolidating data into a simple format, loading data into OpenSpending and using the API.
## Next steps & get involved.
For those keen to put coding knowledge to good use to further the IATI mission, some ideas below:
* Use the API - you can use OpenSpending's API to build applications - read the [briefing](http://openspending.org/resources/iati/index.html) for more ideas and instructions
* [Review our scripts](https://github.com/okfn/iatitools) for converting IATI data. We've been compiling a list of known [issues](https://github.com/okfn/iatitools/issues) with possible future extensions such as geo-coding, reconciling organisations and handling currencies.
## What's in the data, what's still to come
The dataset contains current and future spending by major aid donors representing 44% of ODF, with disbursement data running up to the current month in some cases. It also contains commitment data up to 2016 from one donor (and from multiple donors up to 2014).
However, the data does not contain any information from donors who have not yet published to IATI, and it also does not yet include results, project documents or geo-coded data.
Future projects might include:
* Validation - to ensure that data is properly formatted and uses standard codelists;
* Adding results, [geo-coding](http://open.aiddata.org/content/index/geocoding) and project documents to the OpenSpending visualisation - some of this is already available in the original source data, but has not yet been incorporated to this dataset;
* Other visualisations - for example, a map, and activity and transaction views;
* Running the dataset compilation automatically - so that it runs on a server nightly, is up-to-date and imports the latest version to OpenSpending as it's updated.
## The future
Eventually what we'd like to see is something like this: an integrated dataset of aid and budgets in each country, so that the full picture of resource flows is available.
![PWYF Uganda](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7089/7242685452_5a849c773b_z.jpg)
**Which country will be next to join up their aid and budgetary flows?** You can get in touch with us via the [mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending) if you have any questions about this project or the data.
This post was written by [Mark Brough](http://okfn.org/members/markbrough).

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authors:
- matthias
redirect_from: /2012/06/opendata-ch-workshop/
title: Workshop - Open Budget and Procurement Zurich June 28th 2012
---
**As part of the Opendata.ch conference on June 28th 2012 in Zürich there will be a workshop dedicated to the topic of open budget and procurement.**
Various speakers from Switzerland and Germany will make short presentations and the discuss with the audience the implications and possible future actions. First, Friedrich Lindenberg of the Open Knowledge Foundation will share an overview of OpenSpending.org and present case studies of open budget initiatives. Second, Maja Menn, head of the finance department of the city of Zürich, will share her critical thoughts on open government data for public finances.
Then three speakers, Christian Geiger of Zeppelin University, Andreas Burth of University of Hamburg, and Alexandra Collm of University of St. Gallen, will provide insight into their scientific research on open budget. Last but not least two software developers, Thomas Preusse and Daniel Meister, will show examples of new open budget applications: city budget of Bern and public procurement data of the Swiss platform [simap.ch](https://www.simap.ch/shabforms/COMMON/application/applicationGrid.jsp?template=1&view=1&page=/MULTILANGUAGE/simap/content/start.jsp&language=EN).
To participate in this session please sign-up for the Opendata.ch conference [here](http://opendata.ch/2012) Please note: The session will be held in German.

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authors:
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title: Video Instruction Guide - Loading Data Into OpenSpending
---
Recently, the OpenSpending team have been working on a project to visualise financial data in Cameroon. One of the aims of the project is to create a platform which is sustainable for years to come and that means that it needs to be really easy to load and maintain datasets into OpenSpending.
So... we've created some screencasts about how to load data into OpenSpending. Please do take a look and try it out for yourself and let us know if anything needs to be clearer!
Once you've got your data into the [OpenSpending data format](http://openspending.org/help/data-cleansing.html) you're ready to load.
## Preparing your dataset information
First add information about your dataset to make it easily findable in OpenSpending
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/45913394" width="500" height="375" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/45913394">OpenSpending Upload</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/okf">Open Knowledge Foundation</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
## Upload your data online
Next, you need to get your CSV file online. There are numerous ways to do this, [Dropbox](https://www.dropbox.com/), exporting your data directly from a Google Docs (*File > Publish to the Web > Publish a CSV*). We've used the DataHub to publish our data. If you've never used it before here's a quick demo of how to upload a dataset.
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/45913395" width="500" height="375" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/45913395">DataHub upload</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/okf">Open Knowledge Foundation</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
## Create a model to explain the structure of your data to OpenSpending
Next, tell OpenSpending how to understand your data by creating a model.
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/45913393" width="500" height="375" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/45913393">OpenSpending - Create a Model</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/okf">Open Knowledge Foundation</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
If that's all gone well, you'll be able to move on to creating visualisations (video coming soon - watch this space!) and if not and you have some errors watch the video below to see what to do next.
## Not quite right? How to fix errors...
It doesn't always go right the first time you try and load your data - here's what to do if you have made a mistake either in your model or your data.
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/45913391" width="500" height="375" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/45913391">OpenSpending Error</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/okf">Open Knowledge Foundation</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
Please let us know if you upload a new dataset and if you have any feedback. You can get in touch any time via the [mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).

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authors:
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redirect_from: /2012/06/OKFest-announce/
title: Budget Cycle Monitoring Hackday at OKFest
---
**Often, the only way to check whether governments are releasing financial documents, is retroactively. But what if it were possible to receive alerts and check up against internationally recognised best-practice guidelines as to when the government in your country should be releasing key budget documents?**
At present, the only way to find out when to expect a document to be released in a given country is to trawl the legislation of a country and find references to legally mandated release dates, but there may be another way...
At this year's [Open Knowledge Festival](http://okfestival.org/) in Helsinki, there will be a 'Budget Cycle Monitoring Hackday' - to build a prototype of a calendar to attempt to fix exactly this type of problem.
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8163/7374929594_287879a931_z.jpg" title="OKFest planning" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
## Who is it for?
We figure journalists and researchers need fiscal data as soon as it is released. NGO's monitoring budget practices need to have a way to check when budget documents are released. We hope these groups and more would benefit from the calendar and notification services.
## About the Hackday
**Mission:** To align a calendar of internationally-recognised best practice guidelines for publication of key budget documents with calendars of the fiscal year in different countries and build services which can relate to this. Possible features include:
1. The ability to send out notifications to journalists, CSOs, budget monitoring orgs
at the last acceptable date for the docs to be published to check whether they are available.
2. Integrating with FOI request services to allow organisations to have a mechanism to request budget documents directly. For example, auto-generated FOI letters processed through services such as [Alaveteli](http://www.alaveteli.org/).
## How to join
Simply [sign up for a ticket for OKFestival](http://okfestival.org/tickets-and-bursaries/), bring a computer and join us on the day.
Discussions will be ongoing about what features to include, via the [mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending) - if you know someone who would benefit from this project, we'd love to hear from you!

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author: $authornamehere
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title: Test
---
Tester
=======
Tester

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title: Athens to Berlin - a European Financial Profile
---
**How does the work of budget monitoring organisations, investigative journalists, academic researchers and think-tanks differ in the various countries of Europe? What are the key questions these organisations address - are they largely the same in every country, or does each country have a different issue at the forefront of their minds? What tools and techniques do they have at their disposal to get to the bottom of Europe's tricky financial situations?**
<img alt="" src="http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6032/6309941378_b0a365ce28.jpg" title="Euro" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
A few months back, [we wrote about our project to map out how Civil Society Organisations around the world use technology in their work](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/01/12/civil-society-and-spending-data-who-is-mapping-the-money.html). Having identified in the first phase numerous interesting organisations working in this area, we now move on to phase two, getting down to the questions of tools, methodologies and barriers. A couple of the questions we will be looking at can be found below:
* How government financial information relates to the mission of CSOs, what questions are they trying to answer?
* What are the high-value datasets? Besides the eight key budget documents that every government should produce, as highlighted by the International Budget Partnership, which datasets should we be asking that governments of every country in the world to release?
* How do CSOs get hold of the data? Formats, channels & procedures.
* How do they ensure the sustainability of their efforts? What happens if the person who has been working with the data leaves? Do they document their processes?
* What tools are used to work with, archive, share and to spread the word about any findings?
* Anywhere else the conversation logically takes us...
Considering Europe's current financial situation and the Euro crisis, my focus for this current section is a cross-section of Europe - from Greece to Germany. These two countries stand at either end of the debate on proposed austerity measures for the Euro Zone, but are they actually poles apart in terms of challenges they face in monitoring their budgeting priorities at a grass-roots level? or are there common issues which could be solved with a technical helping hand?
So, armed with a video camera, sunscreen and an InterRail ticket, I am departing today to find some of the answers to these questions and will visit Greece, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and (possibly) Czech Republic collecting opinions on what it is like to be working with government financial data across Europe...
This chain will be completed in the autumn with a trip to Germany, to whom most of Europe is currently looking for hopes of salvation of the common currency.
## First Stop - Athens
The first thing that I should note about my journey to Greece is that, unlike the other countries I intend to visit, I have been, as yet, unable to find a Civil Society Organisation which specifically dedicates its effort to monitoring government budgets, contracts and procurement. Any hints welcomed if such an organisation exists, please do put them in touch!ß
However, I will meet the team behind **Diavgeia** - the Government "Cl@rity" programme, to talk about the up and coming project **"AGORA"**, which deals with transparency in the cost of supplies to the Greek Public Administration Nikolaos Stavropoulos, Maria Galaktopoulou (the Vice Mayor) and Photios Zygoulis. Secondly, Thodoris Papadopoulos, a member of the OpenSpending community and graduate of the **National School Of Public Administration**, who has run up against problems in using Greek data has promised to share his thoughts on what could be done better in Greece. Finally I will meet the team of **Transparency International - Greece**, in particular, Ms Effie Vraniali, a lawyer and a PhD holder in Public Financial Management, before moving on to Thessaloniki.
Our aims in this phase are threefold:
1. To work out what tips and tricks the various CSOs could learn from one another, to document them and put them together as a Spending Data Handbook.
2. To work out what tools are being used in budget and spending monitoring - are there any gaps which could easily be filled?
3. To connect the civil society organisations together, to ensure that ideas keep being exchanged.
## Stay in touch
Please do get in touch and let me know of any questions you would like me to put to the CSOs. The easiest way to stay in contact is via the [mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).
*Image credits: [quapan on Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/hinkelstone/)*

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title: Athens to Berlin - Day 1, Diavgeia
---
**This is the first update from the project: *[Athens to Berlin - a European Financial Profile](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/07/05/OSI.html)***
In the sweltering heat of downtown Athens, I visit the heart of Greece's new transparency initiative - Diavgeia...
# Diavgeia - Transparency, for Governments' Sake
Greece has historically been known for its lack of financial transparency. The [2010 report](http://internationalbudget.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/2010_Full_Report-English.pdf) by the International Budget Partnership cites an article from the OECD Journal on Budgeting:
> “[Greece's] reported budget balance was affected by off-budget military spending and
overestimated surpluses in social security funds.”
and then a BBC article from 2004:
> "Such flaws in its budget reports actually enabled Greece to join the euro currency in 2001 because it misreported its fiscal deficit numbers, claiming a budget deficit in 1999 that was less than three percent (a condition required to be met by countries wishing to join the common currency) when in fact its budget deficit exceeded that target by a substantial margin"
The International Budget Partnership decided not to include Greece in the 2010 Open Budget Survey, citing:
> "[Some problems] such as the weak legislative oversight, would likely have been illustrated by the Survey. Many of the problems, however, relate to the inaccuracy of the information reported and the ongoing need for subsequent revisions, which would not have been directly captured by the Survey."
With the current state of the Eurozone, it is clear that Greece needed to take control of its public financial management practices and its proposed solution is a topic of much conversation and the first stop on my journey...
# Everyone's talking about: Diavgeia (Cl@rity)
[Diavgeia](http://diavgeia.gov.gr/) (English: "Cl@rity") is the Greek Government's program to cut down on paper records and digitise documents related to the processes of government. Since 1st October 2010, all ministries have been obliged to upload, according to the claim on the website, **every government decision** to Diavgeia. This includes information on companies they contract with down to, as my first interviewee, Nikolaos Stavropoulos, claims "information on expenditure however small, even a plastic glass or pencil purchased should be counted". Diavgeia also serves as a platform for online deliberation, every draft legislation or policy initiative, it is also the centralised place for advertisements of openings in public office.
## E-Government in Neo Iraklio
Nikolaos is Scientific Advisor in the office of e-Government - [Municipality of Neo Iraklio Attikis](http://www.iraklio.gr/), Athens, which I am led to believe is the first municipality to build municipal level services on top of Diavgeia. The services include 'Fix My Street' style applications, where citizens can feed back on the services provided by governments as they see them, and also forms a place to discover what services are offered in the local area. Even though the application is only about 3 months old, it has been well marketed at the local metro station and already receives around 35 requests per day. The application recently won an award at the European Data Forum in Denmark. When I get on a better internet connection - I'll upload the video of the presentation Nikolaos gave me.
While I'm in the office, I'm also given a tour of the user interface for officials, via which the data is 'born' - more comments on this in my next post.
The efforts of the municipality clearly provide a useful resource, both inside government, to help to know where do focus efforts, resources and staff, as well as outside, where citizens are given a clear channel to contact the government and a lot of information on who is responsible for a given decision. Too early for comment yet, but we wait to see how this project will develop.
<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7140/7548263168_74dd2d423c_z.jpg" title="OKFest planning" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
## Diavgeia - more than a platform
Back to Diavgeia at the national level. Diavgeia is more than a platform, it is an entire workflow. Decisions are not effective in law unless they are uploaded to the platform and public officials (and their superiors in chain of command) are held personally accountable for entering the information, which should be done in as near to real time as possible - ideally within 24 hours. The project is still in its infancy, and Nikolaos explains the need not only for education in the civil service for how to use the platform, but also a change in mentality - most civil servants are largely used to dealing with decisions on paper and this new level of participation and transparency will take a bit of getting used to.
I also hear rumours (not in the e-Gov office) that Greece does not know know exactly how many civil servants it has, but estimates circulate around 1/10 of the population working for the public service. The benefits of having information in a digital format are clearly being recognised, and Greece is expending its efforts to reap the benefits of digital information.
Diavgeia is a good example of how transparency is not just about civil society holding government to account. Transparency is equally important to civil servants, which often suffer equally from lag times in getting information, and having a centralised resource is often a good way to ensure *everyone* in government has access...
My next stop was to find people who actually used Diavgeia to get their feedback: the team behind [publicspending.gr](http://publicspending.gr/) and a lawyer working with Transparency International, Greece. As I mentioned in my announce blog post, I've had difficulty in finding conventional budget monitoring organisations.
My next blog post, the provisionally entitled 'The Chicken and The Egg: Where are the budget monitoring organisations in Greece?' focusses on these users of Diavgeia to get their perspective on how it is useful and whether it can be improved... I'll be back soon.
*I am also working on a full profile of Diavgeia, similar to those produced for other countries as part of the [GIFT report](http://openspending.org/resources/gift/chapter2-intro.html), keep your eyes peeled on [OpenSpending.org](http://openspending.org/).*

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title: Athens to Berlin - Chicken or the Egg? Days 2-4 (Athens and Thessaloniki)
---
Immediately after landing in Greece, I have my first experience of where austerity cuts were hitting services. While attempting to buy tickets for the metro, I struck up conversation with an irate but lovely lady named Tina, who was irritated to have to travel all the way into central Athens by metro just to travel out again on another line to get home, a journey she would normally do via the suburban railway, which wasn't running, meaning the journey would take twice as long. *"Cuts!"* she told me in a mock-angry voice.
One of the things I found quite bizarre in Greece is that many people seemed to be able to put a date on a lot of the public works which had taken place:
> "Sorry about the pavements here, the last time they renovated them was 2004."
2004, came up a lot and it was only later that I realised that that was the last time that Greece hosted the Olympics; I suspect in 10 years I will be saying similar things about London...
All of this gets me thinking about whether transparency has anything to offer in terms of mitigating the effects of the cuts, if people could see why and where the money was disappearing from services, would it help to make the unpopular decisions faced by policy makers less difficult?
## Chicken or the Egg - where are the budget advocacy groups?
As I mentioned in my announce post, I've not come across *any* budget advocacy groups in Greece. I ask everyone I meet, but no-one can point me to any... I eventually come across [Greece Debt Free](http://www.greecedebtfree.org/), a crowdfunding project to volunteer away Greece's debt, but by that point I am already leaving, so I make a note to get in contact ... I start to wonder whether this is because before Diavgeia, information on public spending simply was not available and so the work was not possible, but was there genuinely no-one campaigning for the information to be released? What comes first? Budget advocacy groups or budgets?
On the off-chance that they knew anyone working in this area, I dropped a line to the local Transparency International group. While they also did not focus on the issue, they put me in touch with a lone-ranger, one of their lawyers, Effie Vraniali, who studied the Greek Public Financial Management System as part of her PhD, comparing it to other countries. Below are some of her thoughts.
Highlights:
* Not only absence of the data, but finding out who was responsible for what within government was an issue,
* Even the Greek Parliament themselves struggled to get hold of the information they required,
* Information in Diavgeia was quite scattered and thus unusable unless you had the time to search for everything you wanted
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/45818263" width="500" height="375" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/45818263">Effie Vraniali - How Greece manages its money</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/okf">Open Knowledge Foundation</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
Last but not least, Effie mentions that she would *love* to do more work to measure the openness financial information in Greece, but she can't do it alone, she needs a team. Effie is now part of the [Working Group on Open Spending Data](http://openspending.org/resources/wg/index.html), so if you are likewise looking to work in this area in Greece, please [get in touch via the mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).
## Diavgeia's Dodgy Data?
Everyone who I speak to is full of praise for what the Greek government are doing with Diavgeia, although all have comments on how it could be done better!
While I'm still in Athens, I meet up with [Thodoris Papadopoulos](http://thodoris.net/weblog/archive/2012/02/29/?p=176), who wrote a paper at the National School of Public Administration on the pros and cons of the Diavgeia system, which he promises to translate selections of and send me. I also meet [Ioannis Anagnostopoulos](http://www.anagnostopoulos.name/) from the Athens team of the cross-university collaboration team [PublicSpending.gr](http://publicspending.medialab.ntua.gr/) who shares his experiences on how easy it was to use Diavgeia to build their research platform.
In my next post, I'll urge journalists, researchers etc to have a look at Diavgeia's data, but before I do, here's a couple of things they flagged up to be wary of...
### How is data born?
The manner in which data is generated affects how it can be used, here are the thoughts I collected from Thodoris, Ioannis and others...
* **Data is uploaded in various formats, often PDFs**. When I was in the e-governance office of Neo Iraklio Attikis, I was given a demonstration of how the data was uploaded to Diavgeia, it took quite a while to locate and upload individual PDFs to the form they were supposed to support. In the back of my mind, I keep thinking to myself, "Why do people like rubber stamps so much?", surely there is a quicker way than this? As has already been pointed out, this also makes it very difficult to search across all of the data in the site at once.
* **A couple of the most important fields in the civil servants' form used to be free text, and not mandatory.** e.g. Some people may have used "." instead of commas, some may use the word "Euro" rather than the sign "€". It was fixed after repeated notices from developers. (Go civic-minded-developers!)
* **Information in the *amount* field is stored as text, rather than as numbers.** A deeper complication of the problem above.
This is particularly problematic when combined with another procedural problem. There are 3 stages to making any official purchase:
1. A document has to be signed to show the expense has been accepted (like a purchase order)
2. There has to be a decision to actually pay the money e.g. upon satisfactory completion of a task
3. There is the actual payment or transaction
According to Thodoris, this field is often entered incorrectly and is not mandatory, so it is often impossible to know whether the information you are looking at is a purchase order or the actual transaction. This could cause big problems down the line, not just for CSO budget monitors, but also within government...
* **The system does not use international standards such as COFOG to classify the information.** This seems to be a recurring theme. For example, if you are interested in a question such as 'how much does the government spend on mobile phones?' it is impossible to find out.Someone buying a mobile phone for the ministry of finance will register it with one code - for another ministry, it will be recorded against another code.
* **A lot of errors.** Diavgeia does not have a validation service. PublicSpending.gr seeks to track down these errors and correct them by validating them against another service, [taxisnet](http://www.gsis.gr/). Ioannis says that 70% of the effort behind PublicSpending.gr is taken up with data cleansing, rather than producing visualisations etc.
* **Missing information.** All of my interviewees were skeptical that *all* information which is meant to actually made it into Diavgeia. Some even had personal anecdotes to prove it didn't. The following quote is from a scientist at the local university, George:
> "My own experience of Diavgeia. I was giving some lectures in a university for a small amount of money, €60 /hour or something like that.
>After 2 months they called me back to sign again the contract to say that I was happy for them to publish this information in Diavgeia. After 2 months I discovered through a variety of things that the information had not been added to Diavgeia."
## On to Thessaloniki
It may take a group of techies to do it, but all is not lost... my next stop is to meet the WebScience Master Programme at the University of Thessaloniki [Read the profile of the programme](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/07/16/Greece-3.html).

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authors:
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redirect_from: /2012/07/Greece-3/
title: Athens to Berlin - PROFILE - Linked Data and Public Spending
---
From the hot, dusty streets of Athens, I trundle in to breezy but baking Thessaloniki on a late-night train...
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8005/7581121498_91fd055495_z.jpg" title="Train Athens - Thessaloniki" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
In the apparent absence of any budget-monitoring or advocacy groups in Greece, a group of programmers are working directly with the Diavgeia data to present it in interesting ways to make it easy for anyone to understand, rehashing the data with data from new sources (criminality rates, population numbers) and archiving it.
I'm here to meet the team from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki WebScience Master Programme, which aims to monitor in real time all Greek public expenditure.
The team have taken a [Linked Data](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_data) approach to combining datasets. New to linked data? Fear not, Professor Ioannis Antoniou from the WebScience Master Program explains, with the aid of some Greek Philosophy what it is:
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/45789248" width="500" height="375" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/45789248">Ioannis Antoniou explains Linked Data</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/okf">Open Knowledge Foundation</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
The whole effort around visualising and working with the data here revolves around Linked Data. The team extract structured information from Wikipedia using [DBPedia](http://dbpedia.org/About) and mix it up with information from [Diavgeia](http://diavgeia.gov.gr/) to produce their new graphs.
## Meet the team
For a quick overview of who is who in the team and what they have been working on, I've put together this rough introductory video:
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/46543472" width="500" height="375" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/46543472">Linked Data and Public Spending at Aristotle University, Thessaloniki</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/okf">Open Knowledge Foundation</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.
### Use the data
The team behind the project is small, but they are interested to hear from anyone interested in using the data. What questions would you like to ask? What datasets could be combined next?
You can get in touch via the mail above, or the [OKFN Greece mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-gr).
The team are also planning a hackday on budget visualisations in the beginning of October! There will be more details on this soon via the [OKFN Greece blog](http://gr.okfn.org/blog/).
## More visualisations
For more visualisations of Greek finances see:
* [GreekSpending](http://greekspending.com/).
* [PublicSpending.gr](http://publicspending.medialab.ntua.gr/) - an initiative conceptualized, analyzed, implemented, hosted and operated at the Multimedia Technology Laboratory (School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens).

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authors:
- gisele
redirect_from: /2012/07/Caring-for-your-neighbourhood/
title: Caring for My Neighbourhood - Geolocating Spending in Brazil
---
**This post was written by Gisele Craveiro, of the University of São Paulo, member of [OKFN Brazil](http://br.okfn.org/) and one of the coordinators of GPoPAI (Research Group of Public Politics in Access to Information).**
The public budget should express the population's needs and priorities and its implementation should be as transparent as possible. In Brazil, the municipal budget implementation details must be published on the web daily, but even in the case where this law is acted upon, the reality is that very few people understand them.
The ["Caring for my neighbourhood"](http://www.gpopai.usp.br/cuidando) project wants to provide means for society to know the budget thematics by better spending oversight.
<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7274/7604750834_a7ec37ee8a_z.jpg" title="Caring for My Neighbourhood" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
To achieve the objective, all expenditure related to public equipments in São Paulo are geolocated and shown in a web site. This will support training activities in the community. We aim to promote citizen engagement by showing the user which projects can be found in their area.
By providing an easy visualisation of many individual expenses placed in a map, it may lead people to make a link between governmental action and something tangible of their everyday life. The tool shows on the map: the expense description, the amount of resources allocated to it and the amount spent so far. Thus data will be more understandable and the resident could take control of what is happening in his/her neighbourhood.
We hope that the comparison to other areas in the city can give to the community/citizens more skilled arguments during the budget formulation and other decision making processes. We hope that it can contribute to better income distribution and a more efficient fight against corruption.
Besides the tool, we will develop content about public budget concepts in order to support activities in the community. We will also organize mapping fests so participants can know better the neighbourhood and public equipments that are receiving investment.We intend that the collected information (maps, photos, videos, texts), produced during these activities or later, can constitute a crowdsourcing platform for future monitoring and also feed open platforms like OpenStreetMap.
Researchers from University of São Paulo (also OKFN members) and Our São Paulo Network (a network of over 600 civil society organizations operating in the municipality of São Paulo) are organising this initiative, but we´d like to invite anyone interested to contribute: sending suggestions, coding or just disseminating this idea/project to whom it may concern. More information with Gisele Craveiro (giselesc at usp dot br).
The tool beta version can be found at: <http://www.gpopai.usp.br/cuidando> (only in Portuguese)
Code available in <https://github.com/fefedimoraes/orcamento>

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authors:
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redirect_from: /2012/07/Romania/
title: Athens to Berlin - Romania's Money Mappers.
---
Although the people I meet here in Romania seem to dispute the fact - Bucharest has a very strong NGO scene. Corruption, both institutional and petty, comes high on the focus agenda as well as making citizens vaguely data-literate about how the government spends money and getting a good grasp on where the money comes from.
<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7139/7592671502_e50276d3e0_z.jpg" title="Dying for Freedom" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
Andra Bucur from the Soros Foundation has kindly gathered together a group of some of the key players in the world of financial transparency together for a discussion on how . It's clearly a hot-topic and turns into more of a debate than an interview, which I am naturally delighted about :)
While I'm here, I meet:
* Andra Bucur - *[Soros Foundation, Romania](http://www.soros.org/about/offices-foundations/soros-foundation-romania)*, working on transparency in Revenues from Extractive Industries
* Bogdan Manolea - *Executive Director, [APTI (Association for Technology and Internet)](http://www.apti.ro/)*
* Cristina Lupu - *[Centre for Independent Journalism](http://www.cji.ro)*
* Codru Vrabie - *[Bribe Market](http://www.piatadespaga.ro/)*
* Elena Calistru - *[Lost Money (Bani Pierduti)](http://banipierduti.cloudapp.net/)*
Unfortunately, they couldn't join us on the day, but I also make a note with myself to check in with [Expert Forum](http://www.expertforum.ro/) and [Active Watch](http://www.activewatch.ro/), who focus on in-depth analysis of financial information.
## Highlights
### Lost Money
Elena Calistru's project, Lost Money, attempts to engage the public with the scary numbers behind the public budget. She says:
> "The public budget is something which is very complicated. For the average Romanian (and not only) it is usually this black hole where their money is spent, for roads, for public services and so on, without knowing exactly what happens there. So this platform tried to put everything there but in a very user-friendly manner with beautiful visualisations and by offering the user a personal experience of that complicated process of collecting taxes and spending them..."
I learn all manner of things about how budgets are calculated in Romania, for example, for school spending, standard costs per pupil have been introduced, with coefficients altering the amount based on the temperature of the region... There's also a *big* debate about whether the favourite topic - roads - should have standard prices per kilometre of road, would that actually solve anything, and would the average citizen care what was spent, as long as they could get from a to b?
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8289/7607848026_21cbeef8ed_z.jpg" title="Lost Money by Elena Calistru" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
Finding the right triggers to engage users is definitely a challenge and there's a consensus that Romanian citizens will only be interested if the data is given a personal angle. Elena's project contains a personal [tax calculator](http://banipierduti.cloudapp.net/calculator/), allowing users to input their salary and get an estimate for how much they contribute in taxes to various spending areas. But the bigger picture and research into big investments is still difficult to engage the public on. Here's Elena on one piece of feedback she got from a piece of her research:
> "We focused on several contracts, large investment contracts, and we showed that the road from Bucharest and the road surrounding Ploieşti, they paid a huge amount of money [...] I received a phonecall from one user... telling me: "Look, stop it with this, I don't care how much money they've spent here, it's the best road available here, I don't care". [...] It's not correct, they could have done more with that money..."
Participation is also something which comes up a lot as something the group are keen to promote, Elena describes how she tackles it in her project.
> [...] "We are now working on a feature where they can become a budget heroes [...] they will be able to see there that this law means cutting expenses of 1 bn Euros from here [...] These are the other policy options [...] Even though I cannot promise the users that all these options you are expressing here will be heard at the decision makers, what I can do is expose them to different policy options for a particular decision and tell them, these are the pros and cons for each of them, what's your choice?"
*Elena is currently working on an English profile of her project, which we'll publish when it's done.*
### Money, Media and Megalomania
Christina Lupu, from the Centre for Independent Journalism described the reason that she currently needs access to information about how the government spends its money: to ensure the media does not become reliant on state support. Christina is working on a project to see how money from the public budget is spent on advertising... :
> "[I]n a lot of the cases the authorities, the local government, uses money from the local budget buying advertising in the media companies. It is a crisis period. The state in Romania is one of the most important investors in the media, buying advertising from public money; they buy advertising and they say, "OK,you are not allowed to write bad things about me because I will cut the budgets", [...] we had cases that it was written that "you are not allowed to write bad things about me". But now it is something that you know. [The agreement is] 'I will not write it in the contract that you have to write good things about me, that you have to come to my events and present them as the most interesting in the world, but if you don't do that, I will go to the competition...' So the media is powerless with regard to how the money is spent."
### Bribe Market - Combatting Corruption
Petty corruption, isn't 'fiscal data' in the pure sense. However, if getting access to basic services requires money to be handed over regularly enough, it becomes almost like an unofficial tax. I listened to Codru Vrabie on his project *[Bribe Market](http://www.piatadespaga.ro/)* (not yet launched) -treating petty corruption as such in an attempt to tackle it:
> "[W]e looked at bribery as in a sense, a legitimate transaction and tried to see, from a supply and demand perspective how can you tackle that, so we thought, "OK, what if we put together a platform which will help people learn what's the actual rate, so open up the prices, and hopefully also get an indication with smiley faces or a star system as to how satisfied they were as to the services they got?", so you open up information about the quality of service as well. [...] So it's wishful thinking based on economic theory but who knows, maybe in a few years or so, maybe we'll actually get to see results either in the sense that prices of bribes will drop significantly [...] or we will see that corrupt public servants will form a kind of cartel and fix prices at a specific rate, but then if people continue to pay that price that means that that is a legitimate tax for getting that specific service, so what we can do then is go to Parliament and advocate that that specific tax is included as a legal price for that particular service. And then no-one will have any incentive to pay a bribe, because they legally pay a tax."
I asked Codru whether he had looked at other bribe spot sites such as [I Paid A Bribe](http://www.ipaidabribe.com/) or [BribeSpot](http://bribespot.com/) - he explained that to some extent, he had modelled his site on Bribespot, but there was one key philosophical difference - Bribemarket is also about user satisfaction with services, their *value for money*, in a sense. Users will be provided with a feedback form, where they can write about how happy they are with a given product or service. Two birds with one stone - tackling petty corruption and (hopefully) improving service delivery...
*We will follow up with Codru to get a full profile of the project when it is launched in the autumn...*
A slight digression, but while we're on the note of corruption, there were some very interesting examples floating around of how Government technology had been successfully used in Romania to counter corruption, for example, in the passport service. According to the group, where before the slow wheels of the passport system may often have been greased to accelerate the lengthy process of getting your documents, the new digitised passport service cuts out many middlemen, and is faster, so it is almost impossible to pay bribes.
### Getting the data - what's it like in Romania?
How do you get data in Romania? How are they finding Freedom of Information laws working out in practice? Would it be helpful to have a portal such as "[What Do They Know?](http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/)" or "[Ask the EU?](http://www.asktheeu.org/)" in Romania?
> *Andra Bucur*: I usually make information requests and send them to the specific authorities but normally I don't get an answer in 10 days, which is the time specified in the law, sometimes you get in about 30 days but they should advise you beforehand if it takes a while to get your request processed... Usually in the extractive industries, we don't get an answer about the information we want [...] so then we use strategic litigation in order to get the information. [...] We send it by fax, I never sent it electronically. There are institutions that don't even have their contacts on the website. Like the National Agency for Mineral Resources, they don't have budgets online, they don't have public acquisitions online, you can click on everything you want but it doesn't work, they don't have contacts online, so the only way to send a request is to actually send it by post or to go to the institution, it depends on the agency. [...]
> *Cristina Lupu*: You may submit your requests online, but the problem is if you do that, you can't prove that they received the email. And this is one of the excuses that they use. If you go to the registration office and they put the date and the stamp you are sure that they received the information [...]
This obviously gets a raised eyebrow from me - rubber stamp syndrome strikes again... We don't come to a consensus on whether the portal would be useful in the end, but we've had a jolly good debate in the meantime...
The age-old ugly beast of data formats (PDFs) also rears its head again, but not just PDFs - nightmare PDFs:
> *Codru Vrabie*: The ones I like [this is presumably sarcastic] best are the PDFs that is locked that was actually distilled from a JPG that is actually a copy, tilted like that [gestures], of a third hand fax, so all the letters are smudged and effaced...
Someday soon, I hope this problem will no longer be an issue, but there needs to be a serious mentality change in government and there need to be more CSOs, such as these, keeping the pressure on to ensure the message gets through...
#### So what data do they want?
The group have actually put together a list already of key datasets, when they were consulted about how Romania should approach the Open Government Partnership, they promise to translate and send it on to me. Until the full list is ready, here's a quick overview of some of the things they ask for:
> *Codru Vrabie*: **Public Institutions - Activity reports.** "For instance the General Authorities Office, the public prosecution. When they published their report a couple of years ago they said there's [X] million criminal cases being tried every year. This is a piece of information which you will find in the annual activity report, it should be referenced to a database. And so, what I'm saying is, for all the information you put in your activity report, give me the attachment, so to say...in an open format."
> *Elena Calistru*: **Machine-readable budgets - "both at central level and at the local level"** - There are some core datasets which need to be there, which are already in place at least at a central level. [...] at the level of Ministry of Finance, sure you have the budget in a machine readable format, but you're not putting it on your website in a website in an open format, which is silly, you could do this without any effort, you can do it without any costs... and so on, so this is very important to start because it's very, very easy. It's the same with the datasets from the National Institute of Statistics."
<div class="well homework"> TOP TIP: Looking for statistics on Romania? You may well be able to find many of the datasets which the Romanian National Institute of Statistics charges for, for free on <a href="http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/eurostat/home/">Eurostat</a>.</div>
> *Elena Calistru*: "**Statistical indicators which are of use for the business sector**, deciding where to invest, what to focus on and so on..."
> *Codru Vrabie*: **Public Procurement Data** "This is a question you should take to Slovakia - I think they have now 3 different portals from [Fair-Play Alliance](http://www.fair-play.sk/index.php) and [Transparency International in Slovakia](http://www.transparency.sk/) that relate to the public contracts and the interface between business sector and the public sector from various perspectives. And the question would be 'to what extent they have seen an increased interest from the business sector to ask these kind of questions or to ask for this type of information now that they can actually see what information is out there and how it can be used.'"
I will put this to both groups when I meet them in Bratislava... The above point is seconded by Bogdan Manolea, who talks about how useful steps forward in e-procurement had previously been made when the data used to be published as a feed. Bogdan says he knew someone planning to make a business out of that data, rehashing it and selling it on, but then came the CAPTCHA codes which made automatic harvest impossible...
> *Elena Calistru*: "**Datasets related to party financing**" Another feature of Bani Pierduti is that we make analyses. I'm now working on an analysis of party finance during the last election campaign. And sure, I checked the dataset available [...] I also made some requests for information from the Parliamentary Parties, but besides that, I took a camera [... and] took pictures of all the banners and so on, and afterwards sent a request for some prices from 3 companies offering outdoor media. The differences are at least significant. [...] the electoral financing laws says that no party can receive discounts or preferential rates for something, because that is considered a donation and they have to declare all the donations. And if one party will yell me "yeah, I got a discount" - why didn't you declare it?
## Civil Society Collaboration
My favourite part of the whole day is when the group start talking about how they might be able to help each other out by sharing the data that they each have added value to in some way. I ask: *"Do any of your projects archive the data so that it is available to the public for many years to come?"*. These are the responses we get:
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/46076299" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/46076299">Romania - Civil Society Collaboration</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/okf">Open Knowledge Foundation</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
(*NOTE: The Soros Foundation reports are already online, not in open formats, but a little bird tells me it is something that is being considered for future*.)
Safe to say, I think it would be a great start if more Civil Society Organisations shared data between themselves as well.
## More to come
This is just a tiny sample of a great and rich debate, I haven't even touched on here the views of the group on whether social media is a hindrance or a help for their work, other interesting methods employed to get participation, both from active citizens and governments in the decision-making process.

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authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/07/budapest-institute/
title: Athens to Berlin - PROFILE - Our Money, the Budapest Institute
---
**This post was written based on the contributions of Petra Reszkető, Balázs Váradi and Timea Sütő of the [Budapest Institute](http://www.budapestinstitute.eu/), Hungary. The video of their interview will be displayed as part of the complete series [Athens to Berlin](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/07/05/OSI.html).**
*The Budapest Institute is an independent think-thank. It produces public policy research and analyses to support policy-making in Hungary and in the Central-Eastern-European region. It is part of our mission to promote evidence-based policy-making and to try to make the national public policy discourse based more on facts rather then beliefs. This post is about the project 'A Mi Penzünk' which aims to present the budget spending of the Hungarian State simply and interactively to make it engaging for the interested layperson.*
[A Mi Penzünk's](http://amipenzunk.hu/) aim is to present financial data for the Hungarian State broken down by functions to provide information on what exactly tax money is spent on. With the visual presentation (thanks to the open software developed by the [Open Knowledge Foundation](http://okfn.org/)) of the budgetary expenses and with the database that can be mined and freely downloaded from the website.
## What is the aim?
Main policy goals of the project are the following:
* to make ’dry numbers’ digestible and illustrative by visualizing the Hungarian budget (spending lines)
* to dispel misbeliefs and popular fallacies on spending priorities of Hungarian governments by sharing information and providing policy narratives.
With this project we would like to contribute to the national tax consciousness and to the strengthening of civic responsibility. Our partners were the Open Knowledge Foundation (visualization software) and the Fiscal Responsibility Institute Budapest (converting and editing the database). The Budapest Institute for Policy Analysis started the project in June 2011, as a revival of an earlier, Hungarian initiative with the same name.
<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7270/7656395574_10b7347f5e_b.jpg" title="A Mi Penzunk" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
## Who is it targeted at?
First, we aim at informing young people (high school students) who are just now growing up to become tax paying citizens by orienting secondary school teachers with the tools and applications installed on the website.
For students we drew up “homework” exercises, and we also created visual aids, posters and other teaching materials to support the work of interested high school teachers. For journalists we provide some short essays introducing policy narratives on the raw budget data.
Second, we would like to facilitate the work of journalists who may use this kind of information and data. One of the conclusions of the workshop with journalists and the following consultations with media representatives was that our initial idea turns to be a false hope. The level of data journalism is far below the EU average in Hungary and in addition, the Hungarian media actors/ firms can not fit this rather seasonal content into their business model. We have learned that the Hungarian media is prone to get ready-made analytics and reports rather than to perform investigative projects on its own.
## Why is it necessary?
In Hungary, policy debates and the media frequently discuss government expenditures. But factual, politically unbiased and easy-to-understand information about actual numbers and proportions is in short supply. Both electioneering and run-of-the-mill political communication is, to a large extent, about how much should be spent on schools and pensions, trains and healthcare. For the average citizen these statements are hard to interpret without points of reference. Are those sums too much or too little? Compared to what? What else could we spend the billions potentially saved on? During our work we have often had to face up to the fact that there is no convenient public database that would represent the budget of the Hungarian state. True, we are informed about the general budget from the current year’s budget law and, in the year after, the law on the final accounts. It is, however, quite a challenge to learn about the planned and actual costs and revenues broken down by the functions of government, not institutions, in a unified and transparent way.
Usually if a tax-conscious Hungarian citizen wants to gather information on the central budget he or she can only do so upon patiently waiting for years, accessing the Central Statistical Office’s or the Eurostat’s homepage. There is unfortunately no public database available on the website of the Hungarian Government.
With this project not only that we provide up to date, accurate information organised in a downloadable database, but we present the data broken down in such way, that it becomes clear and easily understandable on which functional activities is the taxmoney spent (cf. COFOG standards), not - as it was customary before - which institutions receive it.
## How did you get the data?
At the very start of the project we faced several challenges relating to accessing the official data. We struggled with the National Statistical Office and the Ministry of National Development for months, we finally had to ask for support of a later partner organization, the [Fiscal Responsibility Institute Budapest](http://www.kfib.hu/) in July 2011. After an overlong awaiting for the data we cleaned and restructured the database according to our needs, and built the website.
## Features
The project:
* developed an online public information resource presenting information on public spending, thereby matching a niche due to the lack of availability of any official public database
* applied and presented visualization software that make raw data easy to digest
* contains two online [posters](http://amipenzunk.hu/front/poszter) downloadable from the website, one available in 50 printed A1 copies
* Contains a feature called ['Your Dream Budget'](http://amipenzunk.hu/front/dream?country=AT) presenting the relationship between different expense items and 5 international comparisons, allowing you to assess the spending priorities of your government in comparision to other countries.
* Entailed one media workshop, and two workshops with teachers and representatives of educational organizations
* Has social media profiles ([Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/pages/amipenzunkhu/186571038102340), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/amipenzunk).)
<img alt="" src="http://amipenzunk.hu/images/poszter.jpg" title="A Mi Penzunk Poster" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
## What was the impact?
In all this we have relied a great deal on the input of the participants of the three workshops we organized for teachers and journalists, and on the recommendations of peer colleagues.
The workshops have proved that such projects can grab attention, and there is explicit need for follow up. However we have also learned that, contrary to our expectations, the real interest for our project is not shown by the media, but by teachers and NGOs with an educational profile.
For the time of being, we are in consultation with workshop participants from high schools and educational organizations (NGOs) and we are still receiving orders for the poster.
The long term impact of this initiative can hardly be measured in a proper way, though the real immediate impact we hope can be demonstrated later by the webpage statistics (visitors, users of applications, downloads of data and poster) and by the steady demand for the poster to be ordered at re-production costs. [As of April 2012], since the website was officially published in mid January we have had over 10000 visitors out of which 16.66% are returning ones. 87.84% of our visitors are from Hungary, mainly from Budapest and the bigger cities.
## Where Next?
Based on the workshops and follow up consultations with teachers and educational experts, we drew the conclusion, that there is a real need:
* for developing a comprehensive teaching modul (more teaching material explaining terms, clarifying definitions, class schedules, etc.)
* for extending the project to the revenue side (e.g. visualization, trade-off between revenues/taxes and expenditures, other interactive applications highlighting balance at the individual/ household level)
* for creating English version of the website and providing more and deeper international analysis
* to update the database with fresh data for 2012, to create the English version of the website, and to develop another version of the webpage that would be accessible for people with disabilities.
## What could be done to make your work easier?
Based on our experience implementing this project the BI is interested in organising and/or participating in workshops focusing on issues like:
* working in an interdisciplinary scheme (developer-desinger-economist)
* developing applications and interactive tools – how to test them?
* enhancing usability / promoting techniques
Datawise, we also need data classified by function (i.e. programme)!
*Stay tuned for more updates from the [Athens to Berlin series](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/07/05/OSI.html) via the [OpenSpending Mailing List](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/07/27/budapest-institute.html).*

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authors:
- nick
redirect_from: /2012/08/introduction-to-the-taxman/
title: An introduction to the TaxMan
---
One of the pieces of technology powering [Where Does My Money Go][wdmmg] is a standalone application, TaxMan, that performs a rather dull yet important task. As anyone who has filled out a tax return will know, tax can be rather complicated, with numerous steps and calculations to perform. If you are lucky, some of these calculations may be performed for you by your national revenue agency. This however doesn't help you if your aim is not only to calculate *your* tax, but also to understand how taxes are calculated in general. With [Where Does My Money Go][wdmmg], we wanted to find a way to estimate the total tax payments of UK citizens based on their salaries, income tax and "indirect" payments such as VAT (sales tax), fuel duties, etc.
[wdmmg]: http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/
Enter the TaxMan.
TaxMan is a really simple JSON-over-HTTP API that aims to provide current and historical tax calculators for jurisdictions around the world. It currently has support for South African, Mexican, and British tax codes, including estimated calculations for British indirect taxes, and it's easy to extend to other countries. Critically, it doesn't try to shoehorn a complicated algorithmic tax code into a tabular format.
Before we go into details about how TaxMan works, let's see what it does. For example, find out which jurisdictions are supported by TaxMan (the following examples use [HTTPie][httpie] on the command line, but you can use anything capable of making HTTP GET requests, such as your browser or jQuery):
$ http GET taxman.openspending.org
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 75
Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:42:31 GMT
{
"jurisdictions": {
"gb": "/gb",
"za": "/za"
},
"message": "Welcome to the TaxMan"
}
We explicitly link to the jurisdictions from the root of the API so that any client library can refer to `jurisdictions.gb` rather than having to "hard code" any of TaxMan's URL structure. So let's
follow the link for South Africa, here shown as `za` (TaxMan by convention uses [ISO3166 codes][iso3166] to denote countries):
[iso3166]: http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes.htm
$ http GET taxman.openspending.org/za
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 331
Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:47:31 GMT
{
"calculation": {
"total": 0
},
"data": {
"income_tax": {
"bands": [
{
"rate": 0.18,
"width": 160000
},
...,
{
"rate": 0.38,
"width": 133000
},
{
"rate": 0.4
}
]
},
"rebates": {
"aged_65_to_74": 6390,
"aged_75_plus": 2130,
"base": 11440
}
},
"options": {
"age": null,
"income": null,
"year": 2012
}
}
There's plenty to take in here, so let's focus on the basic structure first. There are three top-level keys in the response: `calculation`, `data`, and `options`. As you might expect, `calculation` contains the results of any tax calculation performed by TaxMan. In this example, no calculation has been performed, as we didn't give TaxMan an income to use for the calculation. Thus there's no interesting data. TaxMan will however also attempt to provide the data *it used to perform its calculations*, which is shown in the `data` field. The `options` field makes explicit the available options for this calculator. Note
that we can supply an `income` and an `age`, and some of the entries in `data` begin to make more sense. The `data.income_tax.bands` key contains a description of South Africa's tax bands. All bands have a tax `rate`, and all but the last band has a `width`, denoting the width of the band of income taxed at that rate. The last band covers all higher income, so has an effectively infinite width. For example, a tax system which charges 10% tax on all income up to £40,000, and 20% thereafter, would have two tax bands:
[{ "rate": 0.1, "width": 40000 }, { "rate": 0.2 }]
So, what happens if we do supply an income? I'll truncate the `data` section of TaxMan's output for the sake of clarity.
$ http GET 'taxman.openspending.org/za?income=200000'
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 468
Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2012 08:06:07 GMT
{
"calculation": {
"income_tax": {
"bands": [
28800,
10000,
0,
0,
0,
0
],
"total": 38800
},
"rebates": {
"age_related": 0,
"base": 11440,
"total": 11440
},
"taxable": 200000,
"total": 27360
},
"data": { ... },
"options": {
"age": null,
"income": 200000,
"year": 2012
}
}
You'll notice that the `calculation` section now contains much more information about the calculation, including data on how much you paid in each tax band, your tax rebates, and the total payable tax (`calculation.tax`).
And that's really all there is to TaxMan. It enforces few of the conventions mentioned above on its calculators, although I hope that the `calculation`, `data`, `options` triptych will become a pattern throughout. Most importantly of all, TaxMan is intended to be a simple and discoverable API. Explicitly representing available options is part of this aim of "discoverability".
Under the hood, TaxMan is a very simple open-source [Node][node] application. Calculators are typically one or two files. You can [find the source code on GitHub][tmgh], and we encourage you to fork it and add a calculator for another jurisdiction -- perhaps your own -- or improve an existing one.
[node]: http://nodejs.org/
[tmgh]: https://github.com/openspending/taxman/

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/08/Lost-Money/
title: Athens to Berlin - PROFILE - Bani pierduti? (Lost money?)
---
</strong>This is a profile of a very interesting new project coming out of Romania, aiming to make government finances understandable for the average citizen. It is written based on contributions from [Elena Calistru](https://twitter.com/MadamadePica), who kicked off the project.</strong>
# Vital Statistics
* </strong>Name of Project:</strong> Bani pierduti? (Or, in English, "Lost money?")
* </strong>Link to project:</strong> <http://www.banipierduti.ro>
* </strong>Approximate number of users engaged through the project:</strong> >30.000
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8289/7607848026_21cbeef8ed_b.jpg" title="Lost Money" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
## What is the background of the project?
The project is one of the five winners of the [Restart Romania 2011](http://restartromania.netsquared.org) competition, initiated by [Techsoup Romania](http://www.techsoup.ro/) with the support of the US Embassy to Bucharest.
Starting at the beginning of August 2011, 104 projects were registered for the Social Justice Challenge Restart Romania, and went under the scrutiny of the community. In the end, a jury formed by representatives of the diplomatic community, business sector and IT industry decided the selection of 10 finalist projects. Between 28 - 30 October, the Restart Romania Hackathon transformed the ten ideas with the help of programmers and communication specialists into more concrete platforms which were presented within the Restart Romania Gala. Bani Pierduti was voted within the Gala as one of the five winners of 5000 USD funding.
## What are the aims?
The project formerly known as *"Where’s my LEI, man?"* entered the competition aiming to centralize the publicly available financial information regarding the projects financed through public money (budgets, annual reports etc.).The main objective was make authorities accountable in the manner in which public funds are spent.
After winning the Restart Romania Gala, the project went through a consistent re-thinking aiming to identify both the best technologies for a more complex platform than initially planned, and the necessary data sets which allowed the best representation on how public funds are spent in Romania. Thus, if at the very beginning the project only aimed to use the state budget data, it now operates with data comprising the budgets dedicated to social assistance and public health, the budgets at local level for the Romanian counties, projects financed through EU funds, comparisons with the percentage allocated to various sectors in other EU counties etc.
The project is a now a permanent programme of a newly-established NGO – [Funky Citizens](http://www.funkycitizens.org/) (website under construction at time of publication). Which aims to engage civil society (taxpayers) in the decision making process related to public funds through the use of technology. Its major objectives are:
* Quantitative and qualitative growth of the awareness on the issue
* Offering information and tools for influencing the decision-making process
To achieve its objectives, the project relies on three pillars:
* Data & process presentation
* Public participation
* Understanding the bigger picture
## How does the platform tackle the issues you outlined?
The three pillars of the platform respond to the following problems:
</strong>Problem #1: Fiscal policies represent a "mystery" for the majority of citizens</strong>
<p> <strong>Consequences:</strong> Lack of information and understanding of the process; scarce public oversight of public funds administration; public spending is associated with corruption and distrust</p>
<p> <strong>How we respond:</strong> Educate citizens on the topic</p>
</strong>Problem #2: Little or no participation of the community to the fiscal policy</strong>
<p> <strong>Consequences:</strong> Limited use of existing tools for participation to the decision-making process; needs of the community not reflected in the resource allocation; no feedback to the policy makers on their decision</p>
<p> <strong>How we respond:</strong> Facilitate direct participation</p>
</strong>Problem #3: Lack of vision from governments on investment/ development priorities</strong>
<p> <strong>Consequences:</strong> Short-term planning leading to limited predictability and accountability; bad administration, mismanagement, or corruption in public spending; incoherence between the fiscal policy and other public policies</p>
<p> <strong>How we respond:</strong> Analyse and understand data</p>
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8432/7787652558_79191020ee_o.png" title="Lost Money 2" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
## What is the role of technology in the approach to solving that problem?
The role of technology is an important one, since the web-based platform is the main feature of the project. So far, transparency in the fiscal policy can be achieved only through complicated documents published on the websites of the authorities or through FOIA requests. Also, there were no e-participatory budgeting experiences so far, the only manner to organize public debates on budgetary issues being offline events.
## What are the successes of this project?
The project is still very young and in its early stages. However, the evaluation of its outcomes already shows several approaches which proved successful:
* A consultation process with relevant governmental stakeholders prior to the launch of the project proved to be a good approach in ensuring a supportive or at least a not contentious interaction with the authorities, given the sensitivity of the subject.
* The gradual implementation and launch of the features of the platform seems a successful strategy to educate citizens on a difficult subject while creating interest and awareness on the topic.
* The engagement of different categories of supporters of the project (from young dynamic professionals to the diplomatic community) ensured a greater visibility for the initiative and is expected to further enlarge the community of advocates for more transparency in fiscal matters.
## Are there areas where the project failed? What are the challenges?
The main challenges of the project are mostly related to two major issues encountered by such initiatives:
* The absence of an open data approach in the release of official information related to public spending makes the implementation of the project slower as well as resource-consuming.
* A general perception that public money are lost due to corruption makes people less inclined to look closer at the entire policy cycle and thus the efforts to educate or to engage them harder.
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8289/7787652740_dae031a763_o.png" title="Lost Money 3" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
## Have you had particular problems with the data?
Even though Romania has just joined the Open Government Partnership, the implementation of the open data format for governmental data sets is expected to take at least a few years. Thus, the various data formats present on the websites of authorities or even their absence in several cases made data collection a rather difficult process.
## Are you actively seeking the involvement of the user groups?
The project also envisages that an entire pillar of the platform (“public participation”) will actively seek the involvement of the user groups. The implementation of this service started with two features (large investment projects timelines and legislative early-warnings) which seek an interaction with the public and future plans propose to increase the amount of citizen participation. For example, there are plans to do this by:
* encouraging direct feedback into laws already in draft stages which allows users to cut, add to and restructure proposed to be bills on the basis of the desired budgetary outcome,
* building a simulator for the central budget - Allowing people to visualise and explore the effect of different to be
revenue and expenditure policies (e.g. raising taxes)
* promoting public participation in the annual budget cycle through a calendar of debates on budgets as well as pilot
offline events with webcasts
The most consistent involvement features are expected to be implemented by the end of 2012 – early 2013, as a second stage in the development of the project.
## What are the plans for the future?
The project was planned as a continuously growing platform and its scaling or additional features were taken into consideration from the very beginning. A mobile feature is expected to be implemented into the web platform in 2013, a plan which also involves the use of social audits for public contracts.
*Thanks to Elena for putting this post together and we hope that she will stay in touch with updates about the impact of the platform when it becomes more established. We are always looking for the most exciting case studies from around the world. If you know of one we should feature, please drop us a line via the [OpenSpending Mailing List](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending). Interested in helping to make data open in Romania? Start a discussion on the [OKFN-Romania list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-ro).*

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/09/Spending-Data-Handbook/
title: Spending Data Handbook - How do Civil Society Organisations Wrangle Spending Data?
---
Over the last few months, we have been travelling the globe in an effort to work out [which organisations are mapping the ebbs and flows of government money](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/01/12/civil-society-and-spending-data-who-is-mapping-the-money.html) - and how they do it. In a series of interviews, currently being published via the [OpenSpending blog](http://openspending.org/blog/index.html) we've highlighted the issues which Civil Society Organisations face when working with government financial data.
The aim has been firstly to establish a front along which Civil Society Organisations can unite and realise that they are not lone-voices demanding *better* data, *more current* data.
# The story so far...
Our first step was to start building a [Working Group](http://openspending.org/resources/wg/index.html) to bring these people who work in similar sectors around the globe together and stimulate discussion around the topic of Spending Data. There is already a good exchange of interesting projects from around the world and topics such as the creation of standards and an exchange of expectations and practices are being mooted. The group is growing in size and open to those working in the field of open spending data.
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8460/7976488712_9b16eb14b7.jpg" title="Spending data handbook" class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 1em;" />
The second aim was to find a way, via training, technology or otherwise, to tackle the challenges which the CSOs we spoke to highlighted. The most common problems that these organisations have been encountering include dodgy data, which often changes in structure and format from year to year, incorrect data formats (most common offender, as usual, being - PDFs), jargon or codes in data which had to be painstakingly decoded and many more. We were also delighted to see that CSOs were curious and getting more ambitious with data and wanted to know more about how they could work with it most effectively, for example asking questions such as- *"How do I present my data better?"*, *"How do I speed up getting data from websites?"* or *"We've been thinking about geocoding publicly-funded projects so we can put them on a map, do you know of anyone who has done this successfully?"*.
# What's next? - The Spending Data Handbook.
The range of advocacy topics tackled by these groups is so diverse (from gender budgeting to checking that promised infrastructure in a local town actually gets built) that it would be impossible to address all of the data wrangling skills in one book. Everyone needs different levels of data, from tiny, ward-level datasets up to national budgets. However, there are some overarching principles which apply universally to working with government financial data.
These overarching topics are what we aim to cover in the Spending Data Handbook. Like the [Open Data Handbook](http://opendatahandbook.org/en/), it will be available as an open educational resource on the internet and for training sessions. More on the content below...
# What questions will the Spending Data Handbook cover?
<p> </p>
<div class="well" 'markdown="1"'>
Based on the interviews we conducted, we've drawn up a suggested list of topics for what could go into the handbook. We'd love to <a href="http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending">hear from you</a> with your suggestions and modifications.
</div>
## Part One: An introduction to Open Financial Data
<p> </p>
### How can CSOs be more effective in their use of data? What should they be asking governments for?
* How can they be more effective in requesting (and keeping hold of) meaningful information from government?
* Which phases of the budget/procurement cycle do they need to demand data from?
* What technical formats are ideal for re-use and interpretation?
* What transparency rules need to be in place to enforce publication?
### How can they get (and keep hold of) data
* How can they make backups of the data that has been published?
* How can they extract data from sources on the web?
# Part Two: Technical primer for data work
<p></p>
### How can data be analysed and interpreted?
* Which phases of the budget/procurement cycle produce which kind of data? Which tools do you need to work with these different types of data?
* What different data formats can be used - and how?
* What is the difference between structured and unstructured digital data?
* How can unstructured data be re-structured?
* What are PDF files and how can information from them be extracted?
* How can you convert between different structured formats?
### How can data be cleaned up and brought into a more uniform format?
* How can data be augmented to allow for more meaningful interpretation?
* How can government classifications (codesheets) be applied?
* How can geographic information be included?
* How can information about vendors/suppliers be included?
### How can data be delivered to the public?
* What are databases, query languages? How can they be used?
* How can you summarize large sets of data?
* How can data be presented in an accessible and meaningful way?
## Any thoughts?
So now, **we need your feedback**. Are you an NGO working on these issues? Are there any additional topics you feel people in your organisation would like to know more about? Are the suggested topics useful? You can get in touch with us via the [OpenSpending mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending) or submit a response [via this form](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEl6TFh4THpOVkg1SmZaZXcycUdyRWc6MQ).
## When?
We hope for a sprint on the Handbook to take place around November, but the book will be a work in progress. There are many issues raised by NGOs in our research which won't make it into this first version, but we hope that as organisations become more ambitious in working with their data, we'll add tips and tricks for advanced wrangling into future versions.
*Further interviews from conversations with CSOs will continue to be published on the [OpenSpending blog](http://openspending.org/blog/index.html). Stay tuned for updates.*

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/09/uk25k-reporting/
title: UK Departmental Government Spending - Improving the Quality of Reporting
---
**Continuing in their mission to make spending data more accessible and comprehensible, the Spending Stories team and the team of Data.Gov.Uk are releasing a reporting tool today that will help journalists and analysts to pick the freshest and best departmental spending data to work with when exploring the UK central government expenditure.**
### Spending data is juicy for journalists - why does it get neglected?
Many reasons. One key one is that the shelf-life of a spending dataset is pretty short from a journalist's point of view, if they have to wait 6 months or even a year for spending data they need for a story to be released, then chances are - the sniff of the story they were wanting to write will probably have gone stale.
Journalists, campaigners and activists need access to well-structured, machine readable and timely data from national as well as sub-national administrations. At OpenSpending, we're often contacted by journalists with story ideas, or they approach us with a lead. The stumbling stone for them is either lack of information, or worse data that they can't use because they are not sure of its completeness. The problem is thus the one of trees falling in a wood: If a transaction is missing from a list - does that mean there was no transaction for that amount on that date, or does it mean that the transaction simply was not reported?
These distinctions are important for anyone trying to understand the data - and up to now they have been pretty tricky to answer. As an attempt to make this a little easier, today, we announce the availability of an automatic reporting tool for spending data (available both on [data.gov.uk](http://data.gov.uk/data/openspending-report/index) and on [OpenSpending](http://openspending.org/resources/gb-spending/index.html)), the result of a collaboration between data.gov.uk and us in order to increase the visibility of the spend data and to increase the ease of browsing the substantial volume of datasets that make up the [reporting of Government expenditure](http://data.gov.uk/openspending) in data.gov.uk.
The [tool lists departments](http://data.gov.uk/data/openspending-report/index) registered as data publishers on data.gov.uk and details how precisely they have followed the [HM Treasury reporting guidelines](http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/psr_transparency_index.htm). It will also make the whole of the reported data available for search and analysis both on [data.gov.uk](http://data.gov.uk/openspending) and on [the OpenSpending site](http://openspending.org/search).
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8443/7980196066_d4aa29eb0d_z.jpg" title="UK Departmental Spend Reporting 1" class="pull-left" style="margin: 1em 1em 1em 0;" />
The tool is useful to those both using the data, and those within government in assuring that departments are reporting on time. It helps to check:
1. Quality of the data (i.e. adherence to HMT reporting guidelines, well-structured data)
2. Status of reporting (i.e. how complete the reports are or if there is a reporting period missing)
### Why was this possible?
Having all of these datasets organised under a single catalogue at Data.Gov.UK  in simple spreadsheet format combined with the Data.gov.uk team's work in making the necessary metadata available enabled the OpenSpending team to create an extraction system to be set up to clean the data on a regular basis. The team then cleaned over 6000 column names to add compliance with [HMT guidance](http://nomenklatura.okfnlabs.org/uk25k-column-names).
### How does it work?
The report generator then highlights in red departments who are registered as a publisher on Data.gov.uk but have failed to publish any information on their spending, in yellow those who have published data which cannot be interpreted as spending data (e.g. PDF format or not complying with [the template](http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/transparency_annexa100910.xls) provided by HMT) and green those departments whose records have been updated as regularly as demanded as per the publication requirements (latest data must have been published as recently as a month ago).
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8441/7980196059_f6fd51a5c2_z.jpg" title="UK Departmental Spend Reporting 2" class="pull-left" style="margin: 1em 1em 1em 0;" />
The first stage of this release deals with central departments, who are obliged to report all spending over 25,000 GBP. Subsequent stages to follow soon after will monitor local councils and other governmental bodies, which have different reporting requirements. The interface will be useful both inside and out of government, to ensure transparency regulations are met and to better understand where gaps in data may alter the completeness of the picture offered by government data.
* Reporting tool on [data.gov.uk](http://data.gov.uk/data/openspending-report/index)
* More extensive list of entities at [OpenSpending](http://openspending.org/resources/gb-spending/report/index.html)
* [Our briefing](http://openspending.org/resources/gb-spending/index.html) with all the details and link to code.
*Interested in more regular updates from the Spending Stories team? Join the discussion via the [OpenSpending mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).*

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---
authors:
- raimo
redirect_from: /2012/09/participatory-budgeting-finland/
title: First steps for Participatory Budgeting in Finland
---
**This post is written by [Raimo Muurinen](https://twitter.com/ra__mu) and [Henri Ahti](https://twitter.com/HenriAhti) who are taking a lead on one of Finland’s first Participatory Budgeting (PB) projects with Helsinki City Library. The post comes just as we prepare for Tiago Peixoto’s (aka [@participatory](https://twitter.com/participatory)) keynote and talk on [how to involve citizens in the budget making process](http://okfestival.org/participatory-budgeting/) at OKFestival.**
## How did the project get going?
In April 2012, the Finnish innovation fund [Sitra](http://www.sitra.fi/en) organized [the first participatory budgeting process in Finland](http://www.sitra.fi/artikkelit/2012/osallistuva-budjetointi). As a result, among few others, a new PB project was elected to receive funding. [Helsinki City Library](http://www.lib.hel.fi/en-GB/) users now have the chance to plan and decide projects for the upcoming new [central library](http://keskustakirjasto.fi/en/).
## Why is this necessary and why should it happen now?
At the end of 2011, the [Democracy Group of the City of Helsinki](http://demokratia.hel.fi/english), led by mayor Jussi Pajunen, published a report saying PB has not been used previously in Finland. Except for, with a broad understanding, the area of the northernmost city of Finland, Rovaniemi, where regional boards have a strong role in budgeting.
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8038/7992581440_b0f417be88_n.jpg" title="OsallistuvaBudjetointi" class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 1em" width="320" height="90" />
At the same time Sitra, a Finnish innovation fund, took a more practical approach to the matter. Between August 2011 and April 2012 they organized, the [New Democracy Forum](http://www.sitra.fi/en/new-democracy), which examined and sought for a 'new type of democracy' with 30 guest participants invited from different fields of expertise. A varied group of journalists, members of the parliament, public administration officials, SME CEOs and citizen activists among others heard about the concept of participatory budgeting and as a result, Sitra decided to organize a small-scale experiment, as it had budgeted ca. 100,000 euros for the arising new democracy initiatives. 16 proposals for new democracy projects qualified for voting, where the forum participants, spokespeople for the projects and a few employees from Sitra had each one vote per person. The voters were to vote for a list of ten preferable projects to receive funding. Prior to voting, all the projects’ spokespeople had pitched their projects. As a result, [Avoin ministeriö](http://www.avoinministerio.fi/) (Open Ministry), [Sosiaalinen hub](http://sosiaalinenhub.wordpress.com/) (Social Hub) and our Participatory Budgeting proposition for the Central Library were voted to receive funding.
## Who will be involved in implementing it?
Behind the PB proposal were companies [Emobit Oy](http://emobit.fi/en) and [Avanto insight Oy](http://avanto.in/) as a partner and the Helsinki City Library as a client. The plan started with gathering information about PB and setting up a free and open resource site [osallistuvabudjetointi.fi](http://osallistuvabudjetointi.fi/), which is now running the early first version.
Emobit leads the project as contractual partner for Sitra, providing technical expertise for [OpenSpending](http://openspending.org/), which is used to visualize library spending from previous years with data from [Helsinki Region Infoshare](http://www.hri.fi/en/).
Avanto insight is responsible for planning the PB processess and is running the osallistuvabudjetointi.fi site. The company is a startup founded in 2011 and based in Tampere.
<iframe width='600' height='400' src='http://openspending.org/helsinki_city_library_2009_2011_1/embed?widget=treemap&state=%7B%22drilldown%22%3A%22kustannuspaikka%22%2C%22year%22%3A%222011%22%2C%22cuts%22%3A%7B%7D%7D&width=600&height=400' frameborder='0'></iframe>
## How will it work?
Focus is on allowing library users to participate on developing the new Central Library, which is currently waiting for the results of the architectural competition. At the moment, we are planning to hold 2-3 live sessions in different libraries. These will be open, creative participation sessions for anybody interested. The sessions will give people the possibility to create their own budget proposal and also draw on feedback from the [Dream! survey](http://keskustakirjasto.fi/en/2012/06/07/dream-the-central-library-to-reality-weekend-at-the-pavilion-16-17-june/) held at the beginning of 2012, where Helsinki residents were invited to design the type of urban space and culture they would like to see blossom in the library. Planning is conducted openly, as we publish all the documents freshly to the osallistuvabudjetointi.fi site, where it is possible to comment them and affect the execution.
[View the data on OpenSpending](http://openspending.org/helsinki_city_library_2009_2011_1)
*We’re looking forward to seeing some pictures from the living results of these sessions. Look out for Raimo, Henri and Tiago on Friday, 21st September at OKFestival. We hope that bringing these two groups together will spark a great discussion on the future of PB in Finland.*

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/09/OKFest-Followup/
title: Where Does the Money Go - International. Updates from OKFestival
---
We got a chance to catch up with many old OpenSpending friends at [OKFestival](http://okfestival.org/) last week and got the chance to meet some new ones. For any of you who missed the action, here's a quick recap...
## Machine Readable Budgets for the Netherlands
The week started with Ton Zijlstra announcing a scoop in the "State of Play: The Open Government Data movement and related initiatives", for the first time, the Netherlands announced that it would publish its budget plan in machine-readable format.
Naturally, we wanted to get this into OpenSpending as quickly as possible... but when working with the data, we had some questions. For example, we could not make the numbers align with any other [official estimates](http://rijksbegroting.nl/binaries/pdfs/miljoenennota_bijlagen.pdf) (see page 5). With the help of representatives from the Court of Audit of the Netherlands we did a comparison of the differences of the [open format](http://opendata.rijksbegroting.nl/opendata.html) with the [PDF version](http://rijksbegroting.nl/binaries/pdfs/miljoenennota_bijlagen.pdf) and could not make all of the numbers match (PDFs as reference material can be useful!). We've approached the Ministry of Finance to clarify the discrepancies between the two documents and hope to have an update soon.
<iframe width='600' height='400' src='http://openspending.org/nl-budget/embed?widget=treemap&state=%7B%22drilldown%22%3A%22begrotingsstaat%22%2C%22year%22%3A%222013%22%2C%22cuts%22%3A%7B%22flow%22%3A%22U%22%7D%2C%22drilldowns%22%3A%5B%22begrotingsstaat%22%5D%7D&width=700&height=400' frameborder='0'></iframe>
## Converging on Standards
Publishing to the IATI standard is now becoming more commonplace, but how do we take it to the next level? The OpenSpending team is particularly keen to work towards [standards for government financial data](http://openspending.org/resources/standard/index.html) - so that we can answer questions such as 'how do the budgeting priorities of governments in developing countries align with donor priorities?' (as we did for Uganda with our project with Publish What You Fund) on a systematic and automated, rather than a time-consuming case-by-case basis. Such standards may make other, more ambitious projects, possible at scale, such as geocoding projects and mapping the budgeting process from start to finish, e.g. to answer questions such as whether what was budgeted aligns with what was actually spent.
In the session ["Open Development and aid flow: using open aid data"](http://okfestival.org/open-development-and-aid-flows-how-to-use-aid-data/) we discussed how important it is to align the spheres of budgeting and aid distribution and talked about some of the shortcomings and benefits of some of the systems currently in place. A few notes from the session:
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8316/8019242524_c9a8d662ff_m.jpg" title="Session with Development Data crowd on how we could align spending and Aid data" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em; width="200" height="200""/>
* First and foremost, we need to work out what can be combined and what can't, then produce the tools to map one to another. In order to do this, there is a **need to distinguish between file formats (*grammar*) and reference data (*vocabulary*)** if we are interested in making interoperable standards.
* While IATI is by and large considered a success in terms of getting aid data published, there are still some areas for improvement. For example, **how can we spot which data is missing in order to know how complete a picture we have of total aid to developing countries?** To a certain extent, this has been done in the UK for spending data with the recent announcement of the [report generator](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/09/13/uk25k-reporting.html) for Data.Gov.UK. The question is: *could a similar tool be built for the IATI registry?*
* Feedback on data. Even within those organisations who publish their data to the IATI standard - there are discrepancies in what data is contained within. For example, some publishers may leave fields blank while completing all other fields. It was felt within the group that **there should be some kind of feedback mechanism** to encourage publishers to improve the quality of the data that they published.
* Lastly - **the forum for this discussion needs to be decided**. Should bringing these people together be a role of the [Open Government Partnership](http://www.opengovpartnership.org/), or of the [Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency](http://fiscaltransparency.net/) or do we need a specific forum for this?
We're going to be continuing this discussion over the coming weeks via the [OpenSpending Mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending). We welcome input from anyone involved in this area, so please, join the mailing list and chime in.
## Connecting with Citizens
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8305/8019242120_3d617890ba_m.jpg" title="Damir Mehmedbasic speaking on his work in Bosnia to connect financial data with citizen's issues" class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 3em; width="200" height="200""/>
We were very fortunate to have a fantastic panel of speakers from around the world to talk about their experiences in connecting government financial data to citizens' issues in the panel ["The Money and the Many"](http://okfestival.org/the-money-and-the-many/). Our stellar cast included:
* Damir Mehmedbasic, Executive Director, [Public Interest Advocacy Center (PIAC)](http://www.cpi.ba/). Bosnia and Herzegovina.
* Oluseun Onigbinde, Team Lead, [BudgIT](http://yourbudgit.com/). Nigeria.
* Federico Ramírez Corona, Lead Programmer, Fundar, Centro de Análisis e Investigación. Mexico. Talking about Fundar's [Farm Subsidies Project](http://subsidiosalcampo.org.mx/index.html/) - blogpost to follow.
* Gisele Craveiro, Professor and Coordinator of Research Group on Public Policy for Access to Information (GPOPAI), University of São Paulo. Brazil. Talking about the ["Caring for my Neighbourhood Project"](http://www.gpopai.usp.br/cuidando/).
We heard a variety of approaches, from installing physical counters of the national budget in one of the busiest streets in Sarajevo, to actively engaging with twitter users and teaming up with the Occupy movement in Nigeria, to painstakingly geo-coding public projects in Brazil.
Many NGOs around the world continue to grapple with this incredibly complex topic, and there were words of wisdom for those embarking upon the journey. Their tips:
* The key to reaching the many is packaging media-compatible messages with specific budget information.
* It is important to bear in mind what type of audience you are writing for. If you are a team of academics, make sure you get someone on board who can help you translate the key issues into non-jargonised language for a layman audience.
* Online data-vis can be a key tool in delivering information, but it's not the end, (particularly in developing countries) you need tools to help get the message across offline, perhaps through wall paintings or mobile outreach.
The topic of engagement with citizen issues is something which we will continue to discuss via the [OpenSpending Mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending) and we look forward to hearing updates from teams like these all around the world on this topic.
## Public Participation
Starting with a bold opening statement? Why did Athens outperform other city states? - Better than usual information processing, leveraged by participatory institutions. Want to know how higher levels can lead to lower rates of child mortality? How participation can increase willingness of citizens to pay their taxes or improve the precision of budgeting practices? Watch the presentation below to hear Tiago's talk (from 45:00. It's worth it, there are kittens!).
<iframe src="http://embed.bambuser.com/broadcast/2995373" width="460" height="310" frameborder="0">Your browser does not support iframes.</iframe>
*If anyone does have photos or videos from any of the sessions, please upload them to Flickr and tag them with '#OKFest'!*

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/09/Balkan-Budgets/
title: Balkan Budget Bubbles
---
**We're pleased to announce that the Where Does My Money Go bubbles are on their way to the Balkans! Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for Democracy, the OpenSpending team will be working with the [Centre for Public Interest Advocacy](http://cpi.ba/) in Bosnia to produce interactive graphics of national and subnational budgets in Bosnia and lead training workshops with other Balkan countries (already on the guest list is [CRTA - Serbia](http://www.crta.rs/wp/en/)). We hope that this project will help organisations working in this area to form a united front to demand ever better data from governments, and to do ever more ambitious work with it.**
CPI have already been very active in bringing the budget to the citizens of Sarajevo, particularly by having a strong working relationship with the media. They have also installed a live budget counter on the outside of their offices in one of the busiest streets of Sarajevo to bring information directly to those passing by.
<table class="image">
<tr><td><img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7191/6903153325_0ea750c3da.jpg" title="Bosnian Budget counter - Sarajevo" class="alignnone" width="500" height="500" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="caption">Live updates on government spending brought to passers-by in Sarajevo.</td></tr>
</table>
<br></br>
CPI have already done a fantastic job of collecting the data, but there is still a lot of work to do to wrangle it into the necessary formats before it can be presented in the OpenSpending interactive graphics.
## What will the project involve?
As part of this project we will be:
* Building visualisations of national, entity-, cantonal- and district-level budgets for Bosnia
* Doing training and capacity building workshops with organisations from other Balkan countries, on getting, wrangling and presenting financial data (with OpenSpending and other tools)
* Building a tax calculator for Bosnia (similar to the [Daily Bread](http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/)), plus a session at the workshop on how to create one for other countries
* Test-drive the [Spending Data Handbook](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/09/11/Spending-Data-Handbook.html) and augment it with a more technical primer, for those organisations wishing to do more ambitious data work
<table class="image">
<tr><td><img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8305/8019242120_3d617890ba.jpg" title="Damir Mehmedbasic speaks in Helsinki" class="alignnone" width="500" height="500" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="caption">Damir Mehmedbasic speaks in Helsinki about CPI's work</td></tr>
</table>
<br></br>
*As we progress with this project, we'll be focussing in depth on Balkan countries to work out which organisations are working in this area and what their technical requirements are. Know someone we should be in touch with? [Let us know!](mailto:info@openspending.org).*

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---
authors:
- federico
redirect_from: /2012/10/publicidad-oficial/
title: PROFILE - 'Publicidad Oficial' - Official Advertising, Fundar, Mexico
---
**At Open Knowledge Festival, Federico Ramírez from Mexico presented Fundar's project on uncovering which government parties were using taxpayers's money to
finance their PR and advertising. In this post, based on an interview [Velichka Dimitrova](https://twitter.com/vndimitrova) did when she went out to Mexico for [OpenDataMx](http://blog.okfn.org/2012/09/04/opendatamx/), the Fundar team have delved deeper to talk about how this project came about, and hopefully inspire other organizations to tackle the issue in other countries.**
> “Government advertising should be understood as a communication channel between the government and citizens. It should be clear, objective, easy to understand, necessary, useful and relevant to the public. It should not promote, explicitly or
implicitly, the interests of any party or government”. [*]
## Vital Facts
* *URL*: <http://publicidadoficial.com.mx/>
* *Country*: Mexico
* *Scope*: Federal and state budget
* *Who*: Campaign implemented by [Fundar](http://fundar.org.mx/), [Article 19](http://www.article19.org/ ) and the Open Society Justice Initiative.
* *Contact*: [Justine Dupuys](mailto:justine@fundar.org.mx) (Fundar)
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8319/8046507275_7876f2b14e_z.jpg" title="Publicidad Oficial" width="640" height="480" />
## What is the Background of the Project?
*'Publicidad Oficial'* is the expenditure of the government on public advertising. Fundar was particularly concerned that a lot of money in Mexico was being spent in promoting its own work and own image through public advertising, and aimed to tackle this. In Latin America, government advertising is often contentious: the relationship between the government and the media has frequently come under scrutiny. The amount spent on government advertising is very high in Mexico; in 2011, about 5027 million Mexican pesos / 385 million US dollars was spent, 75% of which went directly to television and radio broadcasting. During the past 12 years in Mexico there has been a huge discussion on how to take public money out of private (media) hands.
In 2007, the Mexican constitution was changed to incorporate a ban on government advertising during political campaigns (Art.41) and also a ban on public servants (especially key executive officers, including thePresident, state governors, and municipal authorities) from appearing on
official publicity campaigns (Art. 134). The reasons for the reform included the abuse of official publicity as a resource for electoral campaigning. During the Mexican Presidential Elections in 2006 the five candidates aired 757,572 spots on radio and TV, while the Mexican President aired approximately 462,000 spots (2/3 of all such spots) publicising his image and governmental actions on social programs. Local governments also aired an unknown number of spots with similar characteristics, but they were not counted. It is important to highlight that this publicity was paid for with public resources.
This is why this campaign is really important: it is not just about showing how much the government spends in this particular area, but it is also about measuring the impact of these continuous violations of this constitutional article e.g. on freedom of expression.
[Read more on rules regulating government advertising in Mexico.](http://publicidadoficial.com.mx/como-se-regula-a-nivel-nacional)
## What are the aims?
Fundar approached this campaign with two concerns:
* The first one is the concern about how the government spends its money in a more general context.
* The second concern is about the structural framework of democracy and the role of the media, as well as the relationship of the political parties and the media.
There are two steps involved in tackling these concerns:
* *Step 1:* Creating fair rules on how the governments can spend money on government advertising
* *Step 2:* Promoting information instead of propaganda in government advertising.
A feasible goal for the project has been to gather data and evidence, which has not been available for government spending before and to provide it to civil society and the general public. In working with the data, there have been two aims:
* Show what kind of data exists: get the numbers on government media spending.
* Denounce those parts of the government who refuse to provide the data for political reasons: show where the gaps are and where lack of transparency (opacidad) exist.
## What kind of data and how to get it?
The government does not release government advertising data for several reasons:
* Deficient government accounting in Mexico due to structural problems in the bureaucracy.
* Trying to avoid political conflict, as in many states the media are not primarily a commercial, but a political actor, which can put a lot of pressure on the government.
* As some media is also owned by government officials, there is unwillingness to release the data which would reveal these connections and ownerships.
A collective of organizations has worked on this topic since a while, but there have been no numbers to serve as evidence. For the Mexican civil society it is not very common to gather data and to try to provide it in some usable format.
Learning from these organizations who were already involved in this discourse and had the political message, Fundar got the data as evidence.
The data was obtained by Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, where some cases were brought even before the Supreme Court, which has to decide on the balance of public and private interest and whether the government had the right to protect information as a part of commercial negotiation. This aspect was contested by civil society, as public tenders should be public knowledge. In some cases a few FOI requests were done for the same kind of data in order to find whether there were any discrepancies.
## Features
The website of Publicidad Oficial offers:
* A map and an index of transparency for all Mexican states (the red states are
where no information has been obtained)
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8041/7982235586_48c8e1e095_z.jpg
" title="Advertising Map Mexico" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
* [Data on the government advertising of the federal
government](http://publicidadoficial.com.mx/gasto-federal)
<table class="image">
<tr><td><img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8295/7982232561_e58d7aca44_z.jpg" title="Access to information Index" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="caption">(Above) Index of access to spending information on government advertising per category: 11 of the Mexican states did not provide any information (0 stars). Only 2 Mexican states provide all the information - 5 stars.</td></tr>
</table>
## Taxonomy of Data Problems - why was it difficult to work with the data?
There were 3 main types of problems in working with the data:
* Political Problems: it is often difficult to track how much money goes to a particular commercial entity. If ghost entities / businesses are created it might not be possible to track the spending to the actual company, as there is no actual proof for connecting the transaction back to them.
* Legal Problems: related to the legality of opening up government spending data when this data is related to a commercial negotiation. A lot of litigation currently is about the government disputing whether some tenders should be protected because of subject to a commercial contract secret.
* Technical / Operative Problems: from issues about transcribing PDF into spreadsheet format to diverging data formats, data quality and availability,
resulting from the fact that Mexican states have different transparency laws and data standards.
* Access to information problems: the discrepancies between the data have posed a problem of reliability of the information we access.
Additionally, fragmentation of the data is also an issue, as data is provided in PDF format for every state, every 6 months, separately for each programme and it is not available to download in bulk format or accessible through API. Often the technical requirements for open data are too specialised and too complicated for CSOs with limited technical capacity and the non-technical staff of the government.
## Relevance, Audiences and User-groups
The website of Publicidad Oficial has become the official source of information on government advertising in Mexico - it is practically the only source. Even the presidential candidates and the media itself cites Fundar as the source of the data.
During the latest presidential elections there has been a polemic about the candidate’s expenditure on the media where candidates have been discussing who is in fact spending more on the media campaign. One candidate has even accused another of being a project of the television media: “If the television makes presidents, you would be a president”.
Users of the webpage and involved stakeholders in the campaign were journalists, researchers, other civil society organisations as well as political parties.
## The Role of Technology
In order to justify having more technical staff in the organisation, one should find more purposes beyond the experimental use of the technology. While there is a need to develop the technological skills of civil society, these should be complementary
to their advocacy skills. Technology is just one of the tools for advocacy.
## Successes
1) Having raised public awareness – government spending on the media is a public and national topic, especially in the time of the electoral campaigns where this kind of transparency is called for.
2) The opportunity to be the most important and respected source for this information and having provoked the winning candidate to take this issue forward with the new government.
3) Having broken the traditional barriers that Fundar faces when trying to reach out to more people in creating a website with its own audience.
## Failures
1) Despite the public awareness and national discussion, no legislation /public policy have been created to solve the problem. The question of how to convert the discussion into tangible results still remains. It does exist a lot of draft bill on the subject, but no one has been passed. See: <http://publicidadoficial.com.mx/iniciativas> for more details.
2) Not having shown the data in a more creative way, related directly to the problems in the communication between the non-technical researchers and the technical staff. A more collaborative way of work should be explored.
3) Not having been able to create and maintain a bigger coalition as a stable process. Involving other actors and sharing one’s political capital has been challenging, as other organisations might have felt they have been invited to “someone else’s party”.
[*] [Basic Principles for the regulation of advertising, ADC.](http://www.censuraindirecta.org.ar/advf/documentos/4804c757c7e629.40711373.pdf)
## Lessons learned
We asked Justine Dupuys from the project what advice she would give to organisations embarking on similar missions in other countries. Here is what she suggested:
1) It is really important to clearly define government advertising and what is acceptable use.
2) In order to fulfil investigation’s objectives, we made a lot of FOI requests at federal and local levels. We suggest [constructing a very complete database with all the deadlines](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvoV_cBqwo28dHMwUUQybms4Z3dxZ2hDMGQ2Tm5ucGc). It will help to follow up on these requests.
3) Communication strategy for releasing the findings on governmental advertising is complicated. Traditional media are reluctant to inform on this issue because they are taking advantages of this situation. My suggestion is to think about creative way of communicate. It is the reason why we implemented a website and used social media [@publioficial](https://twitter.com/PubliOficial).
*Our aim at OpenSpending is to bring together people working all over the world, be they techies or advocacy organisations, to find common patterns and solutions in how to work with and glean answers from publicly available data. Know someone we should contact? [Get in touch](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).*

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/10/spending-standard/
title: Upcoming call - Spending Standard
---
**At OKFestival we had a fantastic session bringing together the IATI and spending community to talk about how we could make standards work for the users of government financial data. Now we want to keep the ball rolling. Next week, we will have a call to discuss how we can make a standard for transaction-level spending data happen...**
## Details
* *When?*: Thursday 11th October 7pm CEST, 6pm BST, 1pm EDT. [Other timezones](http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Spending+Standard+Call&iso=20121011T19&p1=37&ah=1)
* *Where?*: Via Skype
* *How do I join?*: Please add your name, agenda points and Skype I.D. to the [pad](http://wdmmg.okfnpad.org/community-2012-10-11), we'll add you pull you in.
<img alt="" src="http://content.openspending.org/resources/standard/images/header.png" title="OpenSpending banner" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
## What's up for discussion?
Last week, we (well, Friedrich) published a straw-man draft of what a standard could look like for transaction level.
The draft is here: <http://openspending.org/resources/standard/index.html>
We're really keen for your thoughts and also to know who we might be able to engage as early adopters in this so please do drop us a line via the [mailing-list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/10/openspending-lemonde/
title: OpenSpending visualisations featured in Le Monde
---
The OpenSpending platform experienced a huge peak in traffic earlier this week as a visualisation based on French data was featured in Le Monde.
[The article](http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2012/10/16/plf-des-avions-au-bouclier-fiscal-la-java-des-amendements_1776093_823448.html?xtmc=depenses&xtcr=52) "PLF : des avions au bouclier fiscal, la java des amendements", (PLF=Projet de loi de finances, the draft finance law) deals with suggested amendments to the draft finance law and which parties were demanding what amendments.
The OpenSpending visualisation used in the article is intended to give a high-level representation of some of the main areas of government expenditure in France:
<iframe width='600' height='400' src='http://openspending.org/plf_2013_depenses/embed?widget=treemap&state=%7B%22drilldowns%22%3A%5B%22poste%22%5D%2C%22year%22%3A2013%2C%22cuts%22%3A%7B%7D%7D&width=600&height=400' frameborder='0'></iframe>
Besides the OpenSpending visualisation, there are some simple but effective infographics on how many amendments were filed to the draft, and by whom.
*Read the full article on [Le Monde](http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2012/10/16/plf-des-avions-au-bouclier-fiscal-la-java-des-amendements_1776093_823448.html?xtmc=depenses&xtcr=52).*
*A slightly different view of the visualisation was also featured in Libération. Read the piece [here](http://www.liberation.fr/politiques/2012/10/18/budget-comment-depenser-371-milliards_854160).*

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---
authors:
- friedrich
redirect_from: /2012/10/open-interests/
title: Open Interests Hackathon - November 24-25, London, England
---
As a journalist, to understand European Union institutions, policies and commitments, you have to look where the money goes and understand who affects the money flow in the EU. As the influence of Brussels lobbyists grows, it is increasingly important to draw the connections between lobbying, policy-making and funding. [The EU publishes information on its spending](http://ec.europa.eu/beneficiaries/fts/index_en.htm) and also maintains a [transparency register](http://europa.eu/transparency-register/). These, however, are difficult for journalists and citizens to use.
With [OpenSpending](http://openspending.org/), we set out to use the power of technology to catalyze greater government transparency by providing new tools for media and citizens to more easily access government data in searchable, sortable and machine readable formats.
<img alt="Hackday-thumb-800x600-2721.jpeg" img class=caption src="http://www.pbs.org/idealab/Hackday-thumb-800x600-2721.jpeg" title="The Open Interests Hackday is just the latest in a series of events aimed at encouraging journalists to work with data. In this image, programmers and designers gather at the OKFestival in Helsinki." />
One step on our road to achieving this goal is a "hackathon" where we aim to build tools that will help the media and citizens investigate the influence of Brussels lobbyists and where the money goes in the EU. [Open Interests Europe](http://okfnlabs.org/events/hackdays/lobbying.html), which will take place on November 24-25 at the Google Campus Cafe in London, brings together developers, designers, activists, journalists and other geeks for two days of collaboration, learning, fun, intense hacking and app building.
Below are some of the projects we will be working on.
## The Lobby Transparency Challenge
Within any political process there are many interests wanting to be heard -- companies, trade unions, NGOs -- and Brussels is no exception. Corporate Europe Observatory, Friends of the Earth Europe and LobbyControl have begun to data-mine the lobby registers of the European Commission and of the European Parliament to find out who the lobbyists are, what they want, and how much they are investing. Participants will have the exclusive opportunity to work with this data before it is made public in their upcoming portal.
## The Fish Subsidies Challenge
Subsidies paid to owners of fishing vessels and others working in the fishing industry under the European Union's common fisheries policy amount to approximately 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) a year. EU Transparency gathered detailed data relating to payments and recipients of fisheries subsidies in every EU member state from multiple sources, from European Commission databases to member state government databases and inter-governmental fishery organizations such as ICCAT. Participants will have the opportunity to build maps, visualizations and apps with this data.
There will be prizes and interesting talks by jury members [Rufus Pollock](https://twitter.com/rufuspollock), co-founder and director of the [Open Knowledge Foundation](http://okfn.org/), and [Alastair Dant](https://twitter.com/ajdant), lead interactive technologist for the Guardian. The hackathon is organized by the [European Journalism Centre](http://www.ejc.nl/) and the Open Knowledge Foundation, and sponsored by [Knight-Mozilla OpenNews](http://www.mozillaopennews.org/).
*You can find out more details on the [event webpage](http://okfnlabs.org/events/hackdays/lobbying.html). If you'd like to join us and help build these tools, please register [here](http://openinterests.eventbrite.com/).*

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/11/handbook-spring-day-1/
title: Spending Data Handbook Sprint - Day 1
---
As you read this, we're writing a book about spending. It'll be finished by Thursday so you can read it over the weekend, as you sit down to do, (or not do) your armchair auditing of government accounts. As we get the opportunity to meet budget and data activists from all around the world, a set of common issues emerge and some novel and interesting approaches to dealing with them. The purpose of this week's work is to encapsulate these issues and ideas, tips and tricks into a format that will be useful to all manner of organisations working in this area.
The topics are getting data, handling it and present it to various audiences and is aimed at answering the questions: "How can CSOs, open data activists and governments work together to make sense of spending information and to hold government to account?"
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8197/8181622809_b6354ffb47_z.jpg" title="Searching for Lost Money" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
Over the coming few days, we will publish our progress and ask you to help us to fill in the gaps. What we hope to have at the end is a living document, the beginnings of a toolkit which NGOs (and possibly public servants) can use to help liberate more data, collaborate with other organisations to do ever better analysis and policy-making and present their results in a way to produce meaningful responses from their citizens.
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8067/8181658214_eeca42df54_z.jpg" title="Searching for Lost Money" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
## What's happened - Day 1
The philosophy of a book sprint is that the book is created from scratch, by the participants from the table of contents to the final gloss and polish, hence today was spent shaping the scope. Many post-it notes, scribbles and head scratches later, we have a preliminary table of contents.
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8063/8181622557_ddbda633f5_z.jpg" title="Searching for Lost Money" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
This includes workflows and working practices for NGOs, a list of demands which CSOs could put to governments in their country to get better access to types of data they need, tips and tricks which the techies use in their work which could be useful for NGOs and crucially - how to present your data to leverage input from the key audiences you are targeting. We believe that the current state of play has been unsuccessful in creating "armchair auditors" - it seems likely that many conversations will take place over the coming days as to whether anything could be done to change this, using technilogy or wit.
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8348/8181657818_942d94d3e6_z.jpg" title="Searching for Lost Money" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />

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---
authors:
- friedrich
redirect_from: /2012/11/handbook-draft/
title: Spending Data Handbook - Draft Version
---
After four days of intense writing, discussions and editing, it is now
almost midnight: our handbook sprint is over. What we have produced is
an introduction to the use of data for budget- and spending-focussed
advocacy. We've produced a high-level overview that covers a variety of
topics, from the context in which data can be used, to the acquisition,
processing and presentation of budget and spending data.
Of course, four days means we have only been able to lay the groundwork:
we would still like to add more concrete tips and tricks, examples and
in-depth tutorials on a few technologies and tools that relate to
financial information.
So, here it goes the first draft:
<strong><a
href="http://openspending.org/resources/handbook/ch001_introduction.html">Spending
Data Handbook</a></strong>
Of course, this can merely be the start of a discussion. Please feel
free to contribute directly in the [editing
environment](http://okfn.booktype.pro/spending-data-handbook), or via our
[mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).
We hope you enjoy the read!

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authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/11/Sarajevo-Workshop-Writeup/
title: Day 1 OpenSpending CSO Workshop - Sarajevo
---
*A while back, we wrote about the [kickoff of our project to deliver the budget of Bosnia and Herzegovina to its citizens in a form they can understand](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/09/26/Balkan-Budgets.html). Last week in Sarajevo - we had the kickoff workshop, bringing together a group of techies and policy experts from the Balkans and Eastern Europe, the OpenSpending team and MySociety's Tony Bowden to see how, through and beyond visualisation, we could work together to make budgets in the Balkans and Eastern Europe more transparent and accountable.*
# Day 1 - Inspiration and Open Data
<p>
<em>The OpenSpending team has spent a lot of time training journalists on how to use the both the <a href="http://openspending.org/">OpenSpending platform</a> and financial data in general, however this is the first time we've had the opportunity to train people whose aim was not necessarily to highlight scandal and sensation, but to systematically analyse and inform policy based on the available data. All of our participants had an additional aim besides improving policy: to answer the question "how do we display budget and spending information to citizens in a way that is engaging, meaningful and may even produce some action?"</em>
</p>
First up, an introduction to Open Data, to make sure everyone is on the same page. The aim of the day was inspiration to make data projects as powerful as possible, so to kick it off, Friedrich Lindenberg and Lisa Evans showed examples of data-driven financial projects which they felt had really made an impact in society:
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8490/8220640734_aa4821d4cc_n.jpg" title="Slide from Tony Bowden's Talk: Remove Somone's Headache" class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 2em;" />
* **[The Farm Subsidies Project](http://farmsubsidies.org/)**: A collection of investigative journalists who pull together an enormous European Agricultural Subsidies Database and find people and companies using funds originally intended for small farmers.
* **[The UK's The MP's expenses scandal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_parliamentary_expenses_scandal)**: After a huge name and shame campaign by a variety of major news outlets highlighting all manner of *innovative* uses of public money (from buying duck houses to claiming for fictitious second homes), a decision was made to proactively publish the expenses claimed by MP's when they happened. This has been so successful that MP's have really had to clean up their act, so successful in fact that the Guardian recently wrote that the story was getting boring, no-one was doing anything scandalous with it anymore.
* **[Free the files Campaign by ProPublica](http://www.propublica.org/series/free-the-files)** - tracking political ad filings from television stations in swing markets. Television stations are required to maintain a “political file” of political ads requests and contracts and ProPublica helps to make these searchable and easier to identify trends and culprits who abuse the system.
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8346/8220640856_2fb3098d1a_n.jpg" title="Slide from Tony Bowden's Talk: Give Somone a Headache" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" />
After lunch, the participants were on stage to present their existing and proposed projects by way of further inspiration for the other groups in the room. Each group had taken a distinctly different approach to the topic of making decisions about public money in their country better. We heard from Expert Grup in Moldova on their proposed project to convert the Moldovan BOOST data into a format which could be understood by citizens, CRTA from Serbia on [PratiPare](http://www.pratipare.rs/) - a project to track the location and actual cost of a variety of projects in Serbia, ranging from schools to highways, Open Data Albania's use of Linked Data to connect spending to a variety of different other sources of Data. Lastly, [OneWorldSee](http://oneworldsee.org/) and [Centre for Public Interest Advocacy](http://cpi.ba/), Bosnia took to the stage, describing some of their past and up and coming projects, including CPI's 'Balkan Mythbusters'. We wait with anticipation.
Next up - a great talk from My Society's Tony Bowden building on his experience with My Society's projects on how to build a useful and world-/game-changing project. Besides his key tips involving headaches illustrated above - he had the following tips for people who wanted their projects to change the world.
<div class="well" 'markdown="1"'>
<strong>Tony's Tips</strong>
<ul>
<li>Think about who would possibly pay for your services. If someone would pay for it, it's probably valuable (and you'll have a business model when the funding runs out). Think - 'What Would Apple Do?' ;). This is not to say that loss-making projects are not valuable, but bearing this in mind could help to think about sustaining your efforts. </li>
<li>Measure the actions completed your site, not numbers of visitors. </li>
<li> While we're on the topic of measuring people visiting your site. Is it possible that one of the most successful projects could be one in which almost no-one at all visits your site, however, the existence of said site stops bad people from doing bad things as they know people could check at any time?
<li> Make as much of the admin interface public as possible. People should never need your permission to come and help you out and it's surprising how many people will want to. </li>
<li> Get people with obsessive levels of interest on your side as early adopters of your site. The first people who start to use your site will most likely be people you already know. The first time you spot someone who you don't know, who arrives to use your tool - try and find out what made them find it - what made them want to take part. In the build up to the launch of <a href="http://www.fixmytransport.com/">Fix My Transport</a>, My Society made friends with many train spotters who were happy to help out to improve the objects of their hobby. </li>
<li>Introduce league tables for people who help you out. People are instinctively competitive and like to see their name acknowledged . MySociety regularly use two league tables in parallel - one for people who have helped most in the last week, one for people who have helped most of all time. It's a nice acknowledgement for people to let others see how much they have contributed, and may in some circumstances, encourage people to participate more or for longer. </li>
<li>A note on crowdsourcing. A lot of people try to 'crowdsource' information. A lot of projects fail and are not kept up. There is a danger here that the people who put their efforts into providing this information will become disillusioned with the fact that nothing has been done with it. However, if you are planning on collecting information yourself as part of your research anyway, why not open it up to the public and see whether there is any way they can help you? The benefits of this are - you'll be putting the early data in anyway, making your site look popular and encouraging people to come and fill it in. If no-one comes, you don't lose anything - if they do - you save yourself lots of work!</li>
</ul>
</div>
Finally - an introduction to the OpenSpending project for those not familiar with it. We show the ways in which the project has been used, go through a few of our mistakes which were made on the way to creating what is now a pretty stable platform - urging participants not to repeat them, as well as some of its success stories.
We show that using OpenSpending doesn't mean you have to produce a cookie-cutter version of [Where Does My Money Go?](http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/), and in fact, we'll get grumpy if you're not more ambitious than that. There's no licence (I'm aware of) to enforce this - but we want anyone who uses the [Assembly Kit](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/02/16/thekit.html) to build their own site to add something, however small, to make it better. We've done this recently with a project in Cameroon, soon to be launched, including a sub-national transparency index, per capita calculations and searchable data into the mix. This is going to be a theme for the next day, can't wait to see what people come up with.
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8337/8220640914_0faabf2fd3_z.jpg" title="Make Something New" class="alignnone" width="640" height="640" />

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/11/Sarajevo-Workshop-Writeup-2/
title: Day 2 OpenSpending CSO Workshop - Sarajevo
---
This blogpost is the second in the series of the OpenSpending workshop - Sarajevo. Read the [first post](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/11/26/Sarajevo-Workshop-Writeup.html) on the OpenSpending blog.
# Day 2 - Converting Data into Action & Finding Narratives in Data
The people we are trying to target with this data are bombarded constantly from every side with data, numbers statistics - what they need is *narratives*, things that stick in their mind when they leave your website. This is the theme of day 2 - How to convert data into action: how to find the times at which people will be receptive to your message, and how to create a narrative they will remember. To get things rolling, we have a quick look at some of the other projects going on around the world, and play a game to see how much information people can extract from a visualisation in 30 seconds.
<iframe src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/15349310" width="427" height="356" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" style="border:1px solid #CCC;border-width:1px 1px 0;margin-bottom:5px" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen> </iframe> <div style="margin-bottom:5px"> <strong> <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/lucyfedia/visualising-budgets" title="Visualising budgets" target="_blank">Visualising budgets</a> </strong> from <strong><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/lucyfedia" target="_blank">Lucy Chambers</a></strong> </div>
Before splitting off into two streams for the day: *technical* and *policy*, we quickly show everyone together how easy it is to upload and model your data using OpenSpending. If anyone missed it, or couldn't follow along due to our lovely and mighty wifi connection, we've [documented this](http://cameroon.openspending.org/en/contribute.html) extensively as part of the World Bank Cameroon project.
## Policy Stream
<table>
<tr><td><img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8201/8219599019_4471d497a9_c.jpg" title="Data into action - Mindmap" class="alignnone" width="500" height="500" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="caption">You can see the full-sized file <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/okfn/8219599019/sizes/c/in/photostream/">on our Flickr Stream</a></td></tr>
</table>
The policy stream highlight the areas they are interested in capturing in their projects, from international comparisons, to naming and shaming and then ask the key question: "Who cares?" - to work out who we should be targeting and via which medium. Secondly, we did a deeper dive into some of the problems experienced by the various projects, including how to get the data you require when the people giving it to you know you are competent enough to find scandal in it.
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8201/8219558127_da6049c827_m.jpg" title="Slide from Tony Bowden's Talk" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" />
### Targeting citizens with your project
**PERSONAL BELIEF ALERT!** It's a blunt statement, but I'm going to put it out there anyway: I believe citizens don't care about budgets. At least, they don't care about budgets at large, the majority of the time. When numbers are presented to them as ten figure numbers, it is very tricky for them to identify with as they don't relate to things of a size of anything familiar: A household budget, the turnover of their business.
What citizens might sometimes care about is the overall funding priorities of the government as this affects the services they require from government - is my government spending more on defence than it is on hospitals or schools? Journalists have a nose for this, they can feel when people are likely to be receptive to messages like these, and we at OpenSpending often see a traffic spike around the budget times of various countries as they embed our visualisations in their sites and as policy makers themselves use the visualisations to explain freshly drafted budgets to other policymakers (no jokes).
So, the challenge is: beyond key points in the budget year, how do we keep people interested in how their government spends their tax money? What they might care about is particular things, often **services**, such as hospitals or schools, which they might want improving. We, as policy people and techies, who are prepared to crunch the numbers, deliver them in a way which connects them to the services people care about?
### Targeting the experts
There are however, plenty of people who do care about the real numbers - NGOs, Researchers, Internet Activists and Policy Wonks - is there a way that some of our projects can remove the headaches for working with data for these groups? At OpenSpending - we've already seen a demand for the ability to search transactions for [supplier information](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/02/24/how-spending-stories-fact-checks-big-brother-the-wiretappers-ball.html), and via the mailing list, we're collecting a list of questions which other people would like to be able to answer. Could organisations such as the ones at the workshop, actually become a better source for this type of data than governments themselves if they can combine it, present it and query it better?
## Technical Stream
The technical stream split off for an action-packed day. They cover an introduction to [DataWrapper](http://datawrapper.de/) for making simple charts and web visualisations, [Kartograph](http://kartograph.org/) for making elegant maps, Scraping using [ScraperWiki](http://scraperwiki.com/), using Optical Character Recognition to get data out of PDFs and cleaning data using [Google Refine](http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/). All before 5:30 :)
## Project Proposals
The wrapup activity for Day 2 was a Dream Project proposal. If money and data were no object, what would the participants build? A variety of projects, from a Fix My Street-esque project for Bosnia, could be used to produce some alternative performance statistics for various project to rethinking how budget laws were made, so that they had to be submitted as small pieces of code.
While the suggestion from the group from CRTA and Tony Bowden to build on their project tracking site by equipping kids with cameras to take pictures of broken parts of playparks was, I believe, intended largely jokingly, I can't help wondering whether encouraging kids as part of their school projects to take part in these projects might not be a bad idea. Other large management consultancy companies use this technique and besides just collecting data, you are teaching the kids to be active citizens. I shall continue to ponder...

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/11/Sarajevo-Workshop-Writeup-3/
title: Day 3 OpenSpending CSO Workshop - Sarajevo
---
This blogpost is the last in the series of the OpenSpending workshop - Sarajevo. Read the [first post](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/11/26/Sarajevo-Workshop-Writeup.html) and the [second post](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/11/26/Sarajevo-Workshop-Writeup-2.html) on the OpenSpending blog.
# Day 3 - Getting your message out
As a CSO, once you have done all of this work, how can you make sure it is used? The focus of Day 3 was getting your message out there.
## Policy Stream
The Policy Stream actually subdivided even further into Data Analysis and Public Relations for the day.
### Data Analysis
Some of the participants were interested in more in-depth data analysis, so using the Moldovan BOOST data - we tried to generate some potential leads. Some interesting possible avenues for future exploration emerged including a surprising lack of money going to hospitals in the Moldovan capital - more investigation required to work out whether this is actually the case, or just gaps in the data, but an interesting lead nonetheless for the Moldovan group, who had already identified healthcare as an area they wanted to look into further.
### Communicating with the Media and Outreach
A tricky and frustrating subject for Think Tanks and CSOs who work with this type of information is how to get their outputs used. Again, we took a combination of the wacky dream approach and tried and tested experience from the participants. How could we revolutionise the press-release so that people actually used it? Would giving them easy ways to drop your visualisations into their articles increase uptake? Inspired by the [Obama for America Campaign, where targeted messages were used to great effect](http://projects.propublica.org/emails/) to target different parts of the audience, was there a good (and not too labour intensive) way to tailor your message to target the different types of media organisations? Loads of great ideas, which I tried to scribble down in our mindmap.
<table>
<tr><td><img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8200/8220832792_daa9ab9474_z.jpg" title="Outreach" class="alignnone" width="500" height="500" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="caption">You can see the full-sized file <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/okfn/8220832792/sizes/z/in/photostream/">on our Flickr Stream</a></td></tr>
</table>
## Technical Stream
The technical stream got down to work with putting into action the skills they had learned on the previous day and how to build a custom tax calculator for their country. There's a blog post with more instructions on this one cooking, we'll be in touch when we have it ready!
# Stay in touch
We'd love to stay in touch and for other organisations to join the discussion on how we can take these projects all to the next level and hopefully collaborate even more internationally.
The two mailing lists we regularly use for this type of communication are:
* "Policy stuff": <http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending>
* Technical discussion: <http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending-dev>
We hope to see you there soon!
# Our Slides:
Introduction to the workshop:
<iframe src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/15314825" width="476" height="400" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>
*We'll add more as we get them, still waiting for them to come trickling in!*.

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/11/Bosnia-Budget-Classification/
title: Bosnian Budgets - grouping data by categories people care about
---
Last week, I sat watching the team of CPI Bosnia mapping the Bosnian budget into functional classifications. We're working on making the budget accessible to the citizens of Bosnia, making clear visually things such as the division of funds between the cantons and municipalities of the country.
*Functional classifications*, for those of you who don't regularly 'sail the wide accounting seas' tell you things like what general area of spending we area talking about "health", "education", "defence", which is often more interesting from the perspective of the citixen user than e.g. which ministry group it was spent by.
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8063/8219557569_cc12ebbdea.jpg" title="Budget Workshop Bosnia" class="alignnone" width="640" height="640" />
The evening would probably be a little more fun if someone inside government had done it for them, so we could go out and have beer, but nevertheless, it's important to get this right. No idea what we are talking about or why you should care? Read on:
## Why Functional Classifications?
Simply speaking, many users of data want to know *what* government spent money on, rather than who spent it, who received it. People (I'm talking about the general public here) generally care about services - not bank transfers.
You don't have to make these classifications up from scratch, there are internationally recognised systems of these. For example, the stylishly named [Classifications of Functions of Government (COFOG, for short)](http://unstats.un.org/unsd/cr/registry/regcst.asp?Cl=4) - is how the government already publishes its data in the UK. This, with a few amendments (see De-jargonising COFOG) - was the system used to make the budget understandable in Where Does My Money Go?
For other projects which we've done e.g. [Cameroon.OpenSpending.org](http://cameroon.openspending.org/en/) we've used a COFOG-esque mapping. Why 'esque'? Firstly, the government didn't publish their data classified like this, so we had to group it ourself. Secondly, we were aiming here for a functional classification which worked when you visualised it, if we'd used COFOG exactly, we'd have ended up with a huge bubble for general public services which would have made all the others really small, so you wouldn't be able to see the difference in size. So we modified the set of top-level items to make it easier to see smaller distinctions.
For the first version of the Bosnia project, we've got functional classifications for the top level, then bodies which spent the money for the second level of our visualisation. See what they've done in this [Google Doc](https://docs.google.com/open?id=1tyfmH9EqKz_3VucDQWGmKIPpcSPYg6iCcDzwH1wwbdNJvZqoUnTnYRcmlNhV).
### International Comparisons
While we're always warning people about making comparisons between countries (data not being collected in the right way etc lalala), these classifications using COFOG are quite often used to make international comparisons. [OECD do it regularly](http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=30428), so it's probably one of the less-evil ways to do it, in case you're interested in that type of thing.
## De-jargonising COFOG
Let's face it, the terminology used by the government is often not the most appealing, or illustrative from the point of view of the user. Hence, for the Where Does My Money Go Project, we specifically de-jargonised it, and translated the terms into friendly forms that we felt were more accessible to the average user. For example: 'Executive and legislative organs, financial and fiscal affairs, external affairs' became 'Top level government'. You can take a look at how we mapped them on to one-another [in this Google Doc](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ah8UkI7xG7eWdFFTSjlkeFRoOEFLbC1PTjRRcWphOFE#gid=0).
### How to map your budget into COFOG classifications:
Basically, if your government doesn't do this for you - you'll always have to use your best judgements, someone may have made a different call, and may well disagree with the way you've done what you've done. But as long as you document your practices, anyone will be able to pick up anything they don't agree with and produce a different model. So as I'm sat here, I'm listening to people bandying about terms and trying to decide which ones are most relevant.
1. Make a codesheet and align your functional groups to the things you want to go under that umbrella term.
2. Do a [dataset cross](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bD3KztcPdc3Ffe5_xlVl--N2wBVydUtpUDJpq2d6sK8/edit#heading=h.d1ub48are7ej) using Google Refine or use HLOOKUP in Excel. Dataset merging will allow you to match information from different data sources or spreadsheets, without merging them, so the original data remains available.
## Use this method other places.
By the way: this methodology is exactly the same as you would need to syncronise geographic information. E.g. if you've got names in one format e.g. full names and you need them in another format, e.g. [ISO-3166](country codes) - you can easily use a code sheet and the same dataset cross techniques.

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/12/Jobs-OS/
title: We're hiring!
---
*Hacker? Passionate about finding stories in the money? Care about which companies get contracts with government? OpenSpending is seeking a lead developer to guide it through its next phase of development and it might be just the job for you!*
OpenSpending is about mapping the money. We want to make government finances accessible to advocates, journalists and citizens. Our goal is to collect budget and spending information from across the world and to present it in a form that promotes understanding, analysis and participation. Some of the questions we ask are:
* How much is government spending on health? Is expenditure growing or shrinking? How does this translate into results?
* What are the proportions of different government programmes? What is spending on prisons compared to schools? How much is Ghana spending on education compared to Nigeria?
* How much taxes do I pay into which area of government?
* Our day-to-day work has many facets: working on the core platform, journalistic projects as part of our Knight News Challenge 2011 winning entry “Spending Stories” and working with organizations and civic activists world-wide to set up local budget transparency projects.
<img alt="" src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5224/5639223572_5451048271.jpg" title="OpenSpending at Perugia journalism festival" class="alignnone" width="640" height="640" />
## About the role
We’re looking for a lead developer and evangelist to maintain and further develop OpenSpending and the Spending Stories project.
Some things we look for:
* Strong interest in open government and transparency
* Fluent in JavaScript, Python and HTML5/CSS (include links to any sites you built and code repositories, e.g. GitHub, BitBucket)
* Experience with data warehousing, ETL, data processing and management techniques a big plus.
* An appreciation of design and beautiful things
* Readiness to do travelling, some writing, public speaking and to promote OKFN projects
* This person will work closely with the Head of Knowledge to ensure that these activities integrate with the rest of the OKFN’s activities.
## How to apply
If you’d like to apply, please email jobs@okfn.org with the subject line “OpenSpending Tech Lead” before 7th Jan. Please include links to some demos of work from your portfolio, and your CV.

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authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2012/12/Roundup/
title: OpenSpending A Year in Review
---
Just before I turn on my autoresponder and submerge my computer into the blackness of holiday in a concrete box to which I have no access, I thought I'd just quickly wrap up a few of the highlights from this amazing year. It has been very intense - but we've covered a lot of ground, here's a few highlights...
## January
The year kicked off and we launched the Spending Data Working group. This fantastic group of people include some of the world experts and techies who are passionate about linking up the money flows across the world. They meet and natter via the [OpenSpending mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending) - drop them a line and join the conversation!
## February
<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7179/6780224656_976bcdee9a_z.jpg" title="PI" class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 1em;" width="250"/>
We were also approached by Privacy International, to ask whether they could use [OpenSpending's global search to find out which governments were purchasing surveillance equipment to spy on their citizens](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/02/24/how-spending-stories-fact-checks-big-brother-the-wiretappers-ball.html). My favourite spending story so far - we had no idea people would use OpenSpending like that!
We also headed out to Bosnia for the first time, where we met the Centre for Public Interest Advocacy - with whom we have now launched a project to build a version of Where Does My Money Go for Bosnia...Luckily - we'd just packaged up the [Where Does My Money Go Assembly kit](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/02/16/thekit.html), to make it a lot easier for people to build their own versions of the site...
## March - May
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8027/7296195082_0ae9bdb2f0_z.jpg" title="GIFT report" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" width="250" />
We put on our scout hats and set out to find some of the most interesting uses of Technology to promote Fiscal Transparency and showcased them in the [GIFT report](http://openspending.org/resources/gift/index.html). We're still looking for these, so if there are any you'd like to point us to [let us know](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).
## April
Off to Perugia for an epic data-journalism training session with the European Journalism Centre... At Perugia the [Data Journalism Handbook](http://datajournalismhandbook.org) launched. Also in April, we built the widgets that allowed anyone to embed OpenSpending's visualisations in a website/blogpost (like this - Nigeria's proposed budget for 2013!:)
<iframe width='700' height='400' src='http://openspending.org/propbudg13/embed?widget=treemap&state=%7B%22drilldown%22%3A%22from%22%2C%22year%22%3A%222013%22%2C%22cuts%22%3A%7B%7D%2C%22drilldowns%22%3A%5B%22from%22%5D%7D&width=700&height=400' frameborder='0'></iframe>
We promise we'll write up the widgets soon, we really should tell people about them!
## June
We finally got a BETA version of the IATI dataset loaded into OpenSpending. There are still a lot of gaps to fill. But it's up! Interested in helping to fill the gaps - the guys on the [Open Development List](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-development) are your friends.
## July & August
<img alt="" src="http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6032/6309941378_b0a365ce28.jpg" title="Athens to Berlin" class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 1em;" width="250" />
*Image credits: [quapan](http://www.flickr.com/photos/hinkelstone/) on Flickr*
Lucy kicked off the [Athens to Berlin series](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/07/05/OSI.html) travelling Europe to get a better understanding of the problems faced by organisations working in the field of government financial transparency all around Europe... Then - no rest for the wicked - she and [Laura Newman headed out to India](http://in.okfn.org/2012/09/18/okfn-india-trip-the-roundup/) to continue the quest.
## September
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8443/7980196066_d4aa29eb0d_z.jpg" title="Spending data handbook" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;"width="250" />
OKFestival! And we had a fantastic panel - [the Money and the Many](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/09/24/OKFest-Followup.html) bringing together members of the working group on open spending data from 3 continents to share their experiences on barriers and challenges in engaging citizens en masse to care about the issues presented in budgets and spending.
We also worked with data.gov.uk to help build [an oversight tool](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/09/13/uk25k-reporting.html) to see which departments were complying with their transparency obligations... handy...
## October
We got our act together and did something we'd been meaning to for ages. Drawing up a straw-man for a [standard for transaction-level spending data](http://openspending.org/resources/standard/index.html), and the discussions began. We'll continue these discussions in the New Year. Interested in adding your thoughts? [Here's your channel](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).
A bonus for us was that both Libération and Le Monde used OpenSpending widgets to illustrate their articles on debates around the newly announced PLF. Both slightly different takes on the data and had sliced it in different ways - great to see...
<iframe width='700' height='400' src='http://openspending.org/depenses_budget_2013/embed?widget=treemap&state=%7B%22drilldowns%22%3A%5B%22type%22%5D%2C%22year%22%3A2013%2C%22cuts%22%3A%7B%7D%7D&width=700&height=400' frameborder='0'></iframe>
## November
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8209/8173093376_13cb662efa.jpg" title="Tax evasion spotting" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" width="250" />
Ouch - November was packed. We kicked off at MozFest with the [School of Data Expeditions](http://schoolofdata.org/2012/11/14/data-expeditions-at-mozfest/), where our lovely new addition to the team, Lisa Evans lead the mini army of tax evasion-spotters. From there ran headlong straight into a 4 day Spending Data Handbook Sprint and then headed out to Bosnia for the [kickoff workshop of our Bosnia project](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/11/26/Sarajevo-Workshop-Writeup.html).
For Friedrich, who can never get enough of back to back travelling, it didn't end there. From Bosnia he headed straight back to London for the [Open Interests Hackathon](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/10/22/open-interests.html), while I headed out to New York to attend the second TABridge session - bringing together techies and transparency organisations from around the world and locking them into an enclosed space until they solve the transparency needs of the world using technology ;) Lots of great people met, *loads* of hatchling projects...
## December
And so it was December already. We're looking forward to welcoming on board new team members in January. With a bigger team to juggle all of the exciting projects coming up in the new year, we're really looking forward to seeing the results next year...
**See you in January! And if you get a moment in between munching on mince pies and fancy doing some armchair auditing, you know where we are ;)**

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author: $authornamehere
redirect_from: /2013/01/Welcome/
title: Welcome Anders
---
Welcome, Anders!

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authors:
- lisa
redirect_from: /2013/01/open-spending-calendar/
title: An Open Call for Ideas - How Would You Use OpenSpending's Data Calendar?
---
With the new year upon us, it's the time of year when you might be thinking about the calendars you use and wondering how they could work better for you.
Just over a month ago, the <a href="http://openspending.org">OpenSpending</a> team floated the idea of an <a href="http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2012/11/how-openspending-is-getting-the-story-out-of-the-data313.html">open spending calendar</a>
The idea was to monitor some key open spending data sets -- the ones that require work to get the story and that show where government money is going. Journalists can select which data sets they're interested in, and the calendar will alert them when the data is due be released. When it's released, we'll suggest a host of ways to get a story in a second email with a link to where you can download the data. The suggestions for getting a story will be very specific to the data set, but examples are:
<ul>
<li>Links to people who are experts on this data set</li>
<li>Related data sets and replies to freedom-of-information requests and suggested ways to combine them</li>
<li>Clean up the data if it's not already in a usable format</li>
<li>Step-by-step guides for how to interpret the data from our team of statisticians and software developers working on our sister project, the <a href="http://schoolofdata.org/">School of Data</a>.</li>
<li>Links to previous stories on the same topic that were a success</li>
</ul>
Now what we'd really like to know is: Would you sign up for this calendar, and if so, how would you like it to work?
The World Bank offer an <a href="https://finances.worldbank.org/dataset/Global-Open-Data-Calendar/g4sx-dwxc">open data calendar</a>. It mainly shows open data conferences, but also includes announcements and offers users the ability to add their own events and data releases.
We are very keen to hear what you think, and would appreciate if you could take a little time to fill in the form below so we can gauge demand and cater the calendar to your exact needs.
<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dEEwTEQtNWVldmtocFJ3YzZxaFdWWWc6MQ" width="460" height="1300" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0">Loading...</iframe>

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authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2013/01/privacy/
title: OpenSpending community member identifies unredacted private transactions in UK local public spending data
---
A freelance data specialist from our community recently got in touch to let us know that he had used OpenSpending to identify a number of privacy breaches in an individual dataset presented in OpenSpending.
This was due to inconsistent redaction of sensitive data by the local authority. Whilst the majority of these payments were to organisations (hence probably not highly sensitive), there were also a few unredacted payments to individuals. The person who uploaded the data immediately notified their local council, who in turn referred this to their audit committee.
As we take privacy very seriously, as a precaution we have temporarily taken down the UK Local Council £500 spending data, which also featured data from the council in question.
This incident highlights the importance of proper procedures to ensure that data from public sector bodies is properly redacted before being published. The UK government produces a [guideline document for data publishers](http://data.gov.uk/blog/local-spending-data-guidance), which ensures that issues like this are prevented and hence very rare.
Every day people from around the world make use of the database of more than 13 million transactions provided by OpenSpending. The information promotes transparency and helps citizens to hold governments accountable. UK open spending data is some of the best in the world and has already allowed people to get understanding and insight into government spending at a level never before possible.
In this case we’re glad that a member of our community was able to flag up private transactions that should not have been published - leading to these swiftly being taken down. We hope this serves as a reminder for public bodies to thoroughly scrutinise transactional data before it is published.
*The OpenSpending team can be contacted on info@openspending.org for any further questions on this matter.

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authors:
- lisa
redirect_from: /2013/01/How-to-decrypt-a-budget/
title: How to decrypt a budget?
---
If you’ve ever read, or even better tried to explain a budget you’ll be completely aware that budgets are jargon fests.
This would be fine if the budget was just for people who know the lingo, but in the case of a government's budget, well, that’s really something everyone who votes and pays taxes should have access to.
So how do we make budgets accessible to the public? Well there are lots of examples of [journalists](http://www.fsteurope.com/news/is-cash-becoming-extinct/), [non governmental organisations](http://twaweza.org/uploads/flash/budget-visualization-kenya-000/Kenya.html#/home/split=Purpose&spending=Actual&viewType=Bubbles&year=2002-03) and [governments](http://www.flickr.com/photos/hmtreasury/sets/72157632177938360/) doing this. One of the masters of the use of innovative budget glossary is the European Union. For instance: What headline would you find appropriate for a programme, which covers €44 bn in direct farm subsidies and a mere € 0.2 bn for [conservation](http://ec.europa.eu/environment/life/) annually. Well, “[Preservation and Management of Natural Resources](http://ec.europa.eu/budget/financialreport/expenditure/naturalresources/index_en.html)” might not be the name you would find the most fitting.
If you want to get started on a budget that is still carrying cryptic headers you might want to consult the extensive World Bank [budget glossary](https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1gQoR-EKl_xdHJhRDlTTkc5WDA/edit). However, merely knowing what the terms mean often doesn’t help understand the bigger picture of how the budget works. For that you have to understand the terminology in context. The World Bank have this covered too with this [detailed description of the budgeting process](https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1gQoR-EKl_xNUVYb1d2RTdjMFk/edit). This is a good starting point for working with budgets.
If you find better or simpler ways to explain and work with budgets and want to let the community of open spending and budgeting enthusiasts know, then please start a discussion thread on the [open spending mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).

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author: $authornamehere
redirect_from: /2013/01/obi-post/
title: The Open Budget Survey is out
---
Yesterday the [International Budget Partnership] (http://internationalbudget.org/) published their [2012 Open Budget Survey] (http://survey.internationalbudget.org/#rankings) evaluating fiscal transparency across 100 countries. Based on the survey, IBP calculates the Open Budget Index, as a measure for comparing budget transparency across the world. The survey is based on the performance of countries across 125 questions on everything from the independence of state auditors to the transparency of each and every step of the budgeting process.
This year's Open Budget Survey features a data explorer developed in coorperation with OKF. Here you're able to compare how the countries preform in the overall survey or on specific questions compared to their earlier scores back to 2006 in a [timeline] (http://survey.internationalbudget.org/#timeline).
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8193/8405868061_7026f50eb3.jpg" title="The data explorer timeline" class="alignnone" width="640" height="640" />
For each country you're also able to review [each question and score] (http://survey.internationalbudget.org/#profile/) in detail. So whether you're a researcher, journalist or simply immensely curious the survey should offer plenty of opportunities to dig deep into governmental budgetary transparency.
## Join our Community Call on assessing fiscal transprency standards!
At OpenSpending we wanted to follow up on the Open Budget Survey by organizing a Community Call on Wednesday, January 30th 1900 CEST / 1300 EST.
Topic: What questions to ask when assessing fiscal transparency standards of governments?
To join: Simply add your name, SkypeID and agenda items [here] (http://wdmmg.okfnpad.org/16)
If you're wish to follow the discussions on budget transparency and spending standards, don't forget to join our [mailing-list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).

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authors:
- anders
redirect_from: /2013/01/open-budget-survey/
title: The Open Budget Survey is out
---
Yesterday the [International Budget Partnership](http://internationalbudget.org/) published their [2012 Open Budget Survey](http://survey.internationalbudget.org/#rankings) assessing fiscal transparency across 100 countries. The survey is the most comprehensive of its kind and evaluates countries across 125 questions on everything from the independence of state auditors to the transparency of every step of the budgeting process.
This year's Open Budget Survey features a [data explorer](http://survey.internationalbudget.org/) developed in collaboration with OKF. Here you are able to compare the performance of countries in the overall score or on any of the specific questions. IBP has conducted the survey every second year since 2006, and therefore it's possible to check if countries have delivered any progress in terns of ranking or score in a neat [timeline](http://survey.internationalbudget.org/#timeline).
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8193/8405868061_7026f50eb3.jpg" title="The data explorer timeline" class="alignnone" width="640" height="640" />
The survey also enables you to easily examine a specific country in detail as it provides [data on the assessment of each question of the survey](http://survey.internationalbudget.org/#profile/). So whether you're a researcher, journalist or simply immensely curious the survey should offer plenty of opportunities to dig deep into governmental budgetary transparency.
# Join our Community Call on fiscal transprency standards!
At OpenSpending we want to take the opportunity to follow up and discuss the Open Budget Survey and therefore organize a Community Call on Wednesday, January 30th 1900 CEST / 1300 EST.
Topic: What questions to ask when assessing fiscal transparency standards of governments?
To join: Simply add your name, SkypeID and agenda items [here](http://wdmmg.okfnpad.org/16)
If you wish to follow the discussions on budget transparency and spending standards, don't forget to join our [mailing-list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).

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authors:
- samuel
redirect_from: /2013/01/worldbank-guest-post/
title: Can Open Data and Mobile Technology Eliminate the Need for a "Feedback" Loop? - Reimagining the new World Bank Open Finances app
---
This is a guest post by [Samuel Lee](https://twitter.com/OpenNotion) with contributions from [Francesco Ciriaci](https://twitter.com/fciriaci) and [Julia Bezgacheva](https://twitter.com/ulkins).
Efforts to make spending information more relevant and actionable often suffer from low levels of financial literacy, complexity, and just the unfavorable common perception that financial data is boring and hard to understand. At some level, "money" is the universal common denominator. However at scale and without context, it becomes harder to conceptualize and may even become entirely abstract. The layer of "development finance" adds yet more complexity. In the Open Spending space, many of us have tried to bridge this gap on the path of development transparency towards citizen empowerment through open data, data visualization, social media, and mobile technology.
As an embodiment of this same spirit, the [World Bank Open Finances](https://finances.worldbank.org/) team recently released a new mobile application [Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.worldbank.finances&hl=en), [iOS](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/world-bank-finances/id465555488?mt=8), [web](http://financesapp.worldbank.org/). While not ground-breaking, the thought process behind designing and the experience of building the app helps illustrate the challenges of working with financial data in an international development context and sheds light on what might be explored to take the next step. While [social media and mobile technology innovations](http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/jan/04/saving-world-social-media-development-digital) hold much promise and may one day make good on its promise to "save the world," we recognize there is much more that needs to be done to begin realizing that potential. We invite you to join the discussion and share your ideas.
<br>
## An Iterative Approach to Existing Challenges<br>
Dispelling the notion that financial or spending information is boring or difficult to understand relative to other data was an important mental block to cast off. As Dino Citraro of Periscopic puts it, "There is no such thing as 'good data,' there is only good context." Good context is definitely a key to making financial data more relevant and actionable.
So what does better context in a mobile format look like? Here's a breakdown of our latest attempt.
<strong>Location</strong>
<table border="" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1px">
<tr>
<td>
<img alt="" src="https://hackpad-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/hackpad.com_aUeICSaKtLb_p.13000_1358273595716_Screenshot_2013-01-08-05-44-14.png" title="" class="inline-img" width="281" height="500" />
</td>
<td>
<img alt="" src="https://hackpad-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/hackpad.com_aUeICSaKtLb_p.13000_1358273771571_Mexico%20Nearby.jpg" title="" class="inline-img" width="281" height="500" />
</td>
<td>
<img alt="" src="https://hackpad-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/hackpad.com_aUeICSaKtLb_p.13000_1358273696385_WBF%20App%20-%20Nearby%20Project%20Kenya.png" title="" class="inline-img" width="281" height="500" />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<br>
When someone looks at a photograph, often the first thing they do is to look for themselves. Given this dynamic, a pinchable map interface that gives users the chance to intuitively locate themselves in the larger "picture" made sense. Leveraging GPS technology and mashing up financial data with other data at the World Bank (projects, mapping, and procurement), the "Nearby" function helps users explore the question <em>"What is the World Bank doing around me?"</em>
<strong>Language</strong>
<table border="" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1px">
<tr>
<td>
<img alt="" src="https://hackpad-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/hackpad.com_aUeICSaKtLb_p.13000_1358275905994_China.png" title="Chinese language version" class="inline-img" width="281" height="500" />
</td>
<td>
<img alt="" src="https://hackpad-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/hackpad.com_aUeICSaKtLb_p.13000_1358273817346_Screenshot%20Nearby%20Casablanca.png" title="Arabic language version" class="inline-img" width="281" height="500" />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<br>
Have you ever tried to converse with someone who doesn't speak your language? The first World Bank Finances mobile app was only in English, and we quickly felt its limitations. Presenting information in multiple languages was a high priority for this release, which we believe will increase the probability of generating interest, spurring conversation, and moving towards regional impact through open financial data. For this version, the app is available in seven languages- Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. (Please let us know what additional languages we should offer for future releases!)
<strong>Share and Respond</strong>
<table border="" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1px">
<tr>
<td>
<img alt="" src="https://hackpad-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/hackpad.com_aUeICSaKtLb_p.13000_1358275376412_WBF%20App%20-%20Share%20Bolivia.png" title="Bolivia screen shot" class="inline-img" width="281" height="500" />
</td>
<td>
<img alt="" src="https://hackpad-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/hackpad.com_aUeICSaKtLb_p.13000_1358276073480_Fraud.png" title="Fraud report" class="inline-img" width="281" height="500" />
</td>
<td>
<img alt="" src="https://hackpad-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/hackpad.com_aUeICSaKtLb_p.13000_1358276061005_Data%20Accuracy.png" title="Data accuracy" class="inline-img" width="281" height="500" />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<br>
While the app is not designed for more robust manipulation of data like our [web platform](https://finances.worldbank.org/), it allows interaction with financial data in a number of ways. The app offers the ability to share content through social media networks (Facebook and Twitter), e-mail, and SMS. Users also have the option to point out data accuracy issues and report allegations of fraud and corruption.
<strong>Demand-Driven Approach (Contracts and Procurement Data)</strong><br>
<img alt="" src="https://hackpad-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/hackpad.com_aUeICSaKtLb_p.13000_1358276219125_ddc4_0.jpg" title="Development Data Challenge - June 2012" class="inline-img" width="461" height="308" /><br>
From the Development Data Challenge, June 2012<br>
<table border="" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1px">
<tr>
<td>
<img alt="" src="https://hackpad-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/hackpad.com_aUeICSaKtLb_p.13000_1358276914201_Screenshot_2013-01-08-05-44-45.png" title="Screen shot Morocco" class="inline-img" width="281" height="500" />
</td>
<td>
<img alt="" src="https://hackpad-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/hackpad.com_aUeICSaKtLb_p.13000_1358276932098_Screenshot_2013-01-08-05-44-52.png" title="Screen shot Morocco2" class="inline-img" width="281" height="500" />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<br>
Often open data initiatives start as supply-driven efforts and sometimes continue as such. To add real value you need to answer real demand. We were fortunate to connect with like-minded partners to tap into creative views and perspectives. Through a collaborative "ideation" event ([Development Data Challenge](http://developmentdatachallenge.org/), a joint initiative of Publish What You Fund, Open Knowledge Foundation, the Guardian, and other partners) and a Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon, the demand for more open procurement data was [captured and responded to](http://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/the-power-of-open-crowd-sourced-ideas-crowd-powered-solutions). An early prototype created by community developers was a critical proof of concept for parts of the World Bank Open Finances app and resulted in expansion of the Major Contracts dataset from [four months to seven years](https://finances.worldbank.org/Procurement/Major-Contract-Awards-FY2007-FY2013-Beta-version/kdui-wcs3). We are committed to this demand-driven approach and plan to explore more creative methods of documenting and responding to demand in the coming months. (Please let us know if you'd like to [get involved](http://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/contact)!)
<br>
##Remaining Challenges<br>
Adding meangingful context remains a critical challenge and is perhaps a never-ending quest. Specifically, we feel these are the next areas that need to be addressed and welcome your contribution and collaboration in forging the path forward:
<strong>1. Identifying Additional High Value Information</strong><br>
Much like procurement data addressed a need and painted a more complete picture, we are keen to add more high value data towards a more accurate representation of the world. Some of this can also be accomplished through more regular data updates and markers of what has been added since a user's last visit. What other information would you include or mash-up? How might we better leverage the next [Development Data Challenge](http://developmentdatachallenge.org/) or upcoming ["Big Data" dive](http://europeandcis.undp.org/blog/2013/01/11/can-big-data-help-deliver-better-operational-results/)?
<strong>2. Improved Information Delivery</strong><br>
Multiple languages were the first step. Better visualizations are also another area ripe for exploration. As a community, we are long overdue to move beyond pie charts, bar graphs, and tree maps. It is easy to rely on traditional reporting models in a new package, arguably which is not "good context." What can we draw from the [approach of and grafitti artists](http://infosurhoy.com/cocoon/saii/xhtml/en_GB/features/saii/features/society/2012/10/16/feature-01) aboard the [Hacker Bus](http://onibushacker.org/) in Brazil?
<strong>3. Pushing the Limits of Engagement</strong><br>
One of the great powers of social media is in its ability to break down traditional communication barriers. It also allows for a more informed discussion and interaction. Social media integration is just the start- what else can we do to push the limits of open communication, conversation, and engagement? Dr. Agnes Binagwaho, Rwanda's Minister of Health, illustrates the [power of social media coupled with senior official engagement, endorsement, and commitment](http://dr-agnes.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/mondays-with-minister-3-malnutrition-in.html). With growing demand for financial demand from the public [see new civil society driven efforts like Open Budget Morocco](http://floussna.ma/), it is increasingly important to meet this interest with smart engagement and supply.
Are we off base? Would you like to add or highlight other areas? Have relevant experiences or insight to share? Let's talk. Leave comments below or tweet [#WBFinances](https://twitter.com/search?q=#wbfinances&src=savs).
<br>
##Big Dreams, Small Steps<br>
Imagine if all the pieces fall into place. Mobile technology continues to make leaps and bounds and becomes more accessible and affordable. Social media extends its reach and becomes as common as communicating by telephone or in person. Open Data is embraced by all public institutions. Current barriers to access to public information in effect would cease to exist. It would no longer be about who has data, but more importantly what one can do with data- a beautiful world, isn't it? The possibilities for good are endless.
Many development agencies and NGOs are thinking hard about and working on closing the "feedback loop," but a more ambitious scenario would be to eliminate the need for a feedback loop altogether. Imagine being so embedded and engaged in communities of interest that the feedback would be constant and in real-time.
But we don't live in an ideal world, and the promise that many of these ideas may not bear fruit the way they are envisioned to. However, this dream scenario is useful when we think of the intermediate steps along the way to reaching "development utopia."
Open Data is like a map. Coupled with mobile technology and social media, it may show us where we are and help us determine where we would like to go. Having this map is not enough, as we still need to get to our destination.
So let's dream big, but take small steps together.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Links - World Bank finances app:<br>
[Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.worldbank.finances&hl=en)<br>
[iOS/iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/world-bank-finances/id465555488?mt=8)<br>
[Web](http://financesapp.worldbank.org)<br>
[Website](https://finances.worldbank.org)<br>

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---
authors:
- martin
redirect_from: /2013/02/open-spending-in-morocco/
title: Opening Budgets in Morocco
---
This post is written by [Martin Keegan](https://twitter.com/mk270).
In January I attended a conference in Morocco at the
[University of Mundiapolis in Casablanca](http://mundiapolis.ma/), to present OpenSpending. The
conference attracted a broad range of interests: civil society
organisations, journalists, private companies, academics and students,
the World Bank, and the director general of Morocco's Ministry of
Finance. My presentation ([notes here](http://mk.ucant.org/media/openspending-francais/)) showcased the use of OpenSpending in a variety of countries, by
state, civil and commercial actors. We are very generous to [Transparency
International Morocco](http://www.transparencymaroc.ma/) and the University
for their gracious invitation.
The conference covered the efforts in the country, the region and globally
towards fiscal transparency and accountability; there was much discussion of
the proposed Freedom of Information law in Morocco, and the Moroccan
government's efforts towards publishing fiscal data. Several of the
presentations incorporated technology demonstrations. There was some
local press coverage of the conference, and some involvement from broadcast
media (in
French
[1](http://www.lnt.ma/economie/la-transparence-budgetaire-au-centre-dune-rencontre-debat-63825.html)
and
[2](http://www.leconomiste.com/article/902383-la-transparence-budg-taire-fait-d-bat)).
What maybe was not clear to the audience (and indeed, the press
coverage reflected this) was how OpenSpending and similar tools fit
into the landscape. I was directly asked "is the Government of
Morocco going to use OpenSpending?", and very firmly responded that
this was a question for the Government (after all, a representative of
the government was sat only a few paces away). The boundary between
government and private sector (both commercial and civil society) is
always evolving and sometimes contested, and it may be locate differently
in different societies. OpenSpending enables actors of all types (government,
private commercial, private non-profit and individuals) to participate
in discussions of spending, and by changing the costs can help enable
some actors to participate where previously this was infeasible.
The key point why I made in response to this question is that a
Freedom of Information law can in theory substitute for
government-initiated publication of spending data, but that this
should be a complement, not a substitute. What I ought to have
remembered to say was that the access to information, either via FOI
or regular publication does not guarantee that the information be Open
Data, which is effectively necessary for civil society use in
OpenSpending.
It was the experience of [MySociety](http://mysociety.org) that their parliamentary monitoring
tools were never accused of being partisan. It's important to keep
out of conventional politics: we're here to say "if you have transparency,
this is what you get" not "you should have transparency" or "you should spend
more money on this and less on that". The bulk of my presentation was on
four or five country studies, demonstrating the diversity of the places
which can use OpenSpending.
The details of any national budget are a always a matter of healthy
political controversy, and this is [especially true of
Morocco](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/18/us-morocco-protest-idUSBRE8AH0LX20121118). The Moroccan constitution contains an as yet unimplemented undertaking
to establish a Freedom of Information law. It still remains to be seen to what extent this will enable civil society in the future
to obtain more information about expenditures in the Moroccan national budget. In practise Freedom of Information laws will likely not do it alone. They tend often to allow the requester to specify the format of the material published,
or that it be published as open data. Where governments publish fiscal
information AND comply with an FOI law, it can be a [somewhat confrontational
move](http://constitution-unit.com/2011/05/24/we-can-work-it-out-eric-pickles-vs-nottingham-city-council/) to use the FOI laws to compel publication of fiscal data
It was exciting to see that Transparency International Morocco have used the OpenSpending software
for [a site on the Moroccan budget](http://floussna.ma/). They however encountered some challenges with the implementation, which the OpenSpending community will work with them
to help resolve or mitigate these such as language.
By the stage in the conference where the Moroccan OpenSpending instance was
demonstrated, the audience had been subjected to about ten other countries'
spending visualisations, so this presentation by Dr Nesh-Nash came across
as just more of the same, which is an excellent situation to be in. The
audience immediately took to noting that regional spending was arguably
misallocated in his visualisation: this is great progress on the previous
state of not having easy access to this information, and underlies the point
that the raw data, and interpretations thereof, are linked but separable.
[Samuel Lee from the World Bank demonstrated their new mobile app](http://openspending.org/blog/2013/01/29/worldbank-guest-post.html) and its Arabic language features, which was very well receieved from the participants.
Ultimately it would be great if OpenSpending could have an Arabic translation; it's
an official language in about twenty countries, many of which don't
use multiple languages as in Morocco. The public role
of OpenSpending to explain budgetary data depends on its ability to be read in the
languages people use. We're therefore pushing for the localization of OpenSpending into
French as well as another 15 languages. You can check our progress and help contribute at our site on the
[translation platform Transifex](https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/openspending/).
Several participants at the conference placed a particular emphasis on what was termed
"[vulgarisation](http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgarisation)", by which
is meant the business of describing and explaining information intellgible
to experts such that the general public can understand it as well (the word
lacks the pejorative connotations it possesses in English). What this really
means is that in French the motivation of OpenSpending is expressible in
a *single word*. We look forward to follow the developments on budget transparency in Morocco. The broad participation at this conference served to show that the interest will remain strong.

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---
authors:
- anders
redirect_from: /2013/02/Join-hangout-on-the-EU-budget/
title: How to find spending data inside EU's budget - join us for a Google Hangout!
---
<iframe width='600' height='343' src='http://openspending.org/eu-budget-mff/embed?widget=treemap&state=%7B%22drilldowns%22%3A%5B%22main-programme%22%2C%22programme%22%2C%22sub-programme%22%5D%2C%22year%22%3A2020%2C%22cuts%22%3A%7B%7D%7D&width=700&height=400' frameborder='0'></iframe>
<br>
<br>
Last week leaders from the European Union agreed, after months of haggling, on the 2014-2020 EU budget - also known as the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF). The [€960bn budget](http://openspending.org/eu-budget-mff/entries) shown above marked a [widely reported reduction](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20392793) in the budget, but many other stories can be told from the [48 page agreement (PDF) ](http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/en/ec/135344.pdf). Despite accounting for merely [1.08 % of EU's GNI](http://europa.eu/newsroom/highlights/multiannual-financial-framework-2014-2020/index_en.htm), the EU budget should arguably be considered important for every citizen or journalist with a spending nerd hidden inside. Whether you think of [the last minute cuts in broad band investments](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/feb/11/broadband-budget-cut-rural-connection-billion-euro) or the continued commitment to one of the worlds largest [farm subsidy programmes](http://farmsubsidy.org/), the agreement on the EU budget reflects the current priorities of the member states.
At OpenSpending we want to invite journalists and the OpenSpending community to share experiences about how to access and analyse the spending data behind EU's budget. <br>
Join us <strong>Monday 18 February at 19:00 CET / 18:00 GMT</strong> for a Google Hangout.
[Ronny Patz](http://twitter.com/ronpatz) from [Transparency International in Brussels](http://www.transparencyinternational.eu/) will join and share his experiences on access to information on EU spending.
At the hangout we'll discuss how to get started if you want to report on the spending behind the EU budget, and attempt to answer:
<li>Where to find EU spending data?<br>
If you have decided to investigate EU spending, you want to locate who is responsible for releasing the data. We will talk about how to find spending data published at both [EU-level](http://ec.europa.eu/beneficiaries/fts/index_en.htm) and [national level](http://eustructuralfunds.gov.ie/). We have gathered a lot of information in this [map of EU spending](http://openspending.org/resources/eu/index.html).</li>
<li>What's new to report on in the 2014-2020 EU budget?<br>
How do you examine the consequenses to smaller programmes such as [nature conservation](http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/e-u-says-20-percent-of-budget-green-critics-disagree/)?
And how do you detect changes in the distribution of the structural funds?</li>
<br>
If some of the questions above have peaked your interest you should join us at the hangout. If you wish to get started now, have a look at some of the [EU spending data](http://openspending.org/eu-commission-fts) or [notes](http://openspending.org/resources/eu/notes.html) we're already featuring.
Join the Google Hangout by adding your name and email in the form below.
<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1YHLe9oH-Vxv04PQ7Kk6BuocsD06TTfYrc7aK9A9DbCk/viewform?embedded=true" width="760" height="500" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0">Loading...</iframe>

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---
authors:
- anders
redirect_from: /2013/02/OpenSpending-around-the-world/
title: OpenSpending around the world, Week 8
---
<iframe width='600' height='343' src='http://openspending.org/budgetmarocain/embed?widget=treemap&state=%7B%22drilldown%22%3A%22Department%22%2C%22year%22%3A%222011%22%2C%22cuts%22%3A%7B%7D%2C%22drilldowns%22%3A%5B%22Department%22%5D%7D&width=700&height=400' frameborder='0'></iframe>
We're bringing you an update with news from OpenSpending and financial transparency around the world.
### Fresh data and activities from OpenSpending
City budgets: We're thrilled to see how lots of new cities have been added to OpenSpending. Have a look at some of the budgets added recently from [Umeaa, Sweden](http://openspending.org/budget2013politicalview/views/budgetdata-2103-nonpolitical), [St. Etienne, France](http://openspending.org/budget_2013_saint-etienne/views/budget-2013-de-saint-etienne), [Laatzen, Germany](http://openspending.org/stadtlaatzenplan2013), [Rotterdam, The Netherlands](http://openspending.org/begrotingrotterdam2012_3?_view=default6) and [Oakland, United States](http://openspending.org/oakland_adopted_budget_fy2011-12/views/city-of-oakland-adopted-budget-fy-2011-12-dept-program-expenditures-tree-map).
From the 135,000 person town of Cary, United States, you can now browse [expenditures](http://openspending.org/town_of_cary_expenditures/views/expenditures-fy2011) and [revenues](http://openspending.org/town_of_cary_revenues/views/revenue-fy2011) on everything from the [fire services](http://openspending.org/town_of_cary_expenditures/Program/27/entries#Program:27) to [solid waste management](http://openspending.org/town_of_cary_expenditures/Program/52/entries#Program:52) from 2009-2011.
Australia: Data on more than 5,000 [Federal government contracts](http://openspending.org/australian_federal_government_contract_spending/entries) from 2010-2011 has now been added.
EU: [We covered](http://openspending.org/blog/2013/02/14/Join-hangout-on-the-EU-budget.html) the newly passed budget for the European Union for 2014-2020 with a GoogleHangout. In the future we plan follow up with more coverage on access to EU spending data.
Morocco: Last month [Martin Keegan](https://twitter.com/mk270) did a talk on OpenSpending at a conference on transparency in Morocco. Read his take from the event [here](http://openspending.org/blog/2013/02/12/open-spending-in-morocco.html).
### Spending transparency around the world
Earlier this month the Sunlight Foundation (USA) relaunched [Clearspending](http://sunlightfoundation.com/clearspending/), with updated transactional spending data from the United States federal government for 2012. A thorough [review](http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/02/04/clearspending-released-with-new-data/) of the new data found $1.55 trillion in misreported grants.
Haiti: A [report](http://www.cgdev.org/doc/full_text/CGDBriefs/1426965/US-Spending-in-Haiti-The-Need-for-Greater-Transparency-and-Accountability.html) from the Global Center for Development concluded that tracking of US disaster relief spending in Haiti has been nearly impossible due to lack of transparency of NGOs and constractors. The report recommends to require prime contractors to report subcontracting data.
The Comptroller of New York City [relaunched](http://techpresident.com/news/23404/new-york-city-officials-announce-new-dashboard-municipal-spending) its transparency site [Checkbook NYC](http://www.checkbooknyc.com/spending_landing/yeartype/B/year/114) with transactional spending data from across departments. The site offers access to data both via download and API.
### Resources
A new study [Assessing Open Government Budgetary Data in Brazil](http://www.gpopai.usp.br/IMG/pdf/Craveiro-ICDS2013.pdf), has been published by Gisele S. Craveiro and her colleagues at University of São Paulo. The comprehensive paper reviews data from 54 budgetary websites across different Brazilian executive power levels (national, state and municipal), as well as 34 Brazilian audit court websites.
[Sam Lee](https://twitter.com/OpenNotion) from the World Bank reviewed in a [guest post](http://openspending.org/blog/2013/01/29/worldbank-guest-post.html) how mobile technologies can help advance financial transparency.
The International Budget Partnership published the [Open Budget Survey](http://survey.internationalbudget.org/), with detailed data on budget processes across 100 countries. Following the launch we hosted a community call discussing the survey.
The newest issue of [Public Deliberation](http://www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/) is dedicated entirely to participatory budgeting and include several articles worth a read.
### Events on our radar
Open Data Day is coming up tomorrow Ferbruary 23. Join an [event near you](http://opendataday.org/)!
On March 6 journalists who enjoy to dig deep into the rules of the #EUbudget are in for a treat, when the European Journalism Center organise a seminar dedicated solely to [new rules for spending in EU programmes](http://www.ejcseminars.eu/index.php/seminars/350/new-rules-for-the-unions-budget-simplified-access-to-funding-better-accountability-and-further-improvements-of-eu-spending-programmes).
On May 2-4 the [Data Harvest](http://www.wobbing.eu/news/look-back-data-harvest-conference) will bring geeks, journalists and civi hackers together in Brussels to wrangle EU spending data from [farm subsidies](http://farmsubsidy.org/) and the [Comission](http://openspending.org/eu-commission-fts).
We're hosting bi-monthly community calls, and are eager to hear your [ideas](https://twitter.com/openspending) for topics we should cover.
How to get involved? Join the discussion on our [mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).

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---
authors:
- victoria
redirect_from: /2013/02/Budget-Stories/
title: Budgetstories.md - using open budget data to create meaningful stories
---
<iframe width='600' height='343' src='http://www.budgetstories.md/wp-content/uploads/cit-ne-costa-parlamentul.jpg' frameborder='0'></iframe>
This is a guest post by [Victoria Vlad](https://twitter.com/victoriavladd) from [BudgetStories.md](http://www.budgetstories.md/).
Today [Expert-Grup](http://www.expert-grup.org/), an independent think tank based in Chișinău, Moldova, launched [BudgetStories.md](http://www.budgetstories.md/). [BudgetStories.md](http://www.budgetstories.md/) is an open budget website, which includes infographics, budget data visualizations and analysis of the use of public money in Moldova across sectors such as: the public administration, agriculture, education and health. In recent years Moldovan government has become more transparent regarding budget data as well as other types of data. The Ministry of Finance used the World Bank’s [BOOST tool](http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPUBLICSECTORANDGOVERNANCE/0,,contentMDK:23150652~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:286305,00.html), to release detailed and disaggregated data on public expenditures.
Since mid 2012, we’ve however worked to make sense and meaning in the huge sets of data. In November 2012, while finalizing the project concept, members of the organising team took part in the [Balkan Budget Workshop](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/11/26/Sarajevo-Workshop-Writeup.html) organised by the OpenSpending team. We decided to use OpenSpending as a tool for visualizing Moldova's [2013 budget](http://www.budgetstories.md/bugetul-2013/).
Until now civil society (NGOs, journalists and universities) has shown little knowledge or interest in the existence of open data. Our target groups are mainly journalists and policy makers, who will now with this site for the first time have access to “cleaned data sets”. We are therefore hoping that they will republish and reuse the analysis and visualizations, which could trigger increased public attention to inefficiencies identified in government spending. Also, we’d like to expand the network of stakeholders who use the budget data and disseminate information about how the Government of Moldova spends public money.
It is our hope that this project will create a better understanding among citizens and active members of the society about the way the public finance system operates and the way it influences their everyday lives. If we could reach such increased understanding this could ultimately lead to greater contributions from society to the budget process and more efficient spending of public money.
In the future we plan to add interactive modules such as a real time budget calendar and a tax calculator. You can find out more information about BudgetStories.md on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/pages/Budget-Stories/572468439448024?sid=0.5174039560370147) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/BudgetStories). BudgetStories.md is supported by [Soros Foundation Moldova](http://soros.md/) and [Open Society Foundations](http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/).

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---
authors:
- anders
redirect_from: /2013/03/OpenSpending-around-the-world-Week-9/
title: OpenSpending around the world, Week 9
---
### Fresh data and activities from OpenSpending
During Open Data Day we saw activities across cities.In Ottawa [Stephane Frechette](https://twitter.com/sfrechette) helped upload budget data for [city for 2013](http://openspending.org/ottawa_exprev_2013/views/treemap-city-of-ottawa-expenditure-revenue-summary-by-category-2013-estimate).
In Goettingen, Germany the Pirate Party used OpenSpending to visualize the city budget for [expenditures and revenues](http://offenerhaushalt.piratenpartei-goettingen.de/goettingen-haushalt-2011.php?view=).
[Victoria Vlad](https://twitter.com/Victoriavladd) from Expert Grup added budget data from [Moldova](http://openspending.org/sintezabugetuluidestat2013cheltuieli/views/vizualizare-sinteza-bugetului-de-stat-2013-pe-cheltuieli) and wrote a [guest post](http://openspending.org/blog/2013/02/28/Budget-Stories.html) yesterday about BudgetStories.md, a new project which is trying to explain budget data recently released in Moldova.
As a growing number of city budgets are to OpenSpending we're looking to map these in a GoogleDoc, in order to visualise them on the site. You can help by adding the cities, which are already on OpenSpending in [this GoogleDoc](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqR8dXc6Ji4JdHZZNUpWQ2paY3FfYTdFNXkxZXZDTWc#gid=0).
On Thursday March 7, we're organising another Community Call, as Alan Hudson from ONE joins us to discuss: "How to use spending data to estimate unit costs and development outputs across the world?"
All details on the agenda and how to register to join are available [here](http://wdmmg.okfnpad.org/22?).
### Spending transparency around the world
In the Miami Herald, [Nathaniel Heller](https://twitter.com/Integrilicious) of Global Integrity called the state of [financial transparency in Florida](http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/17/3237026/floridas-murky-fiscal-transparency.html#.USD_R5DCCvg.twitter) into question following an unsuccessful launch of a $5m transparency portal.
During this week a one year old [blog post titled "Fiscal transparency (is not enough)"](http://davidsasaki.name/2012/04/fiscal-transparency-is-not-enough/) by [David Sasaki](https://twitter.com/oso), got the (again) from the budget geek community and sparked [this response](http://openbudgetsblog.org/2013/02/28/twitter-activism-is-not-enough/) from the OpenBudgetsBlog. Both posts raise releavnt questions about the importance of access to fiscal data and how to measure the release of such financial data.
In a thorough local spending story Ars Electronica reports how a one-room library in West Virginia purchased a [$20,000 CISCO router](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/why-a-one-room-west-virginia-library-runs-a-20000-cisco-router/).
### Resources
The state of New Jersey (US) has produced a useful [guide for citizens (PDF)](http://www.state.nj.us/treasury/omb/publications/12citizensguide/pdf/citguide.pdf) to make the budget more accessible.
### Events on our radar
March 7: OpenSpending Community Call with Alan Hudson. All details are available [here](http://wdmmg.okfnpad.org/22?).
March 9: [A Hackathon in Ville de Gatineau, Canda](http://gatineauouverte-hackathon03-esli.eventbrite.ca/) will among other topics deal with OpenSpending. The budget from the city [is already up](http://openspending.org/gatineau_deprev_cat_12_13).
May 2-4: [Data Harvest](http://www.wobbing.eu/news/look-back-data-harvest-conference) will bring geeks, journalists and civi hackers together in Brussels to wrangle EU spending data from [farm subsidies](http://farmsubsidy.org/) and the [Comission](http://openspending.org/eu-commission-fts). Information about how to register will follow.
We're hosting bi-monthly community calls, and are eager to hear your [ideas](https://twitter.com/openspending) for topics we should cover.
How to get involved? Join the discussion on our [mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).

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---
authors:
- lisa
redirect_from: /2013/03/spending-stories-open-spending-are-moving-beyond-visualizations/
title: Spending Stories, Open Spending Are Moving Beyond Visualizations
---
<iframe width='650' height='500' src='http://www.pbs.org/idealab/os.jpg' frameborder='0'></iframe>
This post is by [Lisa Evans](https://twitter.com/objectgroup) of the Spending Stories project at OpenSpending and cross-posted from the [PBS Idea Lab](http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2013/03/spending-stories-open-spending-are-moving-beyond-visualizations059.html).
2013 is going to be a big year for the spending stories project. In 2012, as we explained [in more detail on our blog](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/12/24/Roundup.html), we improved [usability of our platform for spending data](http://openspending.org/help/index.html) and developed stronger community ties around the world. Now we're primed to roll out some really empowering resources for the open spending community based on our experiences so far. Here's a look at what to expect in 2013.
###Badge of approval
To build on our reputation as a trusted source of financial data we will introduce badges that show for each dataset uploaded that it has been approved and sanity-checked by our platform editors. So when you embed an Open Spending visualization on you website, you can be clear about the data quality, and when you [search Open Spending](http://openspending.org/search) you can, if you want to, include only approved sources and contributors.
###New analysis engine
Up until now, Open Spending has largely been considered as a visualization tool. While we hope to see the data displays continue to thrive, there's a lot more under the bonnet that we'd like to bring to the front. With the U.K. in a period of austerity, it's quite possible the transaction data can shed some light on this highly sensitive topic. As such, we are planning a new analysis engine for financial transactions that will, among other things, show the biggest suppliers and show the results in insightful visualization tools.
The analysis engine also will feature long-awaited new visualizations for analysis and presentation of the data, such as time-series views and bar charts -- handy for spotting things like spending patterns and cost overruns which could signal inefficiency. Visualizing the transaction data will help you with things such as tracking a supplier, tracking a department, and comparing departments and suppliers, to name but a few.
###Real-time alerts
Via [Journoid](https://github.com/pudo/journoid) we plan to provide real-time alerts for local journalist or activists when new financial data arrives. We are introducing a pilot on the U.K. transaction data, giving new payments as they are published by central government departments or local municipalities.
###Data expeditions
Last year we held a number of workshops that helped people tell stories with data. Drawing on the success of the data expedition at Mozfest in London in November, we are designing online and offline spending [data expeditions](http://blog.okfn.org/2012/11/14/data-expeditions-at-mozfest/) using spending and budget data -- starting with a series of courses taking you from fact checking to the final expeditions where you'll be comparing and analyzing data.
###Data-driven investigations
Countries like [Brazil](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/07/19/Caring-for-your-neighbourhood.html) and the U.K. have begun releasing detailed spending data on contractors. We're looking to enable journalists as well as CSOs and academics to conduct data-driven investigations on spending, in particular transactions. Mentors will assist community members to start working with spending data and sharing methods for how to analyze and visualize these. We will use events and online training sessions to get feedback and advice on how to design the tools needed for scaling investigations of transaction data, which today remain vastly unexplored.
We are very excited about a future filled with more real-time, fine-grained spending data, in which governments are really doing their bit to be accountable -- and we are responding by intelligently analyzing their open data. Together with local newsrooms, NGOs and dedicated citizens around the world, we will work together to map the world's spending data.

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---
authors:
- mark
redirect_from: /2013/03/Launching-the-Aid-Transparency-Tracker/
title: Publish What You Fund Launches Aid Transparency Tracker
---
Publish What You Fund has undertaken some initial [analysis of aid donors’ plans](http://tracker.publishwhatyoufund.org/) to publish to the [IATI](http://www.aidtransparency.net/) component of the agreed [common standard](http://www.oecd.org/dac/aid-architecture/acommonstandard.htm) for aid information. Here, [Mark Brough](https://twitter.com/mark_brough) explains the process they went through to take a series of Excel files, convert them into a format suitable for analysis, and come to some overall conclusions.
The short version: check out the [Aid Transparency Tracker](http://tracker.publishwhatyoufund.org/).
###Why we did this
At the 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, in November 2011, the world’s aid donors agreed a “common, open standard” for publishing aid information. Donors also agreed in Busan to publish “implementation schedules” explaining in detail how and when they would meet this commitment.
The implementation schedules are like a forward-looking calendar, explaining when donors plan to publish specific pieces of data, like results, project documents, and conditions, as well as transaction-level spending data. They also explain whether the donor will be publishing under an open license (public domain or attribution-only) and whether they will be republishing every quarter as a minimum frequency of publication – both are required for IATI compliance. These implementation schedules were published on the [OECD/DAC’s common standard website](http://www.oecd.org/dac/aid-architecture/acommonstandard.htm), but in several different formats, which required a detailed look at each donor’s schedule, as well as interpreting them when donors have completed them in different ways or understood the various options differently.
Pulling all the schedules into a single application allows us to [assess donors’ overall ambition](http://tracker.publishwhatyoufund.org/organisations/); [compare fields across schedules](http://tracker.publishwhatyoufund.org/fields/); show the publication of [fields over time from different donors](http://tracker.publishwhatyoufund.org/timeline/); and provide [CSV](http://tracker.publishwhatyoufund.org/organisations/GB-1.csv), [JSON](http://tracker.publishwhatyoufund.org/api/publishers/GB-1/)/[JSONP](http://tracker.publishwhatyoufund.org/api/publishers/GB-1/?callback=callback) and [iCal feeds](http://tracker.publishwhatyoufund.org/organisations/GB-1.ics) for each donor.
###The original implementation schedules
The implementation schedules were published in individual Excel files, containing three main sheets: general, agency, and activity-level information.
<br><strong>General</strong><br>
Approach to publication: includes timeliness and frequency, licence, initial publication dates, scope of publication.<br>
<table border="" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1px">
<tr>
<td>
<img alt="" src="http://tracker.publishwhatyoufund.org/static/img/sweden1.png" title="" class="inline-img" width="300" height="246" />
</td>
<td>
</tr>
</table>
<br><strong>Agency</strong><br>
Agency-level publication: includes country budgets, organisation documents.<br>
<img alt="" src="http://tracker.publishwhatyoufund.org/static/img/sweden2.png" title="" class="inline-img" width="300" height="246" />
<td>
</tr>
</table>
<br><strong>Activity</strong><br>
Activity-level publication: includes information about when the organisation will (or won’t) be compliant with each field in the standard.<br>
</td>
<table border="" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1px">
<tr>
<td>
<img alt="" src="http://tracker.publishwhatyoufund.org/static/img/sweden3.png" title="" class="inline-img" width="300" height="246" />
<td>
</tr>
</table>
<br>
###Templates
While there is a template for the common standard implementation schedules, several different templates exist, and donors further added to this complexity by modifying the templates, changing options, and adding and deleting rows – in all, we counted eleven different versions. Importing the schedules proved difficult because of this. In addition, some donors published their Excel-based templates in PDF format, which made it impossible to automatically parse them. In these cases, it was necessary to copy and paste the same data into new spreadsheets. While the data was thoroughly checked, it is possible that some human error will have resulted. Some interpretation was necessary to ensure consistency and comparability across the schedules.
###Importing
The schedules were automatically parsed and imported into this application. Publish What You Fund staff then checked the resulting data to ensure that it had been parsed correctly and that it made sense.
<br><strong>Select a file</strong><br>
The user can select a schedule from any publicly-accessible URL. This could be the [OECD/DAC common standard](http://www.oecd.org/dac/aid-architecture/acommonstandard.htm) website, the [IATI website](http://www.oecd.org/dac/aid-architecture/acommonstandard.htm), or the donor’s own website. Where the original schedules could not be automatically parsed (e.g. because they were in PDF), a new spreadsheet was created by Publish What You Fund using the information included in the original schedule.
</td>
<table border="" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1px">
<tr>
<td>
<img alt="" src="http://tracker.publishwhatyoufund.org/static/img/import.png" title="" class="inline-img" width="300" height="246" />
<td>
</tr>
</table>
<br><strong>Check fields</strong><br>
The schedule was successfully parsed and is presented to the user to check and correct, make sure that all information has been parsed correctly, ensure that compliance status is consistent with notes, and score for partially compliant fields if the publisher has understated their publication relative to other donors.
The user can select a schedule from any publicly-accessible URL. This could be the OECD/DAC common standard website, the IATI website, or the donor’s own website. Where the original schedules could not be automatically parsed (e.g. because they were in PDF), a new spreadsheet was created by Publish What You Fund using the information included in the original schedule.<br>
</td>
<table border="" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1px">
<tr>
<td>
<img alt="" src="http://tracker.publishwhatyoufund.org/static/img/import3.png" title="" class="inline-img" width="300" height="246" />
<td>
</tr>
</table>
###Openness begets openness
None of this would have been possible without:<br>
1) A range of great open-source tools:
- [iati-implementationxml](https://github.com/Bjwebb/iati-implementationxml) (originally converted Excel IATI implementation schedules to XML)
- OKFN’s [ReclineJS](http://reclinejs.com/) (for the graphs and timeline; which itself relies on a range of great open source software)
- [Bootstrap](http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/), [JQuery](http://jquery.com/), and [JQuery Tablesorter](http://tablesorter.com/docs/) (for the front-end)
- [Python](http://python.org), [Flask](http://flask.pocoo.org/), and a range of libraries (for the back-end)</li></ul><br>
2) [Implementation schedules](http://www.oecd.org/dac/aid-architecture/acommonstandard.htm) released by donors as part of the common standard, transparently outlining in detail their specific commitments to publish more and better data.
But, we’ve also fed back: iati-implementationxml has been expanded to add compatibility with the common standard formats of implementation schedules; to detect the format of different schedules; and to function as a module that can be imported. We provided a couple of pull request for some small bugs with ReclineJS, and of course, we’re releasing all of our own code as well (although, it could definitely do with some tidying up…).
###What’s next?
Now that we’ve looked at what information different donors are committing to publish, there are two main steps for us:<br>
1) <strong>Doing it again:</strong> we want to check the assumptions and interpretations we’ve made with donors to ensure that they’re accurate, as well as encouraging all donors to be more ambitious about the information they’re planning to publish. As part of this, we’ll also aim to iron out the problems in the schedule.<br>
2) <strong>Looking at publication:</strong> now that we have better data on what donors are committing to do, the question arises: what are they actually publishing, and are they meeting their commitments? We’ll be working on that throughout the year and will release this analysis in October. Until then, all of our code is of course being developed as an [open-source project on Github](https://github.com/markbrough/IATI-Data-Quality).
<br>
<br>We’d love your feedback, so please get in touch:<br>
[email](mailto:info@publishwhatyoufund.org)<br>
twitter: [@mark_brough](https://twitter.com/mark_brough) or [@aidtransparency](https://twitter.com/aidtransparency)
###Links
[Aid Transparency Tracker](http://tracker.publishwhatyoufund.org/)<br>
[Source code](https://github.com/Bjwebb/iati-implementationxml)<br>
Licenses: [AGPL v3](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html) (code); [PDDL](http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/) (data); [CC-BY](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) (report and analysis)<br>
[IATI (International Aid Transparency Initiative)](http://www.aidtransparency.net/)<br>
[OECD/DAC Common Standard website](http://www.oecd.org/dac/aid-architecture/acommonstandard.htm)

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---
authors:
- anders
redirect_from: /2013/03/OpenSpending-around-the-world-Week-11/
title: OpenSpending around the world, Week 11
---
We're bringing you an update with news from OpenSpending and financial transparency around the world.
### Fresh data and activities from OpenSpending
[Tajima Itsuro](https://twitter.com/niryuu) has written an [excellent guide](http://qiita.com/items/4adb658c627d2e6d48e4) in Japanese for uploading data to OpenSending.
The [Open Data Census](http://census.okfn.org/) demonstrated that several countries like Slovenia, Czech Republic and Italy (for EU Structural Funds) have released transactional spending data, which yet have to make it onto OpenSpending. If you can to help to get the data up on OpenSpending, we've added links and other information in this [GoogleDoc](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvdkMlz2NopEdElqWTBJS0Q1Q083VlI3YUFLTl9OY0E&usp=sharing).
We're also working to visualise the cities who are already on OpenSpending. You can help by adding cities in this [GoogleDoc](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqR8dXc6Ji4JdHZZNUpWQ2paY3FfYTdFNXkxZXZDTWc#gid=0).
Last week we had a community call with Alan Hudson from ONE, where we discussed: "How to use spending data to estimate unit costs and development outputs across the world?"
The agenda from the call is available [here](http://wdmmg.okfnpad.org/22?) and we'll follow up with more information about the ideas we discussed.
### Spending transparency around the world
Health spending: Back in January Steven Brill published the long read article [The Bitter Pill](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2136864,00.html), in which he documented the lack of pricing transparency on the American health care market. The story led to this [podcast on Planet Money](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/26/172996963/episode-439-the-mysterious-power-of-a-hospital-bill), where they discussed the key sources of the piece - the medical bill and the untransparent pricing at American hospitals.
EU Structural funds: Consultant and analyst [Luiggi Reggi](http://www.luigireggi.eu/) has [mapped the various formats member states](http://www.luigireggi.eu/Innovation-policies/Home/Entries/2012/11/9_an_interactive_map_to_find_real_open_data_on_Structural_funds_ACROSS_EUROPE.html), when publishing spending data from the EU Structural Fund at national and regional sites. The study shows that Italy and Poland are among the countries delivering machine redable CSV-files, whereas countries like Germany and Spain only release data in PDF.
EU fish subsidies: Last month the European Commission published a report highlighting the [poor quality of data on fish subsidies and over fishing](http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2013:0085:FIN:EN:PDF). About Spain, the biggest receiver of fish subsidies, the report concluded: "A comparable and objective evaluation of overfishing and of economic sustainability is not
possible due to absence of data."
Tax app: In Philadelphia (US) the initiative to reassess property taxes in the city spured the development of an app documenting changes in tax payments [parcel by parcel](http://axisphillyapps.tumblr.com/post/44714283089/how-we-made-the-avi-map).
### Resources
Marc Maxson used the model of [Benford's Law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law) to analyse financial data from a few [public agenices in Kenya and an international non-profit](http://chewychunks.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/the-weekend-i-audited-the-world/). Benford's Law can be used to assess distributions across financial transactions to detect irregularities, which can be an indicator of corruption.
Pulbish What You Fund launched this week a comprehensive Aid Transparency Tracker. [Mark Brough](https://twitter.com/mark_brough) explains how it works [here](http://openspending.org/blog/2013/03/13/Launching-the-Aid-Transparency-Tracker.html).
### Events and deadlines on our radar
March 18: Deadline for proposals for the [News Challenge](https://www.newschallenge.org/) of the Knight Foundation.
March 19: OpenData "Maker" night in London. OpenSpending will be looking into UK government finances at the. RSVP [here](http://bit.ly/Zpo5OU)
March 25: Deadline for proposals for [Journalism Grants](journagrants.org) on international development issues.
May 3-4: [Data Harvest](http://www.journalismfund.eu/dataharvest13) will bring geeks, journalists and civi hackers together in Brussels to wrangle EU spending data from [farm subsidies](http://farmsubsidy.org/) and the [Comission](http://openspending.org/eu-commission-fts). We'll be there and regsistration is now open.
We're hosting bi-monthly community calls, and are eager to hear your [ideas](https://twitter.com/openspending) for topics we should cover.
How to get involved? Join the discussion on our [mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).

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---
authors:
- lucy
redirect_from: /2013/03/AfricanSpending-Knight-News-Challenge/
title: AfricanSpending - Knight News Challenge with Open Institute and African Media Initiative
---
<strong>The Open Knowledge Foundation, in partnership with the Open Institute in Kenya and the African Media Initiative have submitted a proposal to the Knight News Challenge on Open Government with the title AfricanSpending - Monitoring the Money. The focus of this proposal is enabling journalists & CSOs to effectively track government finances.
We want to develop [AfricanSpending](http://africanspending.org/) as a community driven project to monitor the money in Africa, building on the strong base we have already with OpenSpending and pulling in new types of data, very relevant for Africa... </strong>
You can read the full proposal on the [Knight News Challenge Website](https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/africanspending-monitoring-the-money-enabling-journalists-csos-to-track-government-finances/) and if you like it - please applaud it! From tomorrow, you will also be able to provide feedback on the proposals.
Read more on the proposal below!
## Summary
We’ll build a community-driven platform with data resources (leveraging OpenSpending) for journalists and civil society to track public money and mineral wealth, plus related contracts and services, across Africa to combat cronyism and corruption.
## In a nutshell
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/61949275" width="500" height="375" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/61949275">AfricanSpending</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/okf">Open Knowledge Foundation</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
Tracking and monitoring government finances - including those related to mineral wealth - are a major issue across Africa and much of the rest of the Global South. Journalists, civil society organizations and citizens, could and should play a large role in holding Governments to account by following the money.
Unfortunately, African journalists and citizen groups seldom have the fiscal insight or technical skill to “map the money”. As a result, media coverage and public debate is shallow, reactive, and often fails to hold government to account or tell citizens how government action impacts their personal and local lives.
This project is about dramatically improving this situation.
We propose three key aspects of the project work:
### 1. The Technology Platform
We'll customize and extend the functionality and ease-of-use on the www.OpenSpending.org platform, to better track Government money and contracts across Africa. Being able to cover government activity related to the extractive industries and mineral wealth is key. Improving the way that OpenSpending analyses contracts, so that agreements and money flows can be linked, will therefore be a central focus.
We'll also work to improve the ability to link money to people and organizations, enhancing and developing the existing work linking OpenSpending and OpenCorporates, as well as our existing work to link newsroom platforms such as [Document Cloud](www.DocumentCloud.org) and [Poderopedia](www.Poderopedia.org).
Third, we’ll work to improve the relevance and accessibility of the resulting data that will allow citizens to compare the ‘real world’ value of expenditure or contracts, across regions or cities, or between planned and actual expenditure (we can take inspiration here from work like [GM’s Carbon Footprint toolkit](http://visualization.geblogs.com/visualization/co2/#/boiling_water_gas).
By building on the existing OpenSpending platform, and its world-wide user-group, we'll be able to leverage existing technology and ensure our work benefits not just Africa or this project, but a global community.
### 2. Getting The Data
Whilst the platform will make it much easier for journalists and others to access and understand financial information, it will be of little value if it contains little or no data! A second element of our work will therefore be dedicated effort to obtain and process key Government financial information from as many countries as possible. We've already done substantial work here (Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, etc), and run regular DataLiberation Scraperthons and [dBootcamp workshops](https://ghana.databootcamp.org) through the 13 African HacksHackers.com chapters that form part of our network.
<br>
<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8108/8567258995_3185321aa4_n.jpg" title="Oluseun Onigbinde speaks at OKFestival" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" />
<br>
We also have working relationships with groups with relevant knowledge and skills elsewhere (e.g. Nigeria BudgIT and Revenue Watch on extractives, etc) and are assisting the 14-member African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR) with their investigation into the African extractives industry.
### 3. Education, Community Building & Engagement
A platform and data have *no value* if they are not used. The final, essential, part of our work will be developing the awareness and capacity in key communities of journalists, CSOs and civic coders. To do this we will:
* <strong>Build on what’s there</strong>: we are already the lead organizer for the HacksHackers community in Africa (2,000 plus members in 13 chapters) and the [Code for Africa initiative](http://beta.code-africa.org/), that coordinates the largest open data and open government initiatives in Africa through partnerships with the African Media Initiative, World Bank, and Google. We also have good connections with other CSOs working on finance, transparency and extractives across the continent
* <strong>Offer immersive training in the form of ‘Spending Bootcamps’</strong>. Hit and run training has little impact. Our bootcamps, modelled on our existing and successful dBootcamps, will therefore be structured as an investigative process that runs over three months each and helps participants build multi-disciplinary teams (of journalists, technologists, and CSO experts), find data (through DataLiberation Scraperthons), and then build projects (at the dBootcamps) that can be deployed in the real world -- all while learning to use new tools.
* <strong>Manage a [lightweight] fellowship programme</strong>: in environments with severe skills and resource challenges, you need champions who can serve as catalysts and ‘enablers’ to help kickstart mass uptake of new tools or resources. We will therefore run a fellowship programme for 12 annual Spending Fellows, who will initially spend three months each with the core OpenSpending team for intense hands-on training and mentorship, whereafter they will return to be embedded into thought-leader media and civil society organisations. Their focus will be to produce compelling journalism and meaningful civic engagement initiatives from spending data. Going beyond geek tools, we will stress pragmatic ways to demystify budgets and to give “actionable information” that ordinary citizens understand and care about.
## Who Are Our Target Audiences?
<img alt="" src="http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4151/5015379755_c682683dc7_n.jpg" title="Construction Work Africa" class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 1em;" />
We’ll serve four audiences: <strong>journalists</strong> who want to use the site to improve the way they report on government activity, <strong>civil society organisations</strong> who want the tools and information to run “evidence-based” campaigns, <strong>civic hackers</strong> who want to use our data or resources to build thier own tools to improve government and empower citizens, and, finally, <strong>ordinary citizens</strong> who want easy access to “actionable” and customisable versions of their country’s spending information.
We’ll reach the journalists through the growing network of Hacks/Hackers chapters across Africa. There are currently 13 of 20 planned chapters, with roughly 2,000 active members, who meet at least once monthly for skills exchanges and collaborative projects. We’ll reach newsrooms, civic hackers and civil society organisations through the Code for Africa initiative, which uses country-based initiatives such as www.Code4Kenya.org to embed data wranglers into media and NGOs with support from an external civic tech lab to help improve the use of digital tools and data resources.
We’ll also bring together our existing networks topic specific experts in the NGO world, such as the local partners of the International Budget Partnership, with journalists and media organisations to help bring topic-specific expertise together with storytelling ability and develop ongoing relationships to help the data flow between organisations.
## Who Are the Partners?
AfricanSpending is a consortium of strategic partners, all with proven records for delivering on data and civic engagement initiatives, including:
<strong>The African Media Initiative (AMI)</strong>, which is an industry umbrella association of 600+ of Africa’s largest media companies. AMI currently runs a series of digital innovation programmes, investing almost $2 million annually into supporting digital and data initiatives in newsrooms on the continent. AMI also spearheads the Code for Africa initiative, building active citizenry and open data that goes beyond just open government. AMI will drive the media engagement component of AfricanSpending.
<strong>The Open Institute (OI)</strong>, a Kenya-based think/do tank that specialises in implementing open data and open government initiatives. OI is currently the lead implementing agency on Code4Africa on behalf of the World Bank and AMI, as well as for AMI’s dBootcamp data workshops, and on aspects of its www.AfricanNewsChallenge.org programme. OI will be the lead implementer on AfricanSpending.
<strong>The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF)</strong>, the originator of OpenSpending and an international leader on open data tools with extensive experience in building dynamic communities and public engagement around public data. OKF will supply the technical platforms for AfricanSpending, and will host the African fellows at its hubs in London & Berlin.
## The AfricanSpending Fellowship Programme
Fellows will be selected through a competitive public process, and will be expected to return to their media and/or civil society organizations as both ambassadors and peer-mentors. Fellows will be trained to upload and manage data on the AfricanSpending platform, as well as how to build new engagement tools and visualizations based on local needs.
## What Have We Already Built?
<img alt="" src="http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3114/3162948916_5434d7cca2_m.jpg" title="Oil Africa" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" />
The technology base for this project (OpenSpending) is mature and has been extensively used. In addition Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Insitutite & AMI / Code4Africa have already done African-specific work including work in Cameroon and the prototype [“AfricaSpending”](http://africanspending.org/) using national budget data collected for Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. Open Institute meanwhile manages an instance of CKAN as an umbrella public [data portal for Africa](www.AfricaOpenData.org), on behalf of AMI. The data portal, which is used for dBootcamp and other AMI skills programmes, is currently the largest open data source in Africa.
All our code is open source, so will be easy for others in the broader Code4Africa ecosystem to reuse components in different environments, or to integrate our platform with others, such as the Freedom of Information (FOI) request tracking portals already being funded by AMI.
## Support the project
<em>You can read the full proposal on the [Knight News Challenge Website](https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/africanspending-monitoring-the-money-enabling-journalists-csos-to-track-government-finances/)
and if you like it - please applaud it! From tomorrow, you will also be able to provide feedback on the proposals.</em>
Photo credits: David Keats, le Korrigan on Flickr

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---
authors:
- lisa
redirect_from: /2013/03/How-to-Embed-Open-Spending-Databases-to-Your-Own-Website/
title: How to Embed Open Spending Databases to Your Own Website
---
This post is by [Lisa Evans](https://twitter.com/objectgroup) of the Spending Stories project at OpenSpending and cross-posted from the [PBS Idea Lab](http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2013/03/how-to-embed-open-spending-databases-to-your-own-website078.html).
The Open Spending platform is a hive of activity and packed full of colorful displays of spending and budgets from all over the world. Its aim is to help track government and corporate financial transactions across the world and present them in useful and engaging forms.
For some time now, users have been able to [upload](http://openspending.org/help/data-loading.html) any of their own spending to the platform and make a range of visualizations, but now you can embed any of the visualizations on your own website. This means you can have the full interactive display on your site.
### How to embed
Let's say you have chosen a visualization on the Open Spending platform; notice there's an "embed" button at the bottom right of the webpage. The red arrow points to the button below.
<img alt="" src="http://www.pbs.org/idealab/budget-eg-line.png" title="A visualised budget can easily be embedded" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" />
<br>
Just click "embed" and you'll be presented with the code to embed on your website and some options for the size (in pixels) of the interactive.
<br>
<img alt="" src="http://www.pbs.org/idealab/embed.png" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" />
<br>
The rest is just cut and pasting this code extract into your site.
So, if you're a journalist looking to add an interactive to your online news story, an NGO looking to show spending on your cause, or you work in a government department and want to show how you allocate funds, then you can add this code to your site. If you are unsure how to paste the code then contact your site administrator.
The reason it's possible to embed code comes down to the Open Spending widgets.
In very simplified terms a widget is a piece of code you can add into your webpage, and it pulls data -- in this case from the Open Spending database -- so you don't need to store datasets yourself. If you have any difficulties or questions about using the Open Spending widgets, then please don't hesitate to [contact us](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending). If you're curious about how the widget code works, then here are three examples shown in jsfiddle where you can see the full web environment for the:<br>
<br>
<il>[Bubble Tree](http://jsfiddle.net/vitorbaptista/jhaKT/)</il><br>
<il>[Tree Map](http://jsfiddle.net/vitorbaptista/RVdNt/)</il><br>
<il>[Aggregate Table](http://jsfiddle.net/vitorbaptista/mFVMv/)</il>
<br>
The three main visualizations we offer at the moment are listed below along with links to the open-source code on Github.
<br>
### The bubble tree
<img alt="" src="http://www.pbs.org/idealab/bubble.png" >
<br>
Widget code for the bubble tree on Github is [here](https://github.com/openspending/openspendingjs/tree/master/widgets/bubbletree).
<br>
### The tree map
<img alt="" src="http://www.pbs.org/idealab/squares.png" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" />
<br>
Widget code for the tree map on Github is [here](https://github.com/openspending/openspendingjs/tree/master/widgets/treemap).
<br>
### The table view
<img alt="" src="http://www.pbs.org/idealab/table.png" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" />
<br>
Widget code for the table view on Github is [here](https://github.com/openspending/openspendingjs/tree/master/widgets/aggregate_table).
<br>
And it's likely more interactive displays will be available over time. Have fun with the widgets. Let us know how easy you find them to use and when you use them by posting a link to your site on the Open Spending mailing list.
<br>

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---
author: $authornamehere
redirect_from: /2013/04/FAQ-Daily-Bread-in-the-UK/
title: FAQ - The Daily Bread in the UK
---
The annual release of the [budget proposal](http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/oct/18/deficit-debt-government-borrowing-data) from the UK government last month, once again sparked interest in the [Daily Bread calculator](http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/dailybread.html), which was featured at the [Guardian](http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/datablog/interactive/2013/mar/20/budget-2013-how-taxes-spent-interactive).
This FAQ is intended to give you a quick walk-trough on how and why we made the calculations behind the Daily Bread. If you have any questions or comments, we will be thrilled to hear from you on the [OpenSpending list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).
### How does Daily Bread calculate the tax I pay?
We use the tax rates available at the [HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC)](http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/rates/it.htm) to calculate the tax you pay. For each year from 2000 to 2012, HMRC provides information about the amount of money you could earn before you had to start paying tax on it. In 2013-14 you can earn £9,440 before you are taxed.
We then take factors (deductions), which will raise your non-taxable income limit even higher. For instance blind people receive an additional £2,100 to their £9,440 non-taxable income limit, which bring their non-taxable income to £11,600 (that's £2,160 + £9,440).
Other factors, which increase your non-taxable earning are:
- if you are married
- if you have turned 75 years old
- if you are between 65 to 74 years old
We then record the tax bands for each year to the present. Tax bands work as follows: if you earn up to £32,000 you pay 20% of your income in tax, if you earn up to £150,000 you pay 40% of that in tax.
As we have now got the tax rate, we record your [national insurance contribution](https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance/overview) for each year. National insurance is an extra tax you pay so you are entitled to certain state benefits, including the [state pension](https://www.gov.uk/browse/working/state-pension). The contributions you pay depend on how much you earn and whether you're employed or self-employed. You stop paying National Insurance contributions when you reach state pension age. So we have in the script we have different levels of income and the national insurance you are required to pay.
### Which Year does Daily Bread calculate taxes for?
The Daily Bread uses information from the National Statistics report of the [effects of taxes on household income](http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/household-income/the-effects-of-taxes-and-benefits-on-household-income/index.html) to calculate tax rates. Currently the calculations are based on the tax rates for 2010 as these are the most recent figures available from the Office for National Statistics.
We are therefore unfortunately not able to apply the tax rates for 2013-14 to The Daily Bread, even though the rates are available in our [TaxMan](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/08/05/introduction-to-the-taxman.html).
### Why is incomes at £10,0000 at 4,621 despite having a £9,440 non-taxable income?
The Daily Bread include several other indicators in its calculation besides the deduction of the non-taxable income.
According to the [Office for National Statistics](http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/household-income/the-effects-of-taxes-and-benefits-on-household-income/2010-11/index.html), who estimates the average taxes paid by various incomes brackets, the breakdown of the average amount of tax paid by someone earning £10,000 in 2010 is:
- direct taxes: £1122
- indirect taxes vat: £1318
- indirect taxes tobacco: £407
- indirect taxes alcohol: £90+112
- indirect taxes motoring: £268+84
- indirect remainder: £1220
- Sums to: £4621
### How does Daily Bread workout how much my tax contributes to public spending?
We use figures from Country Regional Analysis (CRA) to calculate your daily contribution to public spending. The current calculations are based on data from CRA from 2010, in order to provide synchronized across the various calculations we do. You can find the CRA data we use on the [Datahub](http://datahub.io/dataset/ukgov-finances-cra/resource/52fad6e9-d5b3-4ae7-b5ec-88f921af1623) under the name “OpenSpending-compatible CSV”.
### Where can I find the code behind Daily Bread?
The code for Taxman, which calculates taxes is on [Github](https://github.com/openspending/taxman)
See the introduction to Taxman [here](http://openspending.org/blog/2012/08/05/introduction-to-the-taxman.html).
The code for [Where Does My Money Go](http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/) is available [here](https://github.com/openspending/wheredoesmymoneygo.org).

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---
author: $authornamehere
redirect_from: /2013/04/Visualising-Urban-development-data-at-UN-Habitat/
title: Visualising Urban development data at UN-Habitat
---
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/94746900@N06/8624384287/" title="Explore Visualizations - Open UN-Habitat Transparency Initiative by anderspedersenOKF, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8404/8624384287_53114d0bd0_z.jpg" width="629" height="462" alt="Explore Visualizations - Open UN-Habitat Transparency Initiative"></a>
This is a guest post by [Pontus Westerberg](https://twitter.com/pontusw), [UN-Habitat](http://open.unhabitat.org)
In September 2012, UN-Habitat, the UN agency responsible for promoting sustainable towns and cities, became the third UN organisation to publish data to the [International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI)](http://www.aidtransparency.net/) standard. As the project manager for what we have called “The Open UN-Habitat Initiative”, I am really pleased that we have taken this important step in our journey to become a more open and transparent organisation.
At the same time as we began [publishing IATI data](https://github.com/openaid-IATI/OPEN-UN-HABITAT), we also launched the [Open UN-Habitat website](http://open.unhabitat.org/), which will be the focal point for our open data and transparency work over the coming months and years. At the moment (April 2013) the site contains information about 115 UN-Habitat projects, equivalent to 70 per cent of our current projects. It includes project data required by the IATI standard as well as project descriptions, budgets and information about project partners. We are working to provide additional documents for each project.
Obviously releasing this kind of data takes time. One of our biggest challenges is lack of digitization. Many of our documents have been archived in the database as scanned copies, which means that entering or transcribing those raw data has been difficult. Essentially, a lot of the information would have to be retyped, which is an extremely resource-intensive exercise. Currently we are refining internal procedures to ensure that data is entered into databases in a timely and complete fashion.
The technology behind the site is all open source. We worked with the Dutch company Akvo and their [OIPA tool](http://oipa.openaidsearch.org/api/v2/docs/) to parse the IATI data. OIPA is a search tool built in Django by Zimmerman & Zimmerman, which enables IATI compliant datasets to be easily parsed. The front end was built by Kenyan web agency Verviant in Wordpress and finally the visualisations were created using the bubble charts developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation. All technology we used is available under a Creative Commons license on Github.
However we don’t think that publishing information about the projects we are involved in is enough. By May 2013 we will release all the statistical data collected by UN-Habitat over the years, which will include data on more than 1,200 cities. Some data sets such as the number of urban and slum dwellers has been published before in different formats, while other data sets have never previously been published. Few of the data sets have been published as open data before. In addition to publishing the raw data, we are currently looking at ways of visualizing it – comparing different data sets and looking at changes over time, with the aim of making the site becoming a leading resource for urban development data.
If you have any comments or thoughts, we would be glad to [hear them](http://open.unhabitat.org/contact/).
Pontus Westerberg is project manager at the Open UN-Habitat transparency initiative.

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---
author: $authornamehere
redirect_from: /2013/04/procurement-hack-day/
title: Join us for Hack Day on EU procurement data May 2 in Brussels
---
Next month OpenSpending will be at the annual [DataHarvest](http://www.journalismfund.eu/dataharvest13), where investigative journalists and civic coders dig into data projects from across Europe. The DataHarvest takes it name from the annual release of payments to farmers under the Common Agricultural Policy analyzes by the friends at [Farmsubsidy](www.farmsubsidy.org).
We wanted to follow up on the work on EU procurements, which could become a useful source for journalists. Opented.org did some of the ground work [scraping](http://opented.org/code-repositories/) and parsing of the data from the [European procurement register, TED](http://opented.org/getthedata/).
We're therefore excited to host a Hack Day on procurement data on May 2 before the DataHarvest thanks to support from the [Mozilla OpenNews programme](http://www.mozillaopennews.org/).
**Register [here](http://procurement-hack.eventbrite.com/#)!**
### Why open up procurements?
Procurement data tended, for good reasons, to enjoy much less attention from journalists than for instance spending data. A major reason is the fact that contract information tend to be more about text than spreadsheets, but also because access to aggregate data has been limited. However with access to more than 100,000 public sector contracts annually from the [European procurement register](https://ted.europa.eu) originating from tiny municipalities to large government agencies, there are good reasons to explore if contracts can help fill out the blanks. What is needed is good data feeds, which can provide journalists with contract data beyond the single search options offered at TED. So how does contract data supplement other data sources?
####When spending data is unavailable
Spending data is useful as it provides a clear paper trail of actual individual payments over time, unlike contract information, which often include an indication by the tme of contract award. However today, most European governments have yet to publish transactional spending data as it for instance practised in the [UK](http://openspending.org/ukgov-25k-spending) and [Slovenia](https://www.kpk-rs.si/en/faq/supervizor). When looking at pubic agencies outside government such as regions or municipalities, where a sizeable share of government spending is being executed, access to transactional spending data is yet less common. Therefore procurement data on contracts awarded from any public agency above the EU threshold at EUR 200,000, is often the only resort for a paper trail documenting public spending on particular contractors.
####Getting a sneak peak into publicly owned companies
The public does mostly not have access to information about how publicly owned companies such as power utilitiesspend their money. It is however an often overlooked fact that EU procurement rules apply to all majority publicly owned companies. That is the reason why the public can access more than 500 contracts awarded by the Swedish state-owned Vattenfall in all countries of operation, such as [this contract awarded from their Berlin based company](http://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:12176-2013:TEXT:EN:HTML&src=0), due to the fact that it is majority owned by the Swedish state.
####Contracts - still a soild source for single stories
Journalists can use contract data to tell the stories on questionable [recipients of contracts](http://euobserver.com/institutional/116152) or [no-bid contracts](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-bid_contract), when authorities "forgets" to announce a formal tender process. For many stories journalists have howeever been deemed to [rely on reports from readers](http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/mar/15/nhs-services-tender). An open and searchable database of contracts would innevetable improve the possibilities for covering such procurement processes more systematically. Could it for instance be possible to create an alert, which notified journalists whenever a payment was executed to a supplier (from our spending data), while not appearing in the register for official contract winners (from TED)?
Looking outside the realm of journalism it is worth noting that transparency organisations and international institutions recently have begun looking at more closely at contract data, though until now mostly outside the EU. The last year has seen several new initiatives on procurement including [Opencontracting](http://www.open-contracting.org/) of the World Bank Institute and another [procurement initiative](http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/03/11/announcing-a-new-procurement-initiative/) in the making from the Sunlight Foundation. A few weeks back the folks at WBI helped lay out some ground work for [a draft for a data standard](https://github.com/birdsarah/oc-datamerge-spike/tree/master/draft-standard) based on procurement data from the UK, US, Columbia, the Phillipines and the World Bank. For EU procurement data, I've helped write up a similar suggested draft at [OpenTed](http://opented.org/getthedata/data-standards-in-procurement/).
Tim Davies recently wrote up this account on the work to sort out a [draft for a contracting data standard](http://www.timdavies.org.uk/2013/04/04/developing-data-standards-for-open-contracting/). Initiatives such as these could hopefully be helpful for opening up EU procurement data to journalists.
So join at the Procurement Hack Day in Brussels on [May 2](http://procurement-hack.eventbrite.com/#) as well as at the [Dataharvest](http://www.journalismfund.eu/dataharvest13).

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---
authors:
- anders
redirect_from: /2013/04/Opening-the-Budget-of-Israel/
title: Opening Israel's Budget
---
<a href="http://www.hasadna.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/obudget.jpg" title="Public Knowledge Workshop"><img src="http://www.hasadna.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/obudget.jpg" width="629" height="462" alt="Public Knowledge Workshop"></a>
This is a guest post by Aviv Sharon and Adam Kariv from [The Public Knowledge Workshop](http://www.hasadna.org.il/en/) based in Israel.
<br>
"Show me the money!" If you ask the developers of "Taktziv Patuakh" (Hebrew for "Open Budget"), one of the projects of Israeli non-profit “The Public Knowledge Workshop”, that's more than just a line from a film. The government's true priorities are reflected in the budget, not in its statements. That's what makes budgets interesting. And that’s why looking at budgets is one of the most important things that the public should be demanding from the government. As the negotiations for Israel's 2013 budget draw near, informed public discourse on budgetary matters becomes an even more pressing need.
There are a few important decision-making points in the budgeting process that are most important for the Israeli public to keep track of. First, each law and ordinance gets an overall, macro budget. Then, that budget is broken down into smaller items, on which the state can spend money for purposes like paying salaries, ordering equipment, supporting various non-profits and more. If we, as the public, don't keep track of the whole process, the state can deceive us in several ways: The state might decide on a policy but not budget it, it might budget it but not spend the cash, and it might spend it in ways worth watching closely, like paying suppliers that were chosen without conducting a tender. In short, there are too many leaky holes in this pipe, and it's hard for the public to follow the money.
The flow of money through Israel's coffers became a concern for the developers of "Open Budget" following a large [forest fire on Mount Carmel in December 2010](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Carmel_forest_fire_%282010%29), the deadliest and most widespread fire Israel had ever seen. After the fact, Israel's ministries of Finance and Interior blamed each other for having neglected the fire brigades. On the one hand, the Ministry of Interior claimed that its requests to increase the budget for the brigades were only partially funded by the Ministry of Finance, and very late at that. On the other hand, the Ministry of Finance claimed that it had passed along all the sums stipulated in the relevant governmental resolutions. The Ministry of Finance also added that these resolutions had even greatly increased the funds for aerial firefighting in 2010 compared with previous years.
###Open Budget 1.0
To clear up the argument, activists from Israeli non-profit [The Public Knowledge Workshop](http://www.hasadna.org.il/en/) asked Michael Eitan, then Minister of Improvement of Government Services, to help retrieve data they could use to put together a comprehensive picture of Israel's state budget. Unfortunately, the Israeli Ministry of Finance did just the bare minimum and released several files in various formats, such as Excel, PDF and html. The files were rife with human errors, like parts of the Hebrew text mistakenly written left-to-right. (Hebrew is written from right to left.)
First, the "Open Budget" developers at the Public Knowledge Workshop took the data and organized it in a uniform database. Secondly they built a web-based interface allowing any user to explore the budget. Eventually the database of the Public Knowledge Workshop reached a stage where this was the most accurate and comprehensive database of Israel's budget. Some ministries have even asked to export data from the Open Budget for them, because the state systems were much more cumbersome.
The first version of [Open Budget 1.0](http://open-budget.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) was launched in March 2011 and is still available on [Israel's governmental services portal](http://budget.msh.gov.il/). It allows the public to track budget changes over time, search items for particular keywords and compare the budgeted amounts with the sums spent on each item.<br>
###Open Budget 2.0
Following the first release, the "Open Budget"-developers realized that many of their basic assumptions for analyzing the data were wrong, and that several important features were missing in version 1.0.
For instance, they knew that each item of the budget had an ID number, like item 15 for the Ministry of Defense budget, and assumed that such ID numbers would be consistant over time. This turned out however to be wrong. The Ministry of Finance changed the meanings of many items and sub-items from year to year, and therefore tracking spending on a given item over time based on the ID number seemed meaningless. While most high-level numbers usually kept similar meanings over time, the Ministry of Education (Item 20), for example, had changed responsibilities over time: Namely, it was in charge of sports and culture in some years, but not in others. This made it hard to track the education budget properly over time. Regrettably, the IDs on lower level budgetary items were detected to be even less stable in meaning, and little or no annotations were made available from the government to help observers discern the semantic changes.
Moreover, to track spending on issues such as for instance firefighting, one would need to put together the sums spent on various different items, paying attention to the differences between salaries, procurement and other items.
Last but not least, while the budget may contain all the data, one can't easily determine if the sums are too much, too little, or just right. Nor can that be determined objectively. This is a value judgment, and different people will analyze the budget in different, and sometimes contradicting, ways, and use different data to frame and support their arguments. For example, one could argue spending in the Ministry of Education was appropriate 30 years ago, but has not kept up with the number of students and inflation. Hence, a good system for viewing the budget would allow one to easily examine spending versus those data. What’s more, a good system would then allow experts and civic activists in Israel to publicly annotate budgetary items with their respective opinions, to enrich the budgetary debate with accessible, evidence-based arguments.
These needs are addressed in Open Budget 2.0, which is due for release from the Public Knowledge Workshop within the next few weeks. Namely, the next version of the system will allow users to:<br>
- unify related budgetary items,<br>
- analyze them together,<br>
- compare spending between different items, or between budgetary items and other data sets, which can help put the budget in a larger context, and<br>
- publicly annotate budgetary items.<br>
###Looking Ahead
Our dream at the Public Knowledge Workshop is to make any Israeli governmental expense as transparent as reasonably possible, in real time.
Predictably, one of the biggest roadblocks for progress on budgetary transparency comes from the government itself. Currently we are trying to make the most of the data, which have already been released, but the Ministry of Finance and other branches of government still hold a lot of data sets which they reject to share. Open Budget developers suspect that until they are forced to release them, it will stay that way. Some examples of data sets yet not released are:<br>
- state-provided evaluations of the effect of each budget item on the economy,<br>
- budgets on the ministerial level,<br>
- budgets of governmental agencies,<br>
- details of individual procurements, and<br>
- much greater detail on outsourced activities.<br>
###Recent changes
Presumably as part of the changes made by the new Israeli Minister of Finance, Yair Lapid, the [2012 budget was made fully available](http://data.gov.il/dataset/534) to the public on April 12, 2013. Amazingly, a representative of the Ministry personally contacted the Public Knowledge Workshop to verify that activists at the Workshop had seen the new release. Hopefully, this is a sign of more openness to come.
We encourage new volunteers to [join the effort](www.hasadna.org.il). There are many important causes to contribute to, but extracting knowledge from a bunch of numbers, that is a real challenge.
<br>
Aviv Sharon is a volunteer at the Israeli non-profit "The Open Knowledge Workshop". He writes materials for the public and plans educational projects.<br>
Adam Kariv is a board member of "The Open Knowledge Workshop" and project leader of "Taktziv Patuakh" (Hebrew for "Open Budget").

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redirect_from: /2013/05/Introducing-the-Progress-Page/
title: Introducing the Progress page
---
<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7287/8736993520_01ab3f689d_b_d.jpg" title="The Progress Panel" class="alignnone" width="640" height="406" />
For the past months we've seen many new users come to the OpenSpending community. The community have now added budget data from more than [80 cities](http://apps.openspending.org/maps/) and most recently [universities](http://openspending.org/ugr-spending) have also found their way onto OpenSpending.
While we're thrilled by the uptake in use of openspending for visualising budgets, we've however also noticed that datasets from transactional spending are added less often than we'd hope for. We would therefore want to make it easier for the community to track what other people are working on and offer their help if needed in sutiations like these:<br>
- "I'm working on a dataset, but got stuck cleaning the spreadsheet - who can help?"<br>
- "I've found this excellent dataset on Italian structural Fund payments and would like to add it to OS, but need help translating the columns before uploading."<br>
- "I wonder if someone is already working to add the latest EU budget to OpenSpending?"<br>
### Enter - the [Progress page](http://progress.openspending.org/)
With the Progress page we wish to make it easy to show what datasets people are working on.
### What can you do there?
- Claim a dataset you'd like help to clean and upload to OpenSpending - and ask the list for help if needed
- Check what datasets other people are working on - and offer your help if you can
- Request a dataset you would like to see on OpenSpending
At this early stage we're really interested to hear feedback from you, so let us know how we can make the Progress page useful to track how datasets are moving forward. Share your thoughts on our [mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).
Do you feel like contributing to the code of the Progress page, check our issues on [Github](https://github.com/openspending/dataprogress/issues).

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redirect_from: /2013/05/Procurement-Hac-Recap/
title: Opening the EU procurement database
---
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/94746900@N06/8754972519/" title="OpenTed datastore by anderspedersenOKF, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3797/8754972519_7290637fb4_z.jpg" width="640" height="318" alt="OpenTed datastore"></a>
On 2 May civic coders and journalists from across Europe from Norway to Slovenia met up in Brussels for a Hack Day supported by [Knight Mozilla Open News](www.mozillaopennews.org/) to dig into the EU procurement register, [Tender Electronic Daily](ted.europa.eu). Here are a few of the highlights from the day and where we've been able to take the TED data since the Hack Day.
### Scraping and parsing of TED into OpenTED
Several people got together to build and improve the parsing of data already scraped. The past years has seen several attempts to scrape and parse TED, but past scraping projects have been missing the granular parsing needed in order to make the data useful for investigations.
You can find the latest updates here - we'd love your help:
https://github.com/opented/opented
### User stories - ideas for data journalism on procurement data
During the Hack Day a handful of data journalists sat down to line up questions, which should be investigated by journalists. "If the TED data could speak, what should we ask?"
####Key questions to ask the TED data:
- Where in the EU are highways most expensive to build?
- What are the best ways to expose cartel formations
- What companies are running food services at public school (and what's on the menu)?
- Who is the biggest weapons salesman in the EU?
- Who are the biggest public transport providers - Arriva vs. Connexion?
- What's the relationship between procurement process (time) and what companies gets the contract?
- How many contracts go outside the EU?
- Do the governments purchase from big or small suppliers?
- How can we predict when a project will go over budget?
- What sector is the least competitive (CPV-code vs. average bid)?
- Are there companies within certain sectors that get a suspicous large amount of contracts?
####Using other data with procurement data from TED
- Reconcile with company data from Opencorporates
- Match contracts to actual spending data eg. [UK government spending](http://openspending.org/ukgov-25k-spending)
- Ask Freedom of Information requests to the procuring authority for entire contract (see examples of such successful FOI requests [here](http://www.asktheeu.org/en/request/292/response/805/attach/2/Signed%20Framework%20Agreement%20with%20Eurocontrol.PDF.pdf) and [here](http://www.asktheeu.org/en/request/293/response/909/attach/3/answer%20del%20BD%20GESTDEM%202012%205786.pdf)
- Get to understand what the contracts are actually about with the [official taxonomy of the CPV-code](http://simap.europa.eu/codes-and-nomenclatures/codes-cpv/codes-cpv_en.htm)
### A first look at the TED data
The [full TED data set](http://opented.pudo.org) is now available, thanks to the hack team and in particular [Friedrich Lindenberg](twitter.com/pudo).
You can access the TED data as CSV files EU wide or on a country by country basis. You can also get to know the data format without downloading it, as we've uploaded the [data for Czech Republic (2013)](https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvdkMlz2NopEdEtxU3dDYktRT3ltbTdadnZBcmdaVVE#gid=0) as a sample.
We hope that many of you will dig into it, and examine the contracts.
####Reviewing the data quality
At a community call on May 15, community members decided to begin a quality review of the data available in TED.
We're asking you to help contributing to this [review](https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/document/d/16tXDgtMQVIX5TnzWPPZScRZEd0FkW14Zcc_lche5T_w/edit#heading=h.t1acmd7rub4n). If you'd like to help, please get in touch! In particular the review will examine missing amounts (non mandatory fields), missing contract fields and inconsistent data formats. The quality review can be really useful in order to get a clear picture of the state of the TED-data and help assess how useful it will be for journalists and researchers. We'd be particular interested to hear from those of you who are already working on procurement data in EU countries.
Thanks to [Julia Keseru](https://twitter.com/jkeserue) from Sunlight Foundation and [Ronny Patz](https://twitter.com/ronpatz) Transparency International, Brussels for offering input on this.
###Should OpenSpending include procurement data?
Procurement data is increasingly becoming available in more countries such as [Senegal](http://openspending.org/marches-publics-senegal/entries), [Ukraine](z.texty.org.ua) and [Australia](http://openspending.org/australian_federal_government_contract_spending), where transactional spending data remains unavailble. By definition procurements are clearly different from transactional spending data. While "contract awards" should indicate a final price, they might not be final, as ammendments regularly occur in contracts and did anyone ever hear of an ICT-project, which went over budget? In such a case chances are that you as a journalist or watchdog would prefer to have access to the actual spending data, but if this is not available procurement data can still help you get closer to your story. Contracts might also lack clarity as to when payments are to actually occur. Finally procurement data will most often only include contracts above certain thresholds, which makes significant shares of actual contractor spending unaccessible.
<br>I could be relevant for OpenSpending to add procurement data next to bugdet and spending data, because several countries with available procurement data, do not provide access to the ideal option of transactional spending data. This is for instance the case in most EU member states where procurements from OpenTED today is likely offering the most granular data on public spending.
Do you think OpenSpending should begin adding more procurement data? Let us know!

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redirect_from: /2013/06/french-press-aid/
title: Making sense of French press aid
---
This is a guest post by [Samuel Goëta](https://twitter.com/samgoeta), OKF France.
On May 22nd members of the [OKFN local group France](http://fr.okfn.org/) met at la Cantine, the digital hub of Paris, for visualising press aid data. This workshop held prior to a conference organised by the Social Media Club France on the efficiency on press aid for innovation in the media industry. The results of the 3-hour intensive workshop were presented right after to the audience and the speakers of the conference.
The press has received support in France since Second World War as it is considered critical for ensuring all opinions can circulate in society. These aids are direct subsidies as well as indirect in the form of tax breaks, reduced post fares and subsidised distribution. More recently, in April 2012, the press industry was granted the Strategic Found for the Development of the Press (fonds stratégique pour le développement de la presse) accounting for 60 millions euros of aid. This found was associated with a commitment to transparency, data on the 9 million euros spending, was published in April 2013 on the French [open data portal](http://data.gouv.fr).
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/94746900@N06/8916665396/" title="photo (3) by anderspedersenOKF, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5444/8916665396_25f7da44ca_o.jpg" width="640" height="478" alt="photo (3)"></a>
Following the publication of data on press aid, 5 members of OKF France got hands on the data available. Every participants had no previous experience with data visualization and did not even prepare this workshop. The challenge was to prove that, using open resources and with perseverance, one can visualise a complex system of subsidies in a couple of hours. Data cleansing was obviously the hardest part of the work as participants had little experience of handling data.
The workshop was divided in two groups, one using Open Spending to visualise data on an interactive treemap.
<iframe width='700' height='400' src='http://openspending.org/aidespresse3/embed?widget=treemap&state=%7B%22drilldowns%22%3A%5B%22Division%22%2C%22Nom_unique%22%5D%2C%22year%22%3A2012%2C%22cuts%22%3A%7B%7D%7D&width=700&height=400' frameborder='0'></iframe>
Another group used D3 Javascript library to map data on [an interactive bubble chart](http://okf.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/aidesalapresse/).
The presentation of the visualizations between the two roundtables of the conference raised great interests, as most speakers were speaking about data they could not visualize nor source. The results were directly [published on checkthis](http://checkthis.com/y2ci). The poster spread quite quickly as it reached 400 views in less than 24 hours. This workshop shows that mediation is crucial if we want to develop data literacy. Open data publishers should encourage and support such events as they can also benefit from simple visualisation everyone can use and understand. It also shows the limits of transparency on press aid: although aid is distributed for the development of innovation projects, the details of the funded projects are not mentioned. Officials state it could not be published based for trade secrets reasons. Also we were able to visualize only the tip of the iceberg as data is published for 30 millions € of press aid while total of direct and indirect aids accounts for 1,2 billion € in 2012. This workshop was a small, probably incomplete, effort to understand a complex and opaque funding system for sustaining an industry in the midst of massive changes.

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authors:
- anders
redirect_from: /2013/06/dc-spending-data/
title: Hack for Change helps publish data from Washington DC
---
<iframe width='600' height='400' src='http://openspending.org/dc-vendors-contractors/embed?widget=aggregate_table&state=%7B%22drilldowns%22%3A%5B%22to%22%5D%2C%22year%22%3A2012%2C%22cuts%22%3A%7B%7D%7D&width=700&height=400' frameborder='0'></iframe>
<br>
This weekend thousands of people gathered across United States for a [national day of civic hacking](hackforchange.org). OpenSpending joined organisers at [Code for DC](http://codefordc.org/) in Washington to work on transactional spending data published by the city for 2010 to 2013. The data now allows you to browse spending on [charter schools](http://openspending.org/dc-vendors-contractors/from/public-charter-schools/entries#from:public-charter-schools) and contractors in the [corrections industry](http://openspending.org/dc-vendors-contractors/from/department-of-corrections/entries#from:department-of-corrections).
During Hack for Change we met with journalists and citizens to hear more about what kind of questions that could be answered with the data available.
If you're interested to learn how you can get spending data from your city onto OpenSpending, get in touch via our [mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending) or [Twiiter](https://twitter.com/openspending).

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authors:
- tryggvib
redirect_from: /2013/06/New-Features-in-May-2013/
title: New Features in May 2013
---
![Image by Mosman Library (cc-by 2.0)](https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8205/8206356927_3d5c720658_c.jpg "Badges!")
This is perhaps not a very attention grabbing title for this post, but some cool new features have landed in OpenSpending this month. We're really proud of them so we thought we'd share them with you.
### Badges
We've got badges! OpenSpending administrators can now award badges to outstanding datasets. To begin with there are only a few badges but we foresee collaboration with organisations that want to give their approval to datasets. These organisations can do quality assurance on datasets originating from them but have been modified to fit better into OpenSpending (the badge would then say: *"Yes this is still the data we published"*). These organisations could also give badges to datasets that help their cause (the badge would then say: *"This dataset helps us reach our goal"*).
If you're representing an organisation and want to be able to give out badges, please [get in touch](http://openspending.org/about/contact.html).
If you're managing a dataset, find out which [badges you can get](http://openspending.org/badges) and start collecting!
### Show Analysis Results
After loading a source users can't really see if the load was successful. It may appear to be successful but that might be just because OpenSpending was able to download something.
To provide some kind of feedback OpenSpending now shows the results of the analysis it does on the data. In particular it shows the columns that it found. If there aren't any columns or the column names are weird, users might now catch it before something goes wrong.
### EU Cookie Compliance
This may not be a big thing for you and it might even be slightly irritating but for us this is really important. We want to follow the law and OpenSpending now does so by implementing the EU Cookie Directive (if you want to know about cookies being placed on your computer this is important to you too).
Users are now presented with a small banner that tells them about the cookies and offers them link to a page where they can read more about [our cookie policy](http://okfn.org/cookie-policy/).
### OpenSpending Contacts Map
There are many projects out in the world that work in some way with spending data. We want to be able to connect those initiatives together. They can attract new contributors, learn from other projects and spark new interesting projects (even in other countries).
To help you establish these connections or to find projects you are interested in we've put up an OpenSpending app on [apps.openspending.org/oscontactsmap](http://apps.openspending.org/oscontactsmap/). There you can see the world and find all of the projects that relate to OpenSpending in some way.
If your project isn't there, don't panic! Thera are lot of projects so we might have missed some of you. Please let us know about your project and we'll add it to the list right away. When we're sure we have most of the projects on the list we'll make this map more prominent on OpenSpending's main site.
### Satellite Template
Before May users had to fork [Where Does My Money Go?](http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/) or some other site in order to create their own satellite site (a site that provides context to the data and analysis in OpenSpending).
In May we created a satellite site template so you can easily recreate sites like *Where Does My Money Go?* with a simple config file without having to remove a lot of context specific information.
Just fork [our satellite template repository](https://github.com/openspending/satellite-template) and start configuring your own satellite site.
### Other Changes
There are loads of other smaller changes we did this month. We went through all of the issues in our issue tracker that were labelled as *bug* and fixed them. We tried to make some instructions clearer. We made small headway in getting better IE7 compatibility and we now show the type of a dimension that has been created with the model editor.
### Want to contribute? We need code reviewers!
We're really proud of what we've achieved this month. There are a lot of upcoming changes in the pipelines (in the form of pull requests). Quality assurance is really important to OpenSpending so we don't add anything new to the platform unless it's been looked at by at least one other developer (this is called code review).
If you're interested in contributing to OpenSpending, code reviews are a good place to start. You get familiar with the code base and you can (and should) raise all kinds of questions (so if in doubt about anything, just ask the developers).
There's even a law in open source software (Linus' Law): *"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"*. That means the more people do code review, the better OpenSpending will get. That's why we'd appreciate your help in getting some more quality code into OpenSpending. Look at the pull requests in our repositories on GitHub and comment, both if you see something fishy and if you don't!
**Interested in being a code reviewer? [Get in touch!](http://openspending.org/about/contact.html)**
###Data Clinics and Community Hangouts - going forward
A lot of great spending projects in the making are in the need of community support for tips on how to clean and upload the data.
For this reason we'll therefore begin to run bi-weekly Data Clinics - a community drop in for all kinds of technical troubleshooting you need in order to get working on OpenSpending.
All you need to bring is your messy data, and you'll be able to ask the community on tips on how to tackle your spending data.
The first Data Clinic will take place **today Wednesday 5 June at 19:00 CET / 18:00 BST / 13:00 EDT** as chat via skype (ping: anpehej) or IRC #openspending. [Sign up here!](https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/document/d/1vx9oSJieuqfQ2xdBTyFSTmDRsPRenTrJLKJDo_ZP8z4/edit#)
With the introduction of the Data Clinic we'll now offering community activities every Wednesday - either as Data Clinic or Community GoogleHangout. We hope that you'll join some of the activities!
###Current community projects
Here are some of the projects currently in the works. Many of them could need a helping hand:
- Felix is working on Andalusian procurement data. Data quality seems good, and would be interesting to compare with the data available in OpenTED.
- Cecilia and the investigative journalism team at IRPI has claimed the Italian structural fund data and will be working to add it to OpenSpending. They need help cleaning a few of the data fields so please get in touch if you can help!
- Tarek would be interested looking at spending data from Egypt
- Pierre has helped scrape, clean and upload procurement data from Senegal to OpenSpending. He'll post on the OpenSpending blog soon.
- Benjamin is working on the EU procurement data opendted.pudo.org
- Transactional spending data from the city of [Washington DC](http://openspending.org/dc-vendors-contractors) was added during theweekend as part of #Hackforchange.
###Global Weekend on city spending data July 20-21
The past months has seen strong growth in local spending projects with [86 cities mapped](http://apps.openspending.org/maps/). As we want to support and grow these initiatives we're asking if you'll join us to organise a global spending weekend to open city spending on July 20-21. The spending weekend will offer online trainings and support to your local group to help you get your project off the ground.
Hiroichi (OKF Japan), Mor (Hasadna) and Adam (Open Budget Oakland) have already expressed interest in the idea, and we'd love to hear if you want to be involved.
Have a look and add your self to the [planning document](https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/document/d/1Zh-TPxgMiFDrzk-rNJqL9CmCbbtlZmp2xjWlZ6T20TA/edit#heading=h.6416s7qbnyrt).
### Thanks
Thanks to **Nigel Babu**, **Lucy Chambers**, **Martin Keegan**, **Anders Pedersen**, **Rufus Pollock**, **Stephen Russett**, and **Stefan Wehrmeyer** for their contributions this month (there are probably a lot more who've contributed somehow to this month's features so don't be sad if we forgot you, let us know and we'll add you).
<small>Image of badges used for this blog posts is by [Mosman Library](https://www.flickr.com/photos/mosmanlibrary/) on [Flickr](http://flickr.com), released under [Creative Commons Attribution, version 2.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).</small>

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title: Budget monitoring in an Amsterdam neighborhood
---
Budget monitoring in an Amsterdam neighborhood
The Centre for Budget Monitoring and Citizen Participation (www.budgetmonitoring.nl) is a Dutch organization founded in December 2011. The foundation is the result of a co-operation between active citizens and social workers from the Netherlands and INESC from Brazil (www.inesc.org.br), supported by Oxfam Novib through E-Motive.
The Centre is rooted in the Dutch social movement and implements budget monitoring as a tool to enable citizen’s access to financial information, to promote social participation in public policy making and to monitor the spending of determined budgets of various governmental organizations. In this way, the centre attempts to strengthen civil society and enhance social participation.
Indische Buurt
In 2012 we started with an experiment in one of the neighborhoods in Amsterdam, called Indische Buurt. The Indische Buurt was chosen for the experiment on budget monitoring for various reasons. For example, many active citizen groups, called communities exist and are active within the neighbourhood. These groups already work hard to improve their neighbourhood and are actively developing numerous instruments on participation. Budget monitoring suits their approach well.
Besides, these communities take on a very specific starting point in their work; namely, the citizen and his right on ambition, which can be fulfilled in several ways in his neighbourhood. The communities play an important role to fulfil these ambitions. Budget monitoring and participation contribute to the right of ambitions.
And finally, budget monitoring cannot be implemented as an instrument on its own: it has to be rooted in social movement. The communities in the Indische buurt were already active within various areas therefore, it has been convenient to experiment with budget monitoring in collaboration with these active groups.
To start the experiment on budget monitoring based on the methodology of INESC it was necessary to translate the methodology for the Netherlands into a roadmap. The university of Applied Sciences of Amsterdam developed the roadmap Budget Monitoring based on the methodology of INESC , and adapted it to the Dutch situation, after discussions with the communities in the Indische Buurt. In the roadmap, the emphasis is placed on social justice and civic participation and less on human rights in comparison to the methodology of INESC. Budget monitoring comprises of five steps.
The steps towards budget monitoring
In the first step we tried to localize public budgets. This was not very easy because budgets and information about spending are not (yet) transparent in the Netherlands. So, we had to search for information in PDF-documents. In Amsterdam the annual reports and budgets, as well as ‘5 and 9-months reports’ and reports of meetings have to be published at www.oost.amsterdam.nl (and www.amsterdam.nl). It is very difficult to find the proper information, so an expert was needed to find the way in the 1000 pages on the sites. After a lot of research, we built a simple database. This database also included projects in the city of Amsterdam, concentrating on neighborhoods.
In the second step we analyzed the database to understand the budget for the Indische Buurt. We were unable to find all the budgets that were spent in the neighborhood. This turned out to be a common problem with civil servants. As a civil servant told us in January 2012: “We don’t know the budget for the Indische Buurt, every civil servant just knows his own budget”.
This heavy conclusion was also the reason for the local district to start a research on this subject. The result was a pilot on neighborhood budgets. In the next blog we will write more about this.
During the third step we organized a training. The participants of the training were spokespersons of communities and other community members. The subjects matters were: budget cycle, annual report, annual budget. And other subjects, such as how to influence politics, how to make a plan for the neighbourhood?
Part of the training was the practice and theory of budget monitoring in Brazil, by trainers of INESC who showed the group the emphasis on political influence and advocacy. During the training we started to analyze the data available on budgets. For example, we compared the budget of the local district 2011 with the budget of 2013. We also studied a list of subsidies from the city of Amsterdam and the Ministery of internal affairs for the Indische Buurt.
In the meantime, we asked the local district to give us more information. The district, also began to conduct research. The first result of our request was a short version of the annual report 2011 with infographics.
To make a proper Agenda the group decided that they had to know the priorities of the citizens. What do citizens want for their neighborhood? A questionnaire was made based on the results of several participation events in the Indische Buurt.
After detecting the priorities of the citizens, we re-monitored the budget of the local district and re-analyzed the annual report of 2011. We did this by comparing the figures, the local district published. And we noticed, for example, that there was a big difference in 2011 between the budget and the spending of the budget on education, youth, and welfare. Altogether the difference was over 3,2 million euros.
On the basis of the findings during the training and questionnaire, the community members decided to make a perspective paper, with a long-term policy, instead of making just an Agenda for the neighbourhood. The training group used the financial data and went to the political board of the local district to ask questions about budgeting and spending.
The report of this experiment and the questions the communities asked can be seen at: http://www.budgetmonitoring.nl/english/downloads/Brochure%20Budgetmonitoring%20(ENG).pdf.
The report also contains the way INESC is working on budgets from the perspective of human rights.
The experiment has now concluded. But, the communities and the Centre will keep working with budget monitoring. In the past 3 months things changed a lot. For example, the local district made a website containing facts and figures per neighbourhood. In our next blog we will pay attention on this subject.

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authors:
- anders
redirect_from: /2013/06/Next-Community-Hangout/
title: Next Community Hangout 12 June
---
We'll be running another Community call via Google Hangout Wednesday this week.
**When:** 12 June, 19:00 CET / 18:00 GMT / 13:00 EDT - [your time zone](http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=OpenSpending+Community+Hangout&iso=20130612T13&p1=263&ah=1)
<br>
**Where:** On Google Hangout. Sign up in the form below.
<br>
**Agenda:**
<br>
<il>- “How to crunch numbers from the European Investment Bank (EIB)?”. Introduction by Anne Roggenbuck from [Bankwatch](http://bankwatch.org/) about how they analyse loan data from the EIB.<br>
<il>- News from around the community: Who's got something to share - who needs help moving forward?<br>
<il>- Procurement data on OpenSpending: French and Senegalese procurement are among the most recent contributions to OpenSpending. Should this lead to any changes in the way [the upload module is set up](http://openspending.org/datasets/new)?<br>
<il>- Planning the [Global Spending Weekend July 20-21](https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/document/d/1Zh-TPxgMiFDrzk-rNJqL9CmCbbtlZmp2xjWlZ6T20TA/edit#)<br>
<li>Updating budget and spending data in the [Open Data Census](http://okfnlabs.org/opendatacensus/country/). Is your country up to date?
<br>
<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/forms/d/1vi2LNysNsu346-X8H5oIp00OUjDFsiR_pYcQSWrQAiY/viewform?embedded=true" width="760" height="500" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0">Loading...</iframe>

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authors:
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redirect_from: /2013/06/How-to-understand-data-from-EIB/
title: How to understand data from the EIB - what does the data tell us?
---
<iframe width='500' height='400' src='http://openspending.org/eib-energy-lending/embed?widget=bubbletree&state=%7B%22drilldowns%22%3A%5B%22category%22%2C%22location%22%2C%22year%22%2C%22project-name%22%5D%2C%22year%22%3A2011%2C%22cuts%22%3A%7B%7D%7D&width=500&height=400' frameborder='0'></iframe>
This is a guest post by Anna Roggenbuck from [Bankwatch](http://bankwatch.org/).
<br>
The European Investment Bank (EIB) is the house bank of the EU. It has a lending portfolio of about 60 billion euros annually, about 90 percent of which go to projects within the EU.
For each project the EIB is considering to finance, it publishes on its website basic data including a description of the project, its location, the amount of EIB financing, in most cases the loan beneficiary and where relevant environmental impact assessments. The data has its limitations: no machine-readable data is readily available, and it is not possible to aggregate loan volumes.
Machine-readable datasets for individual industry sectors are available on request, though not for all industry sectors (no transport database for instance) and you’ll have to wait one month for the file. With these files you can relatively quickly aggregate and examine EIB lending in a certain country or region like old or new Member States and for different years. Slightly more complex, but still very much possible, is collecting data for sub-sectors (e.g. renewable energy). This is particularly useful if comparing for instance energy efficiency lending in the old Member States of the western EU versus the new Member States, where the potential of and need for energy efficiency measures is much higher.
EIB loans for energy efficiency projects 2007-2011:<br>
- Old EU member states (EU 15): EUR 1,429 million<br>
- New EU member states (EU 12): EUR 354 million<br>
At the same time, the data provided by the EIB is relatively sparse, and the files notably do not include the names of loan beneficiaries, which would allow assessing whether any companies receive particularly extensive EIB support and in which countries these are based.
Another problem is how the EIB categorises projects. Even though the bank uses an official Eurostat classification system (NACE), inconsistencies and unclear attributions create a much rosier picture about the bank’s lending. (See more details for the energy sector lending below.) Note that for a more critical assessment or investigation one needs to consult additional materials like project summaries, EIB project assessment reports (only available on request), or a project promoter’s website.
###Why is it important to analyse the EIB’s classifications?
Take the EIB energy lending as an example. The EIB boldly states that it is a leading institution in the fight against climate change. While the bank does lend significant amounts for renewable energy projects, it also finances a large number of climate-damaging projects.
What the EIB categorises as clean energy is often not clear. This is especially the case when portions of a particular loan are attributed to different, often conflicting EU priorities like financing for renewable energy and energy efficiency on the one hand and security of energy supply (to EU countries) and trans-European energy networks like gas or oil pipelines on the other hand.
By assessing each project individually, we found the following underlying trends in the EIB’s overstated green energy lending:
###1. Unclear classifications
Quite a number of projects in the EIB database we simply removed because they did not seem to be related to energy, let alone renewable energy. For example the [Poland Forestry and Environment project](http://www.eib.org/projects/pipeline/2011/20110329.htm) aims at rural development and includes “afforestation, improved forest management and protection, and small-scale rural and agricultural infrastructure”. The project is classified as renewable energy in the EIB’s database, but after examining all the information we could find, it is inexplicable how the programme relates to renewable energy development.
Confronted with our criticism of its classifications, the EIB argued that Bankwatch analysis is misleading as it lowers EIB’s support to renewable energy (by not considering large hydro and waste to energy projects) and to energy efficiency projects (by neglecting efficiency gains of new co-generation projects). Bankwatch explained that its methodology focuses on sustainability objective (what was an accusation from the EIB side) thus it takes into account wider impacts of projects, like biodiversity impacts of big dams or climate impact of new, greenfield fossil fuel power stations (even if they are considered more efficient than old ones, they are still new fossil fuel plants). EIB accused Banwkatch methodology of not being in line with EU policy (methodology) however Bankwatch had made its methodology transparent and explained main differences and justification for the methodology chosen.
###2. Very broad strokes
In some cases, financing that clearly did not go to renewable energy sources was nonetheless added to the renewables figure, even though renewables was just part of that loan. In case of [a project with the Italian power company ENEL](http://www.eib.org/projects/pipeline/2006/20060248.htm) the EIB assigned the loan to “Renewable energy” even though more than 50% of the total loan of 450 million Euro was aiming at fossil fuels. (See the excerpt from the EIB’s database below. Irrelevant columns were deleted to reduce space.)
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/94746900@N06/9024498649/" title="eib table by anderspedersenOKF, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8129/9024498649_ce560d1a7e_z.jpg" width="640" height="197" alt="eib table"></a>
<br>
###3. Compartmentalisation
Somewhat in contrast to point two, the EIB in many cases focuses too narrowly on the specific activity they finance rather than taking the impact of a project as a whole into account.
For example, a loan over 500 million euros in 2007 for the construction of [a new boiler at the Power Plant Karlsruhe](http://www.eib.org/projects/pipeline/2006/20060303.htm) is considered energy efficiency (and thus boosts the bank’s ‘green energy lending’) even though the project leads to an overall increase in CO2 emissions.
This is especially problematic in the case of greenfield power plants in developing or transition countries that often have a significant potential to increase energy efficiency. EIB money that could be used for measures to decrease energy loss and consumption, has instead financed new and more efficient (or ‘less inefficient’) fossil fuel fired power plants to address growing energy demand.
###What further questions can we ask?
While the EIB's 2011 energy figures have improved over previous years, the share of fossil fuels is variable when considered over a longer period of time. It will be interesting to see whether the positive trend from 2011 continues.
Up to 30 percent of EIB financing is offered as ‘global loans’ to intermediary institutions like commercial banks and different investment funds. Details for such activities are almost never available due to confidentiality provisions by the financial institution. A more in-depth investigation into these loans and the financial intermediaries could offer insightful information on how climate-friendly the EIB’s global loans are.

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title: Next Data Clinic 19 June
---
Earlier this month we organised the first OpenSpending Data Clinic, to offer help on how you can work with your budget or spending data.
At the first clinic we gave feedback on how to format the Canadian budget and how to convert PDFs from the budget of Barcelona.
<br>
The next Data Clinic will be on Wednesday 19 June at 19:00 CET / 18:00 GMT / 13:00 EDT - [your time zone](http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=OpenSpending+Data+Clinic&iso=20130619T13&p1=263&ah=1) via Google Hangout and IRC channel #openspending.
<br>
Bring your spending data and see if the community can help you out:<br>
- How to visualise budget data?<br>
- How to convert spending data locked in PDFs?<br>
- How to format the data the right way?<br>
<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vi2LNysNsu346-X8H5oIp00OUjDFsiR_pYcQSWrQAiY/viewform?embedded=true" width="760" height="500" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0">Loading...</iframe>

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---
authors:
- anders
redirect_from: /2013/06/universities-on-the-spending-map/
title: Budget transparency for an open university
---
<iframe width='600' height='400' src='http://openspending.org/upo-income-budget/embed?widget=treemap&state=%7B%22drilldown%22%3A%22articulo%22%2C%22year%22%3A%222012%22%2C%22cuts%22%3A%7B%7D%2C%22drilldowns%22%3A%5B%22articulo%22%5D%7D&width=600&height=400' frameborder='0'></iframe>
This is a guest post by [José Félix Ontañón](https://twitter.com/fontanon) of [Openkratio](http://openkratio.org/).
The project began by scraping budget documents in PDF format published by the University of Grenade to a machine-readable format with the purpose of making it easier for citizens, journalists and even employees at the university to work with the data, using tools from spreadsheets to visualization suites. The resulting app allow users to download the income and expenditure budgets in CSV format and provides a set of comprehensive visualizations.
The idea emerged at the International Open Data Day, a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world's local, regional and national governments. The Open Knowledge Foundation's local Spanish chapter did a call for participants and the Free Software Office at the University of Grenade accepted the challenge.
The set of tools used for the project included:
* [CometDocs](http://www.cometdocs.com/) (online pdf 2 excel converter)
* [Open Refine](http://openrefine.org/) (data cleaning)
* [DataHub](http://datahub.io) (data hosting)
* [OpenSpending API](http://docs.openspending.org/en/latest/model/design.html) & [D3.js](http://d3js.org) (visualizations)
###The importance on University budget transparency
The Spanish Public Universities are almost solely funded by several Public Administration Offices. With the University of Grenade as an example, the amount of income coming from Public Payments (including college tuition) only raise up to 11% of the total. As a result of the Spanish economic crisis some college tuition rates rose, having a deep impact on the
pocket of those on the verge of being able to pay their studies.
By releasing University budgeting data, the project:
* Highlighted the reality of the resources available at the university
* Helped identify potential best practices in savings that could be used by other universities
* Helped citizens to make smart proposals on why-and-where the public should invest in higher education
Spanish public universities are equipped with system called SIIU (Integrated University Information System) and they are required to report budget data using this
system. Thus in reality most of the technical challenges around developing budgets in electronic and harmonized formats has already been completed. The question is therefore why the Ministry of Education will not make this information available to the public.
###Reactions following the publication of the app
Honestly, budget transparency at universities is not a hot-topic today. Fortunately, a growing community in Spain where David Rey Jordan, a colleague at OpenKratio citizen group, member
of Open University group at OKFN Spain, and a public employee at Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Seville, Spain) encouraged me to replicate the same exercise for Olavide. Universidad Pablo de Olavide University opened its own Open Data Portal on 2012 releasing data about budgets and qualifications. Some visualizations using OpenSpending were done at the Open Data Day.
Find Openkratio on [github](http://openkratio.github.io/ugr-presupuestos/)
Nota: There are some weak points on the data. While income budget is broken down in
four levels, only three levels for the spending budget are available. The official University
spending budget document (with 5 levels) has been published as scanned PDF images
making them virtually imposible to be scrapped.

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authors:
- anders
redirect_from: /2013/06/next-community-hangout/
title: Next Community Hangout 3 July
---
We'll be running the next Community Call via Google Hangout Wednesday 3 July.
**When:** 3 July, 19:00 CET / 18:00 GMT / 13:00 EDT - [your time zone](http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=OpenSpending+Community+Hangout&iso=20130703T13&p1=263&ah=1)
<br>
**Where:** On Google Hangout. Sign up in the form below.
<br>
**Agenda:**<br>
<il>- Taxation and open data: Follow up on discussion from mailing list and the [G8 meeting](http://blog.okfn.org/2013/06/25/what-data-needs-to-be-opened-up-to-tackle-tax-havens/)<br>
<il>- News from around the community: Who's got something to share - who needs help moving forward?<br>
<il>- Status on the [Global Spending Weekend July 20-21](https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/document/d/1Zh-TPxgMiFDrzk-rNJqL9CmCbbtlZmp2xjWlZ6T20TA/edit#)<br>
<br>
<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/forms/d/1vi2LNysNsu346-X8H5oIp00OUjDFsiR_pYcQSWrQAiY/viewform?embedded=true" width="760" height="500" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0">Loading...</iframe>

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---
authors:
- anders
redirect_from: /2013/06/spending-data-party-announce/
title: Join us for a City Spending Data Party and map the money near you!
---
More than half of the citizens of the world [live in a city](http://www.unfpa.org/pds/urbanization.htm). From schools to fire brigades cities are responsible for some of the most important services we can think of when it comes to government. So whether the nearby school is paid by your city, council or [Município](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipalities_of_Brazil) chances are that the service is operated near you and that everyone should have access to information about the money is being spent.<br>
We are therefore thrilled to announce the global **City Spending Data Party - July 19th to 21st**.
**Where:** Add your city to [the list](https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/document/d/1Zh-TPxgMiFDrzk-rNJqL9CmCbbtlZmp2xjWlZ6T20TA/edit#heading=h.f0m4z18ez212)
**Who:** You, other spending explorers and the rest of the OpenSpending community
The Spending Data Party came together thanks to feedback and engagement from [Hasadna](http://www.hasadna.org.il/en/) (Israel), [OpenBudgetOakland](http://openbudgetoakland.org/), [OpenKratio](http://openkratio.org/), [BudgIT](http://yourbudgit.com/) (Nigeria), [OKF Japan](http://spending.jp/) and [OKF Nepal](https://twitter.com/okfn_np). With the City Spending Data Party we want to open budget and spending data from cities to help us all get a sense of where the money is being spent. We hope that you will join to open up the budget and spending of your city!
Register for the [**City Spending Data Party** ](https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/forms/d/1uHNAh9cfP_F5nudGfhV8t0XnNPmFL7cXhkuqWHAMaR4/viewform)!
###Explore spending in your city - dive in<br>
<il>- Do you know how much your city actually spends on education compared to police enforcement?</il>
<il>- Do you want more people to get people involved in the budget of your city?<br>
Maybe you can learn a few tricks from [OpenBudgetOakland](http://openbudgetoakland.org/mayor_13-15_proposed.html) who created a site where citizens have been commenting on the budget proposal throughout the entire decision making process.
<il>- Which companies works for your city, and do they actually do a good job?</il><br>
Cities such as [London](http://openspending.org/gb-local-gla) and [Washington DC](http://openspending.org/dc-vendors-contractors) release transactional spending data that allows you to see what companies clean up the garbage and repair the roads. Let's make many more cities open up their spending data!
<il>- Share what you learn with the community and ask if you get stuck!
### What to do at the spending party?
<il>- **[Load and visualise](http://openspending.org/datasets/new)** the budget of your city or province and add it to the list of [90 cities already mapped](http://apps.openspending.org/maps/) across the world.</il>
<il>- **Open up budgets** from other local institutions such as [universities](http://openspending.org/blog/2013/06/17/universities-on-the-spending-map.html), public utilities or housing corporations.</il>
<il>- **Learn from online trainings** how to visualise budgets, how to analyse spending data or how you can set up [a local OpenSpending satellite site](https://github.com/openspending/satellite-template). We will run various trainings and are eager to hear if you can contribute. Sign up [to do a training here](https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/forms/d/17diF5_alj37kvcY_2Oqx90xKz1aHJtjgVsXmL3yrHlY/viewform).</il>
<il>- **Make OpenSpending better** by contributing to the code. We've got plans for some great enhancements and want to hear what you'd like to make.</il>
Need inspiration? Head over to the [Idea pad](https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/document/d/1Zh-TPxgMiFDrzk-rNJqL9CmCbbtlZmp2xjWlZ6T20TA/edit#), and see what cities have already signed up.
###FAQ:
<il>-I don't know where to get budget or spending data from my city?<il><br>
Fear not! We'll make sure to share guides on how to access budget and spending data from your city and will also organise a **Data Clinic on July 10th**, where we'll help you search for data or ask your city for it, if it's not available.
<br>
Would you like to join us mapping the money near you on **July 19th to 21st**? Register for the **City Spending Data Party** below!
<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1uHNAh9cfP_F5nudGfhV8t0XnNPmFL7cXhkuqWHAMaR4/viewform?embedded=true" width="760" height="500" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0">Loading...</iframe>

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authors:
- anders
redirect_from: /2013/07/project-and-community-proposal/
title: Supporting growth of the OS project and community - a proposal
---
Over the last few years OpenSpending has seen rapid growth in terms of technology, datasets, and community. As with many projects when they achieve a certain threshold of success and activity, the time has come to bring a bit more structure to the growth of the community and development of the project in order to empower more explicitly and more formally the growing array of stakeholders in the project.<br>
OpenSpending has always a been a community project. This proposal seeks to reflect this more formally in the governance and organization. The main proposed action is to establish a steering group to oversee the project and represent the growing number of stakeholders. In addition, there is a plan to establish specific “teams” who are looking after particular areas, in particular, a “technical (code) team” and a “data team”.<br>
We emphasize that the project will continue to have a home, legally and infrastructurally, at the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Foundation will continue to be strongly committed to the project.
This information along with further details is avalable in [this public and commentable google doc](https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/document/d/12FVxSQQBovNGnGdtujecFoRs54LBqgp4zDgH0tdeQdk/edit#heading=h.19te6xx0f1ol) - please add comments there or share your feedback on [the OpenSpending mailing list](http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending).

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authors:
- tryggvib
redirect_from: /2013/07/New-Features-in-June-2013/
title: New Features in June 2013
---
![Image by GemiTux (cc-by 2.0)](http://farm1.staticflickr.com/76/196956563_150aee58c0_z.jpg "Outside of OpenSpending!")
The summer is here so shouldn't we be outside? Well, in a way we have. Bulk of the work this month has been on stuff **outside** of the core OpenSpending platform although there have also been some changes to the platform itself.
### Contribution Attribution
First up, and really important to us: **List of Contributors!**
We added a [CONTRIBUTORS file](https://raw.github.com/openspending/openspending/master/CONTRIBUTORS) to the root of the openspending repository, just like you would expect in an open source project like openspending.
If you think your name should be there, we didn't intentionally leave it out. We let *git* list our contributors but unfortunately that's only code contributors, there are plenty of other contributors and we want them in our list as well. Let us know if you are missing from the list and we'll add you!
### Better Documentation
This might seem like a small change, but it's an important one. Our *[installation docs](http://docs.openspending.org/en/latest/install.html)* were slightly wrong, which might have caused users some problems. They also referred to an outdated version of *solr*.
That's been fixed now so we've reduced some frustration involved in getting an instance of OpenSpending up and running. If you notice any places in our docs where improvements are needed let us know, or better yet help us by contributiong improvements.
This month we also released some much needed documentation regarding our development process, to help new contributors (and older ones) to know their way around project contributions. We created a short *[Howto hack on OpenSpending](http://openspending.org/help/hacking.html)* as well as a more detailed documentation about the *[development process](http://openspending.org/help/development-process.html)*. For code reviewers we also documented some *[guidelines for our code review process](http://openspending.org/help/code-review.html)*.
### Satellite Template
Our [satellite template](http://github.com/openspending/satellite-template/) exists to make creation of satellite sites easier. It was created last month (and based on *Where Does My Money Go?*) but it has already been used to create (or initiate) new satellite sites. As always when a fresh piece of software gets used, unforeseen use cases turn up.
We were notified of those problems and were therefore able to put effort into adapting the satellite template to these new use cases. Some of these changes have been added into the template but as more satellite sites pop up, more changes will most definitely get added.
We encourage you to use the satellite site if you are in the process of creating a satellite site, or want to create a satellite site. Also, let us know if you think we can improve the template.
### Preparations for Inflations
We have been working hard on making it possible to do *fair* historical comparisons with OpenSpending by adjusting for inflation. This is quite a large undertaking but nothing we can't handle. This month we've been laying the foundations for these inflation adjustments.
First we had to collect some data. We decided to start small and start by looking at Consumer Price Indices (CPI) only. These give a pretty good indication about the inflation and are frequently used in economics. The data was collected and stored in standardised form as a [data package](http://www.dataprotocols.org/) and made available on [http://data.okfn.org/](http://data.okfn.org/data/cpi/).
We went through a lot of CPI data available online and chose the best open data resource we could find. If you know of better data we could use, please help us improve the data, because better data results in better inflation adjustments on OpenSpending.
Then we created a small module to read in data packages and called it [datapackage](http://github.com/tryggvib/datapackage). We created a fairly generalised module so that it could reused in other areas of OpenSpending or in other projects. This module, which we implemented in Python and made available in the [Python Package Index](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/datapackage/), almost instantly sparked off an equivalent [module in Java](https://github.com/rossjones/datapackage-java). Then later we received an improvement to our python module. All in the scope of one month. By the looks of it we succeeded in creating a generalised, reusable module. Well done!
Using our datapackage module we then proceeded to build a first version of an economical transformation toolkit, which we dubbed *[economics](http://github.com/tryggvib/economics/)* (yes, we are very creative when it comes to naming our python modules). At the moment it can do basic inflation computations using the CPI data and we made that available in the [Python Package Index](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/economics/) as well. You can add more economical methods and computations if you like!
Now we're set to start implementing inflation adjustment in the core OpenSpending platform. A huge thanks to all the economists, developers, data wranglers, and advisors for their help. July will be an exciting month!
### Blog migration
Another big change coming in July is a more standard blogging platform for OpenSpending. We have been using *[Jekyll](http://jekyllrb.com/)* to generate our blogs statically and serving those static pages via the OpenSpending platform. We decided to move our blog back to [WordPress](http://wordpress.com/). This will make blog contributions even simpler since many people are more comfortable with WordPress than markdown.
We're not quite there yet (look for this change in July) but we called upon our task force to help us migrate the content and get the blog up to speed. We launched a *IRC hack session* where we collaborated on a [script to migrate Jekyll content to WordPress](https://github.com/tryggvib/jekyll-to-wordpress/). The content has been migrated but there are some UI/UX tweaks we want to do before we launch our main blog as a WordPress blog.
If you know your way around WordPress and want to help. Let us know and we'll fill you in on what needs to be done.
### FarmSubsidy
In case you hadn't noticed we also launched and relaunched again the [FarmSubsidy project](http://farmsubsidy.openspending.org/) as part of OpenSpending. We initially launched an improved version of the project (after it was adopted by OpenSpending) on our servers but quickly noticed that we needed a dedicated server for the project.
So we took Farmsubsidy down for a couple of days while we sorted out the server issues and moved it to a dedicated server. After reloading the data onto the new server we were able to relaunch Farmsubsidy so that the user experience should be better than it was in the first few days and now you can really start investigating how the European Union subsidises farms.
### Thanks
As always there were loads of other changes and happenings in and around the OpenSpending project. We would love to get some help to achieve even more in the coming months and like before we want to give a shout-out to all those who helped us in June.
Thanks to **Michael Bauer**, **Gunnlaugur Thor Briem**, **Lucy Chambers**, **Velichka Dimitrova**, **Martin Keegan**, **Dan Lemon**, **Andy Lulham**, **Tom Morris**, **Prakash Neupane**, **OpenRotterdam**, **Florian Oswald**, **Daniel O'Huiginn**, **Anders Pedersen**, **Rufus Pollock**, **Niels Erik Kaaber Rasmussen**, **Joel Rebello**, **Todd D. Robbins**, **Nils Toedtmann**, **Stefan Wehrmeyer**, and **Guo Xu** for their contributions this month (there are probably a lot more who've contributed somehow to this month's features so sorry in advance if you're missing from the list).
<small>Image of window used for this blog posts is by [GemiTux](https://www.flickr.com/photos/gemitux/) on [Flickr](http://flickr.com), released under [Creative Commons Attribution, version 2.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).</small>

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---
redirect_from: /2013/07/exploring-senegal-public-procurements-how-we-turned-pdf-files-into-browsable-data/
title: 'Exploring Senegal Public Procurements : how we turned PDF files into browsable
data ?'
authors:
- pierre chrzanowski
---
<em>Blog post co-authored by Patrick Nsukami (Dakar Linux User Group), Pierre Chrzanowski (Open Knowledge Foundation France) and Tangui Morlier (Regards Citoyens).</em>
<iframe src="http://openspending.org/marches-publics-senegal/embed?widget=treemap&amp;state=%7B%22drilldowns%22%3A%5B%22from%22%5D%2C%22year%22%3A2013%2C%22cuts%22%3A%7B%7D%7D&amp;width=600&amp;height=400" frameborder="0" width="600" height="400"></iframe>
As part of the <a href="http://fr.okfn.org/2013/05/27/open-data-senegal-retour-sur-le-tandem-dakar-paris/" target="_blank">“Tandem Dakar Paris”</a> a Digital Week organized in May by the French Institute, Jokkolabs (Dakar) and La Cantine (Paris), people from Senegalese and French Open Data communities joint their forces during a workshop in Dakar to explore Senegal Public Data.
During our exploration, we have been pleased to find that <a href="http://www.marchespublics.sn/pmb/index.php?option=com_stats&amp;task=afficheTacmaq&amp;Itemid=141&gt;" target="_blank">Public Procurement Data were regularly published on the Senegalese Authority for Public Procurement website</a>. But the information were released in PDF files and therefore difficult to analyze. So we decided to extract the data into machine readable and open format. In a less than one day, 4800 lines of public procurements awarded between years 2012 and 2013 have been extracted into a single CSV file. It was then easy to upload the file onto Open Spending, making the data easily browsable. Here is how we did it :
<h3>Downloading PDF files</h3>
The Senegalese Authority for Public Procurement releases <a href="http://www.marchespublics.sn/pmb/index.php?option=com_stats&amp;task=afficheTacmaq&amp;Itemid=141&gt;" target="_blank">public procurement data as PDF files</a> on a quarterly basis
<a href="{{ site.baseurl }}/img/blog/2013/07/armp.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-329" src="http://blog.openspending.org/files/2013/07/armp-300x159.jpg" alt="armp" width="300" height="159" /></a>
The files contain information on each public procurement contract awarded during this period of time, including :
<ul>
<li>amount of the procurement ;</li>
<li>date of the procurement has been awarded ;</li>
<li>public authority who delivered the procurement ;</li>
<li>private or public entity who received the procurement (the beneficiary);</li>
<li>type of procurement : service, good, etc.</li>
</ul>
We choose to download files from the first quarter of 2012 to the first quarter of 2013 (the last one available).
<h3>PDF extraction</h3>
One of the tricky part was then to extract data from the PDF files. To transform a PDF file to a CSV file, it was important to split the task into small ones, and follow the KISS principle (Keep It Simple and Stupid). That's what we did, see it here :
<strong>Task #1 - Split the PDF files :</strong> First step was to split the PDF into one-page-only files that would be easier to handle by scripts. This means to go from one document, containing lots of pages, for example 100 pages, to 100 documents of 1 page each. <strong><a href="http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit " target="_blank">We used pdftk</a></strong> a free and opensource command lines tool, to perform this operation.
<strong>Task #2 - PDF to XML :</strong> Second step was to turn the tables within the PDF files to an XML document. It is easier to parse an XML document (the structure) than a PDF one. For this task,<strong> <a href=" http://linux-commands-examples.com/pdftohtml" target="_blank">we used pdftohtml</a></strong>
<strong>Task #3 - XML to CSV :</strong> then we wrote a script in perl (but you can do it in python, ruby, etc.) that turned the XML document to a CSV document. <strong><a href="https://gitorious.org/sharedscrapers/aod_senegal/blobs/master/marches_senegal/parser_page.pl" target="_blank">Here is the XML to CSV  for 1 page script</a> </strong>
The script creates the columns and the lines we defined. When we were satisfied with the result for the first page, we wrote another script to apply the first script to all the XML pages (a bash script). <strong><a href="https://gitorious.org/sharedscrapers/aod_senegal/blobs/master/marches_senegal/parser_pdf.sh" target="_blank">Here is the XML to CSV bash script</a></strong>
<strong>Task #4 - Retrieve public procurement data only :</strong> The result was a CSV file containing all the information from the tables, including the data on Public Procurements but not only. The final step was to retrieve only data on "Public Procurement". This has been done by parsing the XML file and retrieving only lines with a specific content. <strong><a href="https://gitorious.org/sharedscrapers/aod_senegal/blobs/master/marches_senegal/parse_csv.pl" target="_blank">The Retrieve script is here</a></strong><a href="https://gitorious.org/sharedscrapers/aod_senegal/blobs/master/marches_senegal/parse_csv.pl" target="_blank">
</a>
<strong>Task #5 - Run all the scripts :</strong> finally, we wrote a bash script to perform all the tasks in a row :
<ul>
<li>split pdf</li>
<li>turn pdf pages to xml ones</li>
<li>convert XML documents to CSV ones</li>
<li>retrieve all the lines on "Public Procurement"</li>
</ul>
<strong><a href="https://gitorious.org/sharedscrapers/aod_senegal/blobs/master/marches_senegal/parse_all.sh" target="_blank">Here is the final bash script</a></strong>
Eventually, we got a pretty good first version of the csv file with all data on public procurements inside. Next step was to ensure the quality of the dataset and prepare it to be uploaded onto Open Spending.
All the scripts created during this part are published in AGPL : <a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html " target="_blank">http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html </a>and can be forked from <a href="https://gitorious.org/sharedscrapers/aod_senegal" target="_blank">https://gitorious.org/sharedscrapers/aod_senegal</a>
<h3>Cleaning and preparing data</h3>
When extracting data from a PDF file, most of the time your csv comes with conversion errors such as misplaced or divided cells. It is important to correct those errors before going any further. Your dataset is a combination of different inputs from different public authorities : you must also ensure that every reference in the dataset has a unique name (public authority, company, etc.). This will facilitate the analysis. Finally, for uploading the dataset onto Open Spending, you must also ensure the quality of the data such as avoiding empty cells, or converting amounts and dates in the appropriate formats. All this is part of the cleaning process.
To perform those operations we used only 3 kind of tools, linux shell tools, a spreadsheet application LibreOffice Calc (but you can also use Excel) and<a href="http://openrefine.org/" target="_blank"> Open Refine</a> (formerly known as Google Refine).
<strong>Linux shell tools</strong> such as awk, grep or wc that help to identify the error and check if they are correctly corrected. They help to aggregate data and be sure that corrections needed were done globally. A text editor can also be used for this step.
<strong>Open Refine</strong> is a powerful application to help you quickly clean your dataset. We mostly used Refine for its “cluster” feature, which helps you find groups of different cell values that might be alternative representations of the same thing, and then let you attribute a unique name to those cells. We used the “cluster” tool once we were sure that the cells contained the correct information.
<a href="{{ site.baseurl }}/img/blog/2013/07/refine1.png"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-354" src="http://blog.openspending.org/files/2013/07/refine1-1024x496.png" alt="refine" width="591" height="286" /></a>
And we used<strong> LibreOffice Calc</strong> for all other operations : aggregate divided cells ; convert amounts in the right currency ; fill in empty cells with a default value.
Here is a summary of the tasks performed during the cleaning process :
<ul>
<li>Fill in empty cells with default values ;</li>
<li>Concatenate values that are divided into several cells ;</li>
<li>Attribute a unique value to same entities (public authorities, companies) ;</li>
<li>Convert all money amount into local currency “Francs CFA” ;</li>
<li>Convert date format from DD/MM/YYYY to YYYY-MM-DD (standard for Open Spending).</li>
</ul>
<h3>Uploading data onto Open Spending</h3>
Once the csv has been cleaned, <a href="http://www.nosdonnees.fr/dataset/marches-publics-du-senegal-publies-par-l-armp" target="_blank">we published the dataset on NosDonnées.fr </a>the French Open Data Hub, under the Odbl licence. The file was then available for all in an open and machine readable format.
<a href="{{ site.baseurl }}/img/blog/2013/07/nosdonneesfr.jpg"><img class="alignnone wp-image-333" src="{{ site.baseurl }}/img/blog/2013/07/nosdonneesfr.jpg" alt="nosdonneesfr" width="341" height="232" /></a>
Last part was to upload and configure the dataset to be available on Open Spending :
<strong>Step #1 - Import and validate the dataset :</strong> assign a name, an identifier, a country, language, a currency and a description to your dataset. Then specify the url of your dataset. The file must be available on the web, this is why we published it first on NosDonnées.fr.
<a href="{{ site.baseurl }}/img/blog/2013/07/import.png"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-334" src="http://blog.openspending.org/files/2013/07/import-300x189.png" alt="import" width="300" height="189" /></a>
&nbsp;
<strong>Step #2 - Create a model for your dataset :</strong> once the file has been validated by Open Spending, you are invited to attribute dimensions related to your spreadsheet, i.e defining which field designate what. The mandatory fields are the field date, the field amount, the field “to” which is the entity who received the contract, and the field “from” which is the “entity” offering the contract.
Fields “to” and “from” must be compounds dimensions, however the model will not be valid. Make also sure you have an unique ID for each entry. In our case we had to assign an unique code for each procurement row since it was not present in the original file.
You can also specify which dimensions you want to be able to browse by in the Open Spending application. These are the facets of your model. We choose “public authorities”, “beneficiaries” and “type of procurements” and “procurements titles” as facets for our model.
Once the model was ready, we saved it. Then, Open Spending started loading the entire dataset. In case of errors during the loading process, you can always come back to your dataset, do a bit of refine and reload it. After some trials and errors, the result was good enough to be published.
<strong>Step #3 - Create a view :</strong> Dataset was now browsable. Last step (which is not mandatory) was to create specific views or visualisation. On Open Spending you can choose among “Table of aggregates”, “Bubble tree” and “Tree Map”. In our case we wanted to see a list of beneficiaries sorted by who received the most. So we choose “table of aggregates” with a view aggregated by beneficiaries. Once the view was created, we could embed it in our website like this :
<iframe src="http://openspending.org/marches-publics-senegal/embed?widget=aggregate_table&amp;state=%7B%22drilldowns%22%3A%5B%22to%22%5D%2C%22year%22%3A2013%2C%22cuts%22%3A%7B%7D%7D&amp;width=600&amp;height=400" frameborder="0" width="600" height="400"></iframe>
&nbsp;
So that’s all ! <a href="http://openspending.org/marches-publics-senegal" target="_blank">Senegal Public Procurements are now available on Open Spending</a> and easily browsable. We hope this article will be helpful for your exploration into other country's public procurements or PDF files.

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---
redirect_from: /2013/07/join-the-openspending-data-wranglers-and-help-open-up-finances-around-the-world/
title: Join the OpenSpending data wranglers and help open up finances around the world!
authors:
- Anders Pedersen
---
<p dir="ltr">Do you like sharing your skills for working with spending data? Would you like to help other community members to clean budget data? We are looking for volunteer Data Wranglers to prepare and load data into OpenSpending and to support community members with data-related issues.
<p dir="ltr">
<h2 dir="ltr">How it works</h2>
<p dir="ltr">As a Data Wrangler you will help prepare and upload data to OpenSpending. You’ll work on things like:
<ul>
<li dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">Clean the data: Spending data often suffer from being messy and full of peculiar errors. You will be there to give the data some care and attendance with tools such as <a href="http://schoolofdata.org/handbook/recipes/cleaning-data-with-refine/">Open Refine</a> to fix the mess.
</li>
<li dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">Sanity check: Sometimes <a href="http://blog.okfn.org/2013/04/22/reinhart-rogoff-revisited-why-we-need-open-data-in-economics/">a sanity check</a> from you is needed to confirm that the numbers add up and that the budget actually makes sense.
</li>
<li dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">Format the data: You will need to fit the data for the OpenSpending <a href="http://openspending.org/help/data-loading.html">load function</a>.
</li>
<li dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">Keep track of spending data waiting in line at the <a href="http://progress.openspending.org/">Progress Page</a>. At OpenSpending we would like to upload datasets quickly after their discovery.
</li>
<li dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">Share tips and tricks on how to work with spending data with the community of users at our Data Clinics, trainings and Spending Data Parties.
</li>
</ul>
<h2 dir="ltr">Qualifications</h2>
<p dir="ltr">The most important requirement is enthusiasm! In addition, if you know how to use a spreadsheet and what a CSV file is that’s more than sufficient. We have a strong community who can help you grow your data skills. Programming skills and detailed knowledge of budgets is a plus but not required;-)
<p dir="ltr">We will provide a short induction on how to work with OpenSpending and you will also have your peers in the data team to help out.
<h2 dir="ltr">What does it take?</h2>
<ul>
<li dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">For joining the Data Team as Data Wrangler we ask you to commit 3-5 hours per month.
</li>
<li dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">We generally coordinate the work in Spending Data sprints, where you and the team upload a series of datasets within a designated period of time (e.g. 2 weeks). By working in sprints you can contain the required workload, while still harvesting the benefits of working closely with fellow data wranglers via IRC, Skype and Hangout. We emphasize that work can also be done asynchronously -- so if, say, you only have an hour free every Sunday at a particular time, that’s absolutely fine too!
</li>
<li dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">We will feature your profile on the OpenSpending site along with the rest of the Data Team.
</li>
</ul>
The first training session for our team of Data Wranglers will take place on <strong>Thursday 18 July</strong>, so register your interest as soon as possible!
<p dir="ltr">To apply to become an OpenSpending Data Wrangler fill in <strong>the application form below</strong> and we will get back to you as soon as possible. For questions about what the role, get in touch with us at: info [at] openspeding [dot] org.
<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1jL4lGrC_z577r7iQLcJw_PYzDCNzKrPh-QPPl2q4QMM/viewform?embedded=true" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" width="600" height="750"></iframe>

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---
redirect_from: /2013/07/community-update-from-openspending/
title: Community update
authors:
- Anders Pedersen
---
This is an update with news from members across the OpenSpending community. We list some of the many ways you can get involved, and we give a status on how registrations are coming along for the <strong>City Spending Data Party</strong> on July 19-21. Hint, we have some great cities participating including Lagos, Minsk and Kathmandu!
<h3>On the blog</h3>
Patrick Nsukami (Dakar Linux User Group), Pierre Chrzanowski (Open Knowledge Foundation France) and Tangui Morlier (Regards Citoyens) wrote up up a detailed account of <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/07/04/exploring-senegal-public-procurements-how-we-turned-pdf-files-into-browsable-data/">how they liberated Senegalese procurements from PDF</a> and published the <a href="http://openspending.org/marches-publics-senegal">data on OpenSpending</a>.
Félix Ontañón wrote up a post about how he <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/06/17/budget-transparency-for-an-open-university/">opened up university budgets</a> in Spain.
Earlier this month we called for a discussion about the continued growth of the OS project and community based on this <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/07/02/project-and-community-proposal/">proposal</a>. We are still eager to hear your thoughts and comments about this.
<h3>Fresh data on OpenSpending</h3>
Several fresh datasets have been added from <strong>Bosnie-Herzegovina, Japan, Brazil and Uruguay</strong> in this round of additions to OpenSpending.
<a href="http://openspending.org/kawaguchi_2013_shikai">川口市平成25年度一般会計予算</a> July 9, 2013
<a href="http://openspending.org/bosnia-and-herzegovina">Bosnia and Herzegovina July</a> 8, 2013
<a href="https://openspending.org/fdi_uy_2013">Programa FDI Uruguay</a> July 8, 2013
<a href="http://openspending.org/inesc">Inesc</a> July 8, 2013
<a href="http://openspending.org/orcamento_brasil_2000_2013">Execução do Orçamento Federal do Brasil - 2000-2013</a>, 8 July 2013
<h3>Get Involved</h3>
We have got an abundance of activities and development going on. Let us know how you wish to be involved.
You can help adding spending data by heading over to our <a href="http://progress.openspending.org/">Progress Page</a> where several datasets are waiting to be cleaned and uploaded.
We are looking for <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/07/08/join-the-openspending-data-wranglers-and-help-open-up-finances-around-the-world/">Data Wranglers</a> who can help clean and add data to OpenSpending. <a href="https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/forms/d/1jL4lGrC_z577r7iQLcJw_PYzDCNzKrPh-QPPl2q4QMM/viewform">Register</a> now and you will be able to join the first training on July 18th.
Do you code? Hal Seki from OKF Japan is <a href="https://github.com/openspending/openspending/issues?milestone=24&amp;state=open">heading up a community sprint</a> to add a few improvement to OS before and during the Spending Data Party. Get in touch if you want to help out!
<h3>Upcoming events and activities</h3>
<strong></strong><strong>Thursday July 11 19:00 CET / 18:00 GMT / 13:00 EDT</strong>: The weekly <strong>Data Clinic</strong>, where we offer community support on how to work with budget and spending data - via Google Hangout and IRC freenode channel #openspending.
Bring your own spending data - or have a look at our <a href="http://progress.openspending.org/" target="_blank">Progress page</a> to find one of the spending data sets we're currently working on. Register for the <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vi2LNysNsu346-X8H5oIp00OUjDFsiR_pYcQSWrQAiY/viewform">Data Clinic here</a> or drop in at IRC
<strong>Thursday July 18 <strong>19:00 CET / 18:00 GMT / 13:00 EDT</strong>:</strong> The Community GHangout will include updates from across the community and prepare for the City Spending Data Party
<strong>Friday July 19 to Sunday 21 City Spending Data Party:</strong> Communities across the OS community will get together online during this weekend to map spending in their city. So far community members from <strong>Minsk (Belarus), Lagos (Nigeria), San Francisco, Oakland, Kathmandu (Nepal), Kampala (Uganda), Kota Tangerang, (Indonesia) and cities across Japan</strong> have registered for the event. Find out all the details about the event and how to register in <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/06/30/spending-data-party-announce/">our announce post</a>.
<h3></h3>

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---
redirect_from: /2013/07/where-does-my-money-go-activities-have-become-infectious-in-japan/
title: "“Where Does My Money Go?” activities have become infectious in Japan"
authors:
- Hiroichi Kawashima
---
<p dir="ltr">“Where Does My Money Go? (WDMMG)” activities have become infectious in Japan, as sites are gaining ground across cities all over Japan. Accordingly, Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) Japan Group has been receiving increasing number of inquiries on how to develop WDMMG sites from both forward-looking local government officials and interested individuals.
<p dir="ltr">In a year, since the first release of the first WDMMG site for Yokohama in July 2012, the number of WDMMG participating cities has jumped to 19 cities by July 2013. Enthusiastic engineers are forming a community of practice led by Hal Seki, Georepublic Japan, to share know-hows and experiences on WDMMG development and helping new members to become able to develop new WDMMGs for their interested cities. National media outlets such as Nikkei, Asahi and NHK have covered the growing WDMMG activities as a new phenomena caused by Open Government Data movement in Japan.
Building on this growing attention to WDMMG, the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) Japan Group is planning to conduct Spending Data Party on July 20th and 21st to further assist interested city officials, engineers and civil society activists to create their target city’s WDMMG sites. This event will be held as a part of <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/06/30/spending-data-party-announce/">Global Spending Party</a> organized along with the Openspending community.
The event in Japan will highlight some advanced WDMMG-like activities in Japan, help recently joining players to develop their own sites, and discuss the latest issues on WDMMG development such as budget data standardization and transactional data collection. Please take a look at the <a href="http://spending.jp/">WDMMG site for Japan</a> and keep your eyes on new developments!
<a href="{{ site.baseurl }}/img/blog/2013/07/jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-411" src="http://blog.openspending.org/files/2013/07/名称未設定-300x230.jpg" alt="名称未設定" width="300" height="230" /></a>

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---
redirect_from: /2013/07/opening-up-municipal-spending-data/
title: Opening up municipal spending data
authors:
- Niels Erik Kaaber Rasmussen
---
<p id="docs-internal-guid-48a607d4-cf05-030f-18f7-77fd498f5751" dir="ltr">The open data web-agency <a href="http://www.buhlrasmussen.eu">Buhl &amp; Rasmussen</a> has developed <a title="Kend din kommune" href="http://kommune.politiken.dk">a site visualizing the budgets of all 98 Danish municipalities</a> for one of the biggest Danish news sites, Politiken.
<p dir="ltr">Municipalities are central for the functioning of the welfare state Denmark. They take care of a range of important tasks like social- and health care, primary education, social benefits, traffic and much more. However even in a year with local elections they do not attract much public attention.
<p dir="ltr">One reason to this might be that the barriers for ordinary citizens to engage in local politics are too high. One way to lower the barriers might be to make it easier to understand the most central decision made by municipalities each year: their budgets.
<p dir="ltr"><strong>The data</strong>
<p dir="ltr">There are comprehensive data openly available on Danish municipal budgets and accounts. Budgets and accounts are structured in a hierarchy with 4 levels and roughly 250 possible expenditure and income posts. Data for all 98 municipalities can be obtained from <a href="http://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/kommuner-og-regioner/kommunernes-budgetter.aspx">Statistics Denmark</a> and dates back to 1978. Obviously a lot of changes has taken place since 1978 but historical data for the last 5 years or so are reasonable comparable with today’s figures.
<p dir="ltr"><strong>Reducing complexity - preparing the data</strong>
<p dir="ltr">Multiple problems arise when comparing historical accounts to the latest budget, as I decided to do for this project. First inflation must be taken into account. Secondly the responsibilities of the municipalities are not fixed over time and thirdly accounting practices changes over time.
<p dir="ltr">I choose to adjust time series using a combined consumer price and wage index. While this does not fix the problem with changing responsibilities and accounting practices it improves the overall comparability.
<p dir="ltr"><strong>Dealing with national reimbursements</strong>
<p dir="ltr">Some expenses paid for by local government are reimbursed in part by national government. Shall the reimbursed part be included as an expense or not? I decided to do both(!). When presenting the budget using the bubble diagram all figures represents expenditure minus related income if any. In addition to the bubble diagram a table view shows the budgets with<a href="http://kommune.politiken.dk/tabel.php?type=ind"> income</a> and <a href="http://kommune.politiken.dk/tabel.php?type=ud">expenditures</a> separated from each other.
<p dir="ltr">In the budgets expenditure posts are split in operational and construction expenses. The separation makes good sense for a lot of analyses however for simplicity I choose not to differ (the separate parts of an expenditure post are shown with mouseover).
<p dir="ltr">I made an effort to include not just spending data but also figures describing the different sources of income. Openspending makes such a good case in highlighting public spending but seems to ignore income. To get a reasonable understanding of municipal budgets you’d have to consider both spending and income.
<p dir="ltr"><strong>The solution</strong>
<p dir="ltr">The <a href="http://kommune.politiken.dk/boble.php?kid=530#/~/budgetteret-i-alt-br---billund-kommune/social--og-sundhedsv-sen/tilbud-til--ldre-og-handicappede-i-alt/pleje-og-omsorg-mv--af--ldre-og-handicappede">main visualization</a> is the well-known bubble chart from OpenSpending slightly altered to include an information box, when users click at the lowest level. The popup includes information on historical spending, related income and presents the expenditure as part of the total budget, divided by the number of inhabitants and as compared to national average.<img class="aligncenter" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/TRzOOu2z7zQLArG-zU8aL3FwJpD3XRnrzGSdAfjsRv5bovcaJxzsW59kz98KcX5X8YPO9Os3TOBZ32_qFo4HdMs8F_zCsp9gZgkyX6IdKYs-fr-pXrUNBWpxyQ" alt="" width="368px;" height="333px;" />
<p dir="ltr">Information popup showing historical data, expenditure as part of the total budget, expenditure per inhabitants and expenditure compared to national average.
<p dir="ltr">The bubble chart itself is an inspiring tool - thanks to the <a href="http://okfn.org">Open Knowledge Foundation</a> and the OpenSpending-project for providing it.
<p dir="ltr">In addition to the bubble chart I created some features useful when dealing with multiple budgets with same structured format. For users interested in a specific expenditure post, <a href="http://kommune.politiken.dk/mestmindst.php#0-6-prindb">that post can be selected</a> and a list of the municipalities spending the most/least per inhabitant (of in percent of the total budget) can be shown.
<p style="text-align: left;" dir="ltr">The standardized structure of the budgets also made it possible to build a function to <a href="http://kommune.politiken.dk/sammenlign.php#101-751">compare two different municipalities</a> in details.
<p style="text-align: center;" dir="ltr"><img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/Idynpqpo9gPdb3T-KlJ9JRB9swcL6Q3FLJi1rdRxLW_aMuRJTD1dTtq9Z1qSz8-xhYCHAPoYrVIZ8JUtf_PYbYGqUMmXMF96zrHLSLKjLrW6uPnlBkFJk_oUOA" alt="" width="495px;" height="325px;" /><em>
Comparing two municipalities. The small charts shows historical data.</em>
<p dir="ltr">The compare-feature makes it easy for one to see how the neighbour municipal prioritize differently.
<p dir="ltr">Municipal elections are going to be held in Denmark later this year. Hopefully the opening of the budgets will help lowering the barrier for citizens to engage in discussions.
<p dir="ltr"><strong>Local spending in your city</strong>
<p dir="ltr">While data on budgets and accounts for municipalities in Denmark are relatively easy to obtain this is far from the case in every municipal or city around the world. Some places the data is not published at all, many places the data is not published in a machine-readable format and seldomly is data made available in a manner that makes it possible to compare one city to another in a meaningful way.
<p dir="ltr">The OpenSpending project is organizing a <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/06/30/spending-data-party-announce/">City Spending Data Party</a> on July 19-21 - if you’re interesting in local spending data this is a great chance to get involved.

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---
redirect_from: /2013/07/city-spending-party-around-the-world/
title: City Spending Party around the world
authors:
- Anders Pedersen
---
<!--magazine.image = http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7379/9334987957_69a3d9382a_z.jpg -->
<a title="nepal-spending-party by okfn, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/okfn/9334987957/"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7379/9334987957_69a3d9382a_z.jpg" alt="nepal-spending-party" width="640" height="480" /></a>
Last weekend more than a hundred budget nerds and engaged citizens gathered at 20 spending data parties to open up city spending and budgets. From Lagos to Kathmandu groups dived into budget data across the OpenSpending community as part of this first global <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/06/30/spending-data-party-announce/">City Spending Data Party</a> from July 19 to July 21. The spending parties helped bring the <a href="http://apps.openspending.org/maps">number of cities</a> on OpenSpending to 119. Here is our wrap up from the City Spending Data Party across the OpenSpending community.
###Kathmandu
In Kathmandu, Open Knowledge Foundation Nepal organised <a href="http://np.okfn.org/2013/07/12/city-spending-data-party-kathmandu-2013/">a two day spending party</a> for civic coders, journalists and students focusing on Kathmandu Metropolitan. Coders opened up the city budget from PDF-documents, while tackling tough language issues as documents were not published in nepali unicode. The team detected significant year to year rises in <em>Infrastructure and Development</em> spending as well as in the salaries of employees. On the last day for than 20 participants and journalists attended the presentation of the work. Read the full report from the Spending Party in Kathmandu <a href="http://np.okfn.org/2013/07/24/kathmandu-metropolitan-in-city-spending-data-party/">here</a>.
###Lagos
In Lagos the amazing visualisation team at <a href="http://yourbudgit.com/">BudgIT</a> hosted a spending party to compare several years of expenditure and revenue data from the city. The team used the spending time to [code a tool](http://yourbudgit.com/openlagos/) that will help other groups to build more visualisations using data stored in OpenSpending.
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/okfn/9368255071/" title="openlagos by okfn, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2831/9368255071_e1b09be012_z.jpg" width="640" height="401" alt="openlagos"></a>
###Tel Aviv and San Fransisco
As part of the City Spending Party, [Hasadna](http://www.hasadna.org.il/en/) organised hackathons between Tel Aviv and the Jewish community of San Francisco. In Israel 120 participants worked in six teams on open data projects. One of the teams worked on the Open Muni budget, which is a new app for municipal budgets developed by Hasadna. In San Francisco 60 people worked on two projects, one of which was the Open Muni project around budgetary data imports and translations.
The Hasadna team also worked with David Zbikowski, Julian Martinez and Marc Joffe on loading spending data for California cities from the Public Sector Credit Solution's <a href="http://www.publicsectorcredit.org/ca/en/cities">California City Credit Scoring web site</a>. Julian even won the grand prize at Saturday evening's raffle: a trip to <a href="http://okcon.org/">OKCon</a> in Geneva!
###Toronto
<a title="D3 dataviz from the Toronto-spending-hackathon by Gabe Sawhney" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/okfn/9334987957/"><img src="http://gabesawhney.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Screen-shot-2013-07-22-at-11.29.38-AM.png" alt="Toronto-spending-hackathon" width="640" height="480" /></a>
In Toronto Gabe Sawhney organised a hackathon focusing on the budget of the city as well as lobbyist registry data. The team parsed the 2012 city budget from a messy bunch of Excel files, and uploaded it to OpenSpending producing a treemap and as well as a visualization with d3.js (see dataviz above). Read the report from Toronto <a href="http://gabesawhney.com/?p=384">here</a>.
###Tokyo
The OpenSpending community of the Open Knowledge Foundation Local Group Japan is rapidly growing and threw a full scale one and a half day spending party at Yahoo Japan. There were 50 participants from across the country, including elected officials from three local prefectures around Tokyo.
At the party 15 cities started loading data into OpenSpending and 8 cities completed their own Where Does My Money Go? site, which enables citizens to see where their taxes are spent locally. Koganei city created <a href="http://koganei.spending.jp/">a spending site</a> that invites citizens to comment on the budget, a model which was pioneered earlier this year by <a href="http://openbudgetoakland.org/mayor_13-15_proposed.html">OpenBudgetOakland</a>, another member of the OpenSpending community. The spending party also began taking on some of the more challenging issues. Japanese cities do not have coherent budget classifications the community will therefore begin to explore how <a href="http://openspending.org/japan_lg_spending/">budgets across cities</a> can be compared. Coders at the spending party also made several contributions to the OpenSpending codebase and contributors from Open Knowledge Japan have taken on the important task of making the OpenSpending <a href="https://github.com/openspending/satellite-template">Satellite site</a> more user friendly by adding several new features. The spending party was covered by the national broadcaster <a href="http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20130720/t10013177541000.html">NHK</a> and by the participants in their <a href="http://storify.com/halsk/spending-data-party-japan">own Storify</a>.
###Is your city missing?
<iframe width='600' height='400' src='http://openspending.org/minsk-ved-all-test/embed?widget=aggregate_table&state=%7B%22drilldowns%22%3A%5B%22to%22%5D%2C%22year%22%3A2013%2C%22cuts%22%3A%7B%7D%7D&width=600&height=400' frameborder='0'></iframe>
Besides the events featured above, the City Spending Party also included numerous projects from members taking their city budgets into their own hands with the help from the OpenSpending community. From Minsk to Brazil community members worked on city budgets, and one week after the spending party dots are still being added to <a href="http://apps.openspending.org/maps">the world map of cities</a>. You can find the full list of participating groups <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/city-spending-party/">here</a>.
Is your city spending party missing from our wrap up? We still want to hear your spending party report! Or if you want to organise your own spending party, then [get in touch](mailto:info@openspending.org).

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---
redirect_from: /2013/07/predicting-city-bankruptcies-with-open-data-the-case-of-detroit/
title: 'Predicting city bankruptcies with open data: The case of Detroit'
authors:
- Anders Pedersen
---
This is a guest post by Marc Joffe of <a href="http://www.publicsectorcredit.org/ca">Public Sector Credit Solutions</a>.
Many have noticed that the United States last week was struck by its biggest municipal bankruptcy ever, when the City of Detroit declared bankruptcy. Less well known is the fact that Moody’s, the major credit rating agency, <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chi-moodys-slashes-chicago-ratings-20130718,0,6620303.story.">downgraded the City of Chicago</a> by three notches at about the same time.
Earlier this year, I used audited financial disclosures to estimate the risk of city bond defaults, which often accompany bankruptcies, in the state of California. The research was funded by a grant from the state, but its conclusions are mine and not those of any official agency. The goal was to see whether open data collected from so called Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFR), that US governments typically file as PDFs, and open analytics (or open economic modeling), can serve as an alternative to standard credit rating agency analysis.
The model created during the research is <strong>openly available</strong> and designed to calculate default probabilities, where higher scores are worse than lower scores. Since 1940, the annual default rate for American cities has been 0.10%. In 2012 however, 2 out of 265 or 0.75% of California cities defaulted on their debt, and so that is the average score in the model. Scores substantially higher than 0.75% therefore represent heightened credit risk.
A number of people have asked me how the scoring model would have treated Detroit (Michigan) and Chicago (Illinois), which are in other US states. Here is a my response.
A Google spreadsheet containing the model is available <a href="https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvdkMlz2NopEdGtKdnY2VTRPcmFLbmFPanNvc2pCdUE#gid=0">here</a> and embedded below. It is a modified version of <a href="http://www.publicsectorcredit.org/ca">our original model</a>. I entered data from <a href="http://www.detroitmi.gov/Portals/0/docs/finance/CAFR/Final%202012%20Detroit%20Financial%20Statements.pdf">Detroit’s 2012 CAFR</a>, which was published on December 28, 2012 and the <a href="http://www.cityofchicago.org/content/dam/city/depts/fin/supp_info/CAFR/2012/CAFR_2012.pdf">Chicago’s 2012 CAFR</a> which appeared more recently. Based on our open model Detroit’s probability score is 3.34%, which is worse than almost every California city in our survey. Chicago’s score is also pretty bad: at 1.77% it is worse than the score for <a href="http://www.stocktongov.com/government/departments/manager/bankruptcy/default.html">Stockton</a>, which was one of the two California cities to default in 2012.
The main driver of Detroit’s high default probability score is its negative <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fund_accounting">general fund balance</a>. The ratio of Detroit’s general fund balance to general fund expenditure is -27%. As reported in our <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2258801">April working paper</a> general fund exhaustion, which means very low or negative general fund balances, were associated with the Vallejo, Stockton and San Bernardino bankruptcies. The situation in Detroit provides further evidence that municipal bond investors and other stakeholders would benefit by monitoring this indicator.
Although Chicago does not have a negative general fund balance, it has an annual general fund deficit and declining revenue, two of the four indicators that drive the default probability score. Chicago also has a relatively high ratio of interest and pension costs to total governmental fund revenues. When these uncontrollable costs become relatively high, bankruptcy is harder to avoid.
Assessing government default probability rates based on open data is today a challenging task, as most cities publish this data in PDF-format. Getting cities to publish such data in machine readable format, would make such research a lot easier. For the OpenSpending community the the bankruptcy of Detroit also underlines the need for addressing not only spending, but also revenue flows and liabilities.
Collecting, extracting and analyzing data from public financial disclosures can help us evaluate the credit risk of our local governments openly and transparent. This could be an important way of using the OpenSpending concept and platform.
<iframe width='600' height='400' frameborder='0' src='https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AvdkMlz2NopEdGtKdnY2VTRPcmFLbmFPanNvc2pCdUE&output=html&widget=true'></iframe>

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---
redirect_from: /2013/07/community-update-data-wrangling-list-and-moving-day-for-the-progress-page/
title: 'Community update: Data wrangling list, moving day for our progress page and
more'
authors:
- Anders Pedersen
---
It has been a few busy weeks around OpenSpending, and so it is time for another community update!
###Introducing Datatoload: a place to list datasets that you would like to add to OpenSpending
Two months back we launched <a href="http://progress.openspending.org">progress.openspending.org</a> in order to make it easy to show and tell what datasets you are working on. Since the launch we however noticed that progress.openspending.org seems to be ill suited for actually tracking and collaborating on the uploading process, as the site does not offer a place to discuss the data but only list it. We therefore recently created the repo <a href="https://github.com/openspending/datatoload">Datatoload</a> on the OpenSpending Github site, which will replace progress.openspending.org going forward.
With Datatoload you can now not only list your dataset, but also <strong>ask a questions</strong> to <a href="https://github.com/openspending/datatoload/issues/4#issuecomment-21298852">to other users and discuss how to work with your dataset</a>. You can learn more about the easy steps for getting to use Datatoload in this guide<em>.</em>
<strong>Please note:</strong> For you to use Github to track datasets going into OpenSpending does not mean that you will need any programming skills!
###Welcome to new community members!
Are you sensing that the OpenSpending community is growing? Well, you are right! This week we have had a look at how you are using the site, and got quite thrilled from what we saw.
- The last month: 79 public datasets were added by 78 users
- The last three months: 115 datasets were added by 138 users
- This is compared to 171 users throughout all of 2012.
The City Spending Party was certainly a big part of this as we went from 91 mapped city budgets in early July to <a href="http://apps.openspending.org/maps/">135 cities today</a>.
We are eager to take on the community growth and ask you to get in touch if you can help assist on blog editing, data wrangling or code review via info [at] openspending [dot] org.
###New on the blog
- The bankruptcy of Detroit through the lens of open data: Marc Joffe from Public Sector Credit Solutions wrote this excellent piece on the <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/07/29/predicting-city-bankruptcies-with-open-data-the-case-of-detroit/">fragile finances of Chicago and Detroit</a>.
- How to visualise local budgets? Niels Erik Kaaber Rasmussen wrote about <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/07/11/opening-up-municipal-spending-data/">how he visualised Danish municipal finances</a> using bubble charts.
- Getting stuck cleaning spending data? Tony Hirst from School of Data wrote an excellent <a href="http://schoolofdata.org/2013/07/26/using-openrefine-to-clean-multiple-documents-in-the-same-way/">guide for cleaning spending data with Open Refine</a>
- Hiroichi Kawashima gave an <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/07/10/where-does-my-money-go-activities-have-become-infectious-in-japan/">exciting update from Japan</a> and the many deployments of Where Does My Money Go? satellite sites there.
- The community members who took part in the City Spending Party provided stellar updates for our <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/07/26/city-spending-party-around-the-world/">blog post touring city spending parties around the world</a>.
Are you doing work on spending data or did you just complete a budget visualisation that you would like to share? Write a guest post for the OpenSpending blog by getting in touch at info [at] openspending [dot] org
###Sign up for a volunteer task in our brand new community Trello board
OpenSpending is first and foremost a community project, and we are thrilled about the growing engagement. We however need your assistance to move forward on the many new tasks for making OpenSpending a good place to come for beginners as well as budget nerds. We have created this <a href="https://trello.com/b/nLZBzdRS/activities">public Trello board</a>, which will help us manage our many task as community from <strong>translations</strong> to <strong>guest blog posting</strong> that are ahead of us.
If you have not used Trello before, fear not, but simply <a href="https://trello.com/c/xeGcPRCv/1-read-this-first-to-get-started">read this ticket</a>, which explains how you can get started contributing to the various tasks at OpenSpending, small or big, while using Trello.
###A Datawrangling mailing list
Last week we welcomed our Data Wranglers for a first introductory call and our announcement of the Data Wrangling team is right around the corner. A key task for the Data Wrangling Team will be to help community members to clean, load and visualize data with OpenSpending. We would therefore like to offer a place where community members can ask all these questions about how to scrape, clean and load spending data. For this reason we have created the <a href="http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/os-datawrangling">Data Wrangling mailing list</a>, where you can join such a conversation and get tips and tricks for working on budget and spending data from community members including our fantastic the Data Wrangling team.
You can <a href="http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/os-datawrangling">join the list right here</a>!
###Events and hangouts
We have got an Introduction to OpenSpending, a Community Hangout and the fantastic <a href="http://okcon.org">OKCon</a> coming up, so mark your calendar!
####Introduction to OpenSpending Tuesday 6 August
Are you looking to get started using OpenSpending: either to add your first dataset or create a visualisation? We will be running an online training on 6 August, at 16:30 CET / 15:30 BST / 10:30 EDT<strong> - <a href="http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=OpenSpending+introduction&amp;iso=20130806T1030&amp;p1=263&amp;ah=1">your time zone</a> </strong>via Google Hangout
Sign up for the introduction to OpenSpending in the Google form below:
<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1GaXw9mQYdJ6xjkADw-eg4vH5Uq6mM7o0T9029Hn6akk/viewform?embedded=true" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" width="600" height="500"></iframe>
####Next community Hangout on Wednesday 7 August
From August we will reintroduce the bi-weekly meeting schedule, and scale back from the weekly calls we ran while preparing for the spending party. This means that we will host Community Hangouts every two weeks dedicated to both community updates and a data clinic, where you can get help with the dataset that you are working on.
We will organise our next Community Hangout on 7 August, at 19:00 CET / 18:00 BST / 13:00 EDT - <a href="http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=OpenSpending+Community+Hangout&amp;iso=20130807T13&amp;p1=263&amp;ah=1">your time zone</a> via Google Hangout
Sign up in the form below:
<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vi2LNysNsu346-X8H5oIp00OUjDFsiR_pYcQSWrQAiY/viewform?embedded=true" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" width="600" height="500"></iframe>
####OKCon in Geneva 16-18 September
OKCon will feature several budget and spending related sessions on topics such as on open finances and spending standards. Have a look at the entire <a href="http://okcon.org/schedule/">schedule and featured speakers</a> and get your ticket. We would be thrilled to see you there!

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---
redirect_from: /2013/08/lagos-city-spending-party/
title: Lagos City Spending Party
authors:
- Oluseun Onigbinde
---
<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://www.lagosstate.gov.ng/">Lagos</a> is the financial capital of Nigeria. With a population of over 17 million people over an area of 356,861 hectares, Lagos is responsible for over 70% of Nigeria’s non-oil revenue.  Taken as a country, Lagos GDP of $86.7bn exceeds that of Kenya, East Africa economy powerhouse. The administration of Lagos State since the advent of new democracy cycle of Nigeria in 1999 has been under the national opposition party, Action Congress of Nigeria.
<p dir="ltr">With rising revenues from taxes and less dependence on resource rent from the federal accounts, Lagos is one of the three states in Nigeria which puts its <a href="http://www.lagosstate.gov.ng/subpage.php?k=62">budget</a> online. Its <a href="http://www.lagosstate.gov.ng/debt_profile_lagosstate.pdf">financials</a> in big headers in terms of expenditure, revenue and debt over the last years has also been available online for citizens to access.
<p dir="ltr">At Global City Spending Party organised by Open Knowledge Foundation, <a href="http://yourbudgit.com/">BudgIT</a>, a Nigerian startup using creative technology to make data interesting, worked on Lagos released datasets. We combined our timeline framework with the <a href="http://openspending.org/">OpenSpending</a> tool to deliver what is very appealing. Using the Openspending tool was very important for the BudgIT team as it validates the recent capacity building project by OKFN which was funded by <a href="http://indigotrust.org.uk/2013/03/08/budgit-nigeria-making-budget-data-understandable/">Indigo Trust</a>.
<p dir="ltr">OUR VISUALIZATION
<p dir="ltr">We decided to build to show a yearly trend of Lagos revenue and expenditure datasets. The steps on the using the simple <a href="http://yourbudgit.com/openlagos/">visualization</a> are given below:
<ol>
<li>
<p dir="ltr">Using the timeline within the PHP framework, users have the ability to see the Lagos revenues and expenditure over a period of years. <img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/5DAqZXZwNq4xgf7MA1W1nze2arp8xfDtkyRnS26zexkCwAfdHvUo2ucQQVC5l1OoG8e64uj85dHY2goTAz102Qq4DpnYvH5DkRqjVIkSukhse4hVVziu68LSmAbn1wqOjIk" alt="" width="624px;" height="186px;" />
</li>
</ol>
<ol start="2">
<li>
<p dir="ltr">On click of the timeline, users can see the relative sizes of the revenue and expenditure. <img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/RPWko3d14yjHyJdDwqsziYM1PeS_vnlmhiv_y41rTqtJUEJ4S3zVvEX34FTDY5yVpkPqPE3zoY98zhkRwsdnvI4Iaj3s9bjKbv8hiaQymhwUkWqVn0DwPzLX9wmnKDoBIQk" alt="" width="545px;" height="247px;" />
</li>
</ol>
&nbsp;
<p dir="ltr">3. With an above instruction to click on the circle, users can peer at the data visualized with OpenSpending tool.<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/toLbEV0mWqoHwaWwC5plnB6CTNIeVjTB9wP0o1QAOPBn4osBRXkPqvT3zgquGuxvCyqzZv0PZDU10DwYP4TnRlRHHVGCFKnkZccVk2ZHH7UtO6jTOxsaBc4WIdoo3k4xMJ4" alt="" width="624px;" height="245px;" />
<p dir="ltr">Using a PHP framework with code available at <a href="https://github.com/olamieUsman/openlagos">https://github.com/olamieUsman/openlagos</a>, the BudgIT team used a timeline framework to visualise the years and wrap the OpenSpending platform around the relatively sized bubbles.
<p dir="ltr">The application built exclusively by the BudgIT team over a weekend is an ongoing approach to make data more friendly, accessible and transparent for citizens across the literacy span. BudgIT maps  the array of tools such as desktop web, mobile web, sms, apps, infographics, interactive applications, print, radio, television, games and community groups for every specific access class. We continuously seek <a href="http://yourbudgit.com/index.php/support">support</a> of global organisations in making the Nigerian budget simple and understandable for every Nigerian citizen.

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---
redirect_from: /2013/08/kathmandu-metropolitan-spending-party/
title: Kathmandu Metropolitan Spending Party
authors:
- Prakash Neupane
---
<iframe src="http://openspending.org/kathmandu_spending_budget/embed?widget=treemap&amp;state=%7B%22drilldowns%22%3A%5B%22budget_title%22%2C%22level%22%5D%2C%22year%22%3A2013%2C%22cuts%22%3A%7B%7D%7D&amp;width=600&amp;height=400" frameborder="0" width="600" height="400"></iframe>
<span><span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">Kathmandu, city of temple, capital of naturally enriched (Mountains, lakes, Hills, River) palace Nepal. Where people believe more than 4 millions (but record shows 2.5 millions) people reside in 50.67 square km area. All the governance body(ministries, departments, commissions), legislative body(Supreme Court, Armed Court), Security Force (Nepal Army, Nepal Policy, Armed Police Force) are centralized in Kathmandu. People have to come Kathmandu for going outside from Nepal, because only one international airport (Tribhuwan International Airport) is in Kathmandu. So it is obvious, the huge budget is spent for Kathmandu.</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Open Knowledge Foundation Nepal, organized City Spending Data Party on July 19-21. The objective was to work on the budget of kathmandu metropolitan that was announced just 1 week back. The program was invitation only , so the announcement for participation was done in 12 july <a href="http://np.okfn.org/2013/07/12/city-spending-data-party-kathmandu-2013/">http://np.okfn.org/2013/07/12/city-spending-data-party-kathmandu-2013/</a> . And finally selected </span></span><span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>12 participants </span></span><span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>on the base of first come</span></span><span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>(this was for first two days while last day was public)</span></span><span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>.</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>As it was the first time event, every one worked hard, here is the summary:</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span><strong>First Day:</strong></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">Everybody arrived on time, we discussed on what we are going to build, what could be the expected plan of three days. First task was group division, we have 4 groups</span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Data Wrangler: Kshitiz, Manish, Sanjeev Khadka, Nikesh Balami, Rajan Silwal</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Code Hackers : Everest, Bidhya, Utshav, Rajendra</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Designer: Rajesh and Ashish</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Documentation and Social Media : Sajjan and Spandan</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Data Wrangler team download the pdf file of 22<sup>nd</sup> Kathmandu Metropolitan City council budget for fiscal year 2070/71from the official website of Kathmandu Metropolitan.</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Download some tools like tabular pdf to csv and tableau </span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">Differentiate the data into two topics, Aaya(Income) and Byaya(Expenditure) of Kathmandu Metropolitan</span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">Decided to work on Byaya (Expenditure), which include:</span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Pujigat Kharcha(Capital Expenditure)</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Talab, Parisramik, Subidha Kharcha(Salary and Facilities Expenditure)</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Karyalaya Sanchalan Kharcha (Office Running Expenditure)</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Purwadhar Sudhar tatha anya bikash Kharcha (Infrastructure and Development Expenditure) </span></span>
&nbsp;
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span><strong>Second Day</strong></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">Day 2 kicked off with data wranglers completing remaining works of day first (completed total conversion)</span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">Code hackers and designers worked on the visual par</span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">Visualizing the information from the budget of Kathmandu Metropolitan city in simple charts and spending visualizations.</span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">Designs, banners and slides for next day</span>
&nbsp;
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><strong>Third Day</strong></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Around 25 participants including Former Minister, Media, Students and others</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">We presented what we had made in last two days.</span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><a style="font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Verdana, sans-serif;" href="http://blog.openspending.org/wp-admin/index.php">Dashboard</a>Discussed issues and problems we had faced while working.</span>
<a href="{{ site.baseurl }}/img/blog/2013/08/okfn.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-567" src="{{ site.baseurl }}/img/blog/2013/08/okfn.jpg" alt="okfn" width="969" height="500" /></a>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span><strong>Output</strong></span></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">We have written <a href="http://np.okfn.org/2013/07/24/kathmandu-metropolitan-in-city-spending-data-party/">this post</a> explaining the output. </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The output from openspending.org is at the top of the post or you can find it on <a href="http://openspending.org/kathmandu_spending_budget">OpenSpending</a>.</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span><strong>Impact</strong> <strong>and Learning </strong></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">The event was good learning for all, The first challenge was to extract the budget information from pdf, so it took almost whole day to properly extract the data from it.</span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Second major problem was the language, the font was preeti, which means it was not in nepali unicode, the interesting thing is, Nepal's government has already address this through policy but due to the lack of proper management, it is not implemented in many place.</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>Third was, lacking of technical knowledge of platform, later we studied and made it finally.</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">After doing this event, Kathmandu Metropolitan appreciate our working and suggest us to give them feedback and also invite us there to resolve those issues.</span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>After this event, different social organizations, media are willing to collaborate us for the event like this.</span></span>
&nbsp;
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><strong>Future Plan</strong></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;">We are planning to continue this event in schedule(might be in every 3/3 months)</span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>We are planning to start a class to learn more technical skill with schoolofdata.org as well as a regular class with experts.</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Sans, sans-serif;"><span>We are going to work on whole government budget soon.</span></span>

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---
redirect_from: /2013/08/openspending-news-round-up-august-12/
title: OpenSpending News Round-up, August 12
authors:
- Teodora Beleaga
---
<p dir="ltr">Fiscal transparency never sleeps, and neither does the OpenSpending community. To keep track of all happenings across the open spending spectrum, we’re rounding up on latest blogs, stories and datasets each week. But we’re only human, so if we miss anything, give us a nudge at info [at] openspending [dot] org.
<p dir="ltr"><strong>Updates from the community</strong>
<a href="{{ site.baseurl }}/img/blog/2013/08/OS-Capture.png"><img class="size-medium wp-image-624 alignleft" src="http://blog.openspending.org/files/2013/08/OS-Capture-300x159.png" alt="OS Capture" width="300" height="159" /></a>
<p dir="ltr">Last week saw several accounts of the <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/06/30/spending-data-party-announce/">City Spending Data Party</a> we hosted in July, 19-21. <a href="http://okfn.org/members/prakashneupane/">Prakash Neupane</a> shared the systematic way in which our community in Kathmandu, Nepal approached the <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/08/05/kathmandu-metropolitan-spending-party/">city’s expenditure data</a>, in addition to <a href="http://np.okfn.org/2013/07/24/kathmandu-metropolitan-in-city-spending-data-party/">the more detailed account</a> available on the Nepalese OKFN website.<!--more-->
In Lagos, Nigeria the people at <a href="http://yourbudgit.com/">BugtIT</a> visualised the city’s revenue and expenditure. Showing year-on-year changes from 2008 to 2013 this is a great example of <a href="http://www.thefunctionalart.com/">functional art</a>. <a href="http://okfn.org/members/oluseunonigbinde/">Oluseun Onigbinde</a> <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/08/02/lagos-city-spending-party/">blogged </a>about how the team in Lagos put this together.
Further accounts of <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/07/26/city-spending-party-around-the-world/">the City Spending Party</a> are still to come. If you were part of the project and are yet to share your experience (Toronto and Tokyo, Tel Aviv or San Francisco, we mean your amazing work) please get in touch at info [at] openspending [dot] org.
In the community, Michael Bauer from the School of Data <a href="http://mihi-tr.github.io/openspending-sankey/">experimented</a> with Sankey diagrams made using d3.js and BOOST data from Kenya. Data journalist David Cabo also showed how he visualised budgets from <a href="http://aurrekontuak.irekia.euskadi.net/en/budgets">Euskadi</a> and <a href="http://presupuesto.aragon.es/resumen">Aragon</a>, both Spain.
<strong>Financial transparency around the world</strong>
<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://blog.okfn.org/2013/08/07/introducing-the-open-economics-principles/">The Open Economics Principles</a> were made available as part of the Open Economics project at the Open Knowledge Foundation. In <a href="http://okfn.org/members/vndimitrova/">Velichka Dimitrova’s</a> words, Project Coordinator of Open Economics, they are “the guiding principles of transparency and accountability in economics that would enable replication and scholarly debate as well as access to knowledge as a public good.” Add your endorsement to the principles <a href="http://openeconomics.net/principles/">here</a>.
<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/23/slovenia-launches-supervizor-an-official-public-web-app-for-monitoring-public-spending/">Slovenia’s public web portal</a> designed to monitor government spending and expose corruption has won the prestigious <a href="http://www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2013/unisinf479.html">UN Public Service Award</a>.
Marc Joffe, principal consultant at <a href="http://www.publicsectorcredit.org/">Public Sector Credit Solutions</a> and Ian Makgill, managing director of the <a href="http://www.spendnetwork.com/">Spend Network</a>, both part of the OpenSpending community, reviewed at <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/local-government-network/2013/aug/01/open-governance-projects-compare-council-finances">the Guardian</a> how local municipality projects work to open up spending, referencing other great projects such as <a href="http://openbudgetoakland.org/">OpenBudget Oakland</a> and <a href="https://github.com/hasadna/omuni-budget">Open Muni</a> from Hasadna.
Interested in the Oakland Community Democracy project instead? The OpenSpending community found <a href="http://www.shareable.net/blog/community-democracy-project-to-open-entire-city-budget">this article</a> worth a read.
The <a href="http://sunlightfoundation.com/">Sunlight Foundation</a> and <a href="http://codeforamerica.org/">Code for America</a> have teamed up to produce what they hope will be the most comprehensive survey of local procurement processes. Working in local US government? Give them a hand by filling in <a href="https://codeforamerica.wufoo.com/forms/local-gov-procurement-survey/">this</a> form.
<strong>New datasets on OpenSpending Datasets</strong>
<a href="http://openspending.org/financial_aid">EU Financial Crisis Aid</a> as donated by country from 2008 to 2011 has been uploaded and visualised on OpenSpending.
<a href="https://github.com/openspending/datatoload/issues.">datatoload</a> is the place where we track government spending data that yet has to be loaded into OpenSpending. We have data from Massachusetts and New York to Finland and Moldova awaiting to be cleaned. Kudos to our team of data wranglers for claiming datasets and working their magic at unlocking data from pdfs and cleaning spreadsheets up. Want to join them? Get in touch at the data wrangling mailinglist
<strong>Did we miss anything?</strong>
While we strive to produce a comprehensive snippet of the fiscal transparency landscape across the world, this mammoth task gets the better of us every once in awhile. When that happens we trust we can rely on the wonderful community at the heart of OpenSpending to give us a nudge at info [at] openspending [dot] org.

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