[examples/openspending] - openspending v0.2 (#907)
* [examples/openspending] - openspending v0.2 * [examples/openspending][m] - fix build * [examples/openspending][xs] - fix build * [examples/openspending][xs] - add prebuild step * [examples/openspending][m] - fix requested by demenech * [examples/openspending][sm] - remove links + fix bug
This commit is contained in:
Luccas Mateus
GitHub
@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@
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---
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lead: true
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title: CaseCaring for My Neighbourhood
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authors:
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- Neil Ashton
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---
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*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).*
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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.
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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.
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<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7274/7604750834_a7ec37ee8a_z.jpg" title="Caring for My Neighbourhood" class="alignnone" width="640" height="480" />
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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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**Next**: [Open Knowledge Foundation Greece](../okfn-greece/)
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**Up**: [Case Studies: Spending](../)
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---
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lead: true
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title: EU Spending Data
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authors:
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- Neil Ashton
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---
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<div class="well">This segment is based on a community call organised on 18 February
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2013 with
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additional input from <a href="https://twitter.com/ronpatz">Ronny Patz</a>,
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Transparency International, Brussels Office.</div>
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European spending programmes have been undergoing increased scrutiny
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among journalists and CSOs in recent years. In this section, we will examine the
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access to data from the EU structural funds as well as the EU Commission
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spending through the Financial Transparency System (FTS) and discuss
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what actors are involved in data-driven analysis and campaigning
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around this data.
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## Structural funds
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Following the Common Agricultural Policy, which has been covered by
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[Farmsubsidy.org](../farmsubsidy/), data from the structural funds have
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been considered the most important spending data by both journalists and CSOs. In 2010, the Financial Times and the Bureau of
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Investigative Journalism published a project including an extensive
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database [mapping the structural
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funds](http://datajournalismhandbook.org/1.0/en/case_studies_1.html) across
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the 2007-2013 EU budget ([more info](http://blog.okfn.org/2011/03/08/a-kafkaesque-data-trail-the-hunt-for-europes-hidden-billions/)).
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The project was rightly heralded as
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groundbreaking for its level of detail and dedication and its cross-border
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setup. Three years later, however, it is also clear that such centrally
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initiated projects have limitations, and therefore challenges
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remain when thinking about Europe-wide spending transparency.
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### Data issues
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The FT-TBIJ structural funds investigation exposed a series of barriers
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which limit the use of structural funds for CSOs and journalists:
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* Poor data quality
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* Lack of access to data in machine-readable formats; in practise, data
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is often published as PDF, since no format for spending data has
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been specified in EU regulation
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* A dispersed model of distribution across regions in Europe from
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dozens of local sites without a centralised European clearinghouse
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### Community challenges
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We’ve identified a few important points, which should be noted from the
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project:
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* **Media outlets are unlikely to build and sustain long-term data
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projects**. Though the project provided a unique insight into
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structural funds, it was not the intention of the publishers to
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develop a long-term model for tracing and publishing structural
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fund payments. Though non-profit media institutions do offer a few
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[important exceptions](http://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/),
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we also know that maintaining databases is costly and is widely
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considered to provide too little value for ongoing beat journalism inside
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newsrooms.
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* **CSOs have not addressed systemic needs for data**. Despite receiving
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wide recognition from CSOs regarding the importance of the FT-TBIJ
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structural funds investigation, the European CSO community has
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remained unable to address the need for continuous data flows and
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analytical capacity. Several CSOs do, however, provide extensive
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coverage of European data across topics like FOI ([AccessInfo](http://www.access-info.org)),
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lobbyism ([Corporate Europe](http://corporateeurope.org), [Alter-EU](http://www.alter-eu.org)) and the green economy
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([Bankwatch](http://bankwatch.org), [Friends of the Earth](http://foei.org)).
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* **Improvements in access to data seem still to be largely supply-driven**. There are national governmental initiatives addressing the
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lack of access to spending data such as [Open
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Coesione](http://www.opencoesione.gov.it/) from the Italian
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government (launched summer 2012), which publishes data on Italian
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structural funds from 450,000 development projects worth € 33.4
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billion. Project Lead [Luigi Reggi](http://luigireggi.eu) is
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regularly engaging with data journalists and the wider public
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through open data events and social media.
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[Luigi Reggi](http://luigireggi.eu) has also mapped the accessibility of
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EU structural funds data across the EU.
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<small>Rating of the accessibility of data
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from the structural funds. Red: PDF only. Dark green: machine
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readable. Source: [luigireggi.eu](http://luigireggi.eu)</small>
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## Future perspectives
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The data from the EU structural funds is an example where CSOs and media
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outlets are still falling short of the potential of covering already-available spending data in individual countries as well as across
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borders.
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At this moment, there seems to be no clear political momentum within the
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EU for requiring data from the structural funds to be published at a
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central site (eg. on the European Data Portal).
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New rules will, however, mandate publishing of structural fund data
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according to certain dimensions or fields, which provides a small step in
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the right direction ([page
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157](http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2012:0496:FIN:EN:PDF))
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## Financial Transparency System (FTS)
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Spending reported under the FTS consists of both [EU Commission spending
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and grant funding](http://community.openspending.org/research/eu/) provided to
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programmes such as research, education, and foreign aid. This is likely the best documented part of the EU budget, though it is not transactional spending data, as it only provides project funding data
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and not actual transactions from either EU agencies nor project recipients.
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An increase in the minimum threshold is under consideration,
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however, which would cause a decrease in access to a substantial amount of
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payments.
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**Next**: [FarmSubsidy.org](../farmsubsidy/)
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**Up**: [Case Studies: Spending](../)
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---
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lead: true
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title: Farm subsidies in Mexico
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authors:
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- Neil Ashton
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---
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Project: <a href="http://subsidiosalcampo.org.mx/">Farm subsidy database for Mexico</a> by <a href="http://www.fundar.org.mx/">Fundar</a>
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## About the project:
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Fundar joined with two other organisations including University of
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California of Santa Cruz to build the first farm subsidy database in
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Mexico. Fundar received some technical assistance from the Environmental
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Working Group, which operates the US farm subsidy database.
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Currently Fundar is planning to relaunch the database with a new interface and new
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features. One part time consultant and 2 developers work on the database
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which is strongly prioritised by the organisation.
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## Experiences
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The farm subsidy database has seen substantial use from journalists
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using the various search functionalities. During the last federal
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election the database became an important source for both local and
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national media outlets for monitoring politicians.
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Collaboration between communities working on farm subsidies in Mexico, USA and Europe could be explored in order to share experiences on how to create useful tools for displaying and analysing farm subsidy data.
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**Next**: [India Spend](../india-spend/)
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**Up**: [Case Studies: Spending](../)
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---
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lead: true
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title: FarmSubsidy.org
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authors:
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- Neil Ashton
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---
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<div class="well">Project: <a href="http://farmsubsidy.org/">FarmSubsidy.org</a></div>
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Every year EU pays almost €60 billion to farmers and the farming industry under the Common Agricultural Policy, making it the biggest single spending programme under the EU. In 2005, journalists from the UK, Sweden, Netherlands, and Denmark teamed up to get ahold of the data country by country. Finland, Poland, Portugal, regions of Spain, Slovenia, and other countries soon followed. In some countries like Germany in 2007, the group had to go to court to get the data, which resulted in coverage from Stern and Stern online while raising the discussion of transparency.
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The meaningful demand from Farm Subsidy for each farm subsidy payment to be made public became a powerful vehicle for measuring transparency in practise.
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Farm Subsidy publishes a transparency index annually, benchmarking all member states on the quality of their data releases. The data from Farm Subsidy as well as the analysis and outreach of the
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core team have resulted in substantial improvements in EU spending journalism
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since 2006. A selection of the [news stories generated from farm subsidy
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data](http://farmsubsidy.openspending.org/news/) is available.
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## Challenges
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- The uptake from journalists using the farm subsidy data as a continuous source for reporting was limited, most likely due due to the size of the dataset as well as the poor quality of the data often submitted by governments.
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- Limited access to data since 2010.
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## Ruling to shut down access
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In 2010, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) decided that individual farmers should have the right to privacy when receiving funds
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from the CAP. The ECJ decision has *de facto* enabled governments to release data of [highly
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varying quality, granularity and
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consistency](http://farmsubsidy.org/news/features/2012-data-harvest/).
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<small>Source: Farm Subsidy. Along with the annual retrieval of farm subsidy
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payments, Farm Subsidy produced a comprehensive index on farm subsidy
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spending transparency.</small>
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In early 2013, Farm Subsidy approached OpenSpending suggesting the two
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projects collaborate around the hosting of the site as well as the
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annual data collection. In May, OpenSpending officially began hosting the
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site at
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[farmsubsidy.openspending.org](http://farmsubsidy.openspending.org).
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At the annual [DataHarvest
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2013](http://www.journalismfund.eu/dataharvest13), the opportunities around farm subsidy investigations were covered at several sessions:
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* How the experiences gained in retriving farm subsidy data can be
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used for accessing other spending data
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* How journalism on farm subsidy spending can expand its focus as well
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as find more local user cases
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**Next**: [Farm subsidies in Mexico](../farm-subsidies-mexico/)
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**Up**: [Case Studies: Spending](../)
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@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
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---
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lead: true
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title: 'Case Studies: Spending'
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authors:
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- Neil Ashton
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---
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In contrast to budget data, spending data reports on specific expenditures of funds, covering individual transactions that have actually taken place rather than categories of planned spending.
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Our research has uncovered an interestingly contradictory state of affairs. In most countries, fine-grained transactional spending data is not easily available, and over the past few years, organisations and journalists in these countries have used FOI requests and otherwise created pressure for the release of such data. In a few countries, however, such spending data has been published—and it hasn't attracted much public attention!
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In the following case studies, we examine how spending data can be used to strengthen community participation in public spending as well as to increase accountability on some of the biggest spending programmes in the EU. The cases also deal with the challenges of enhancing uptake of spending data among community members and journalists in the face of the data's often intimidating complexity and scale.
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* [Caring for your neighbourhood](./caring-for-my-neighbourhood/)
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* [OKFN Greece](./okfn-greece/)
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* [EU Spending Data](./eu-spending-data/)
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* [Farmsubsidy.org](./farmsubsidy/)
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* [Farm subsidies in Mexico](./farm-subsidies-mexico/)
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* [India Spend](./india-spend/)
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* [Supervizor](./supervizor/)
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|
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**Next**: [CaseCaring for My Neighbourhood](./caring-for-my-neighbourhood/)
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**Up**: [Mapping the Open Spending Data Community](../)
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---
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lead: true
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title: India Spend
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authors:
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- Neil Ashton
|
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---
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[India Spend](http://www.indiaspend.com/) is one of India's first data journalism initiatives. Starting out with a tight remit to investigate spending practices in India from a journalistic standpoint, they have since branched out into other topics, such as the urbanisation of India, many of which have financial themes. Their reports are very well regarded, and other business newspapers pay a monthly fee for syndication of their reports.
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India Spend mentioned a variety of issues in getting, working with, and presenting financial data in India. Here are a few of the most striking.
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## Problem number 1
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> "We have to start sourcing physical copies of the data, and the problem often is that paper copies are in local languages, which we don't speak."
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### Any solutions?
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To date, to our knowledge, there is no simple method of automatically machine-translating datasets, the most effective method of machine translation being Google Translate, which has a fee-based API, and even this does not cover all of India’s languages.
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|
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## Problem number 2
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> "The average government website in India isn't even PDFs, it's images."
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|
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### Any solutions?
|
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|
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See the [Tools Ecosystem Section](../../appendix/tool-ecosystem/) for a few tools to help extract information from image-based documents.
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## Problem number 3
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> "The level of literacy for visualisations in India is not high".
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People struggle to interpret anything besides the simplest charts, so the India Spend team try to keep it simple. They have been experimenting with simple visualisation tools such as Tableau and GeoCommons, but there have been some complications. When trying to map locations in India, for example, they often found that the given longitude and latitude of a particular place were recorded incorrectly. This was not so much the case when they tried to do mapping internationally—mainly just India.
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## A few conclusions
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Common trends in the types of data required:
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|
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* To advance their work, India Spend really need performance and program data, but this simply is not available in India.
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* Output-level data is needed to be able to compare what was promised against what actually happened.
|
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* Information on the original instructions given to people compiling the data within governments is needed in order to understand what assumptions were made and what is and is not included in a given category.
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<em>See the full list of organisations we visited on the India trip on the <a href="http://in.okfn.org/2012/09/18/okfn-india-trip-the-roundup/">OKFN-India blog</a></em>.
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**Next**: [Supervizor, Slovenia](../supervizor/)
|
||||
|
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**Up**: [Case Studies: Spending](../)
|
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@@ -0,0 +1,95 @@
|
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---
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||||
lead: true
|
||||
title: Open Knowledge Foundation Greece
|
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authors:
|
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- Neil Ashton
|
||||
---
|
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<div class="well">Project: Tracing financial reporting from the Cl@rity program.</div>
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*This project review is based on the detailed review of Thodoris
|
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Papadopoulos, Open Knowledge Foundation Greece, Local Group.*
|
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|
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Open Knowledge Foundation Greece is monitoring the financial reporting systems in
|
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Greece during the financial crisis, resulting in detailed reviews of
|
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the rapid legal and technical changes in the Greek financial
|
||||
reporting system. This has ultimately lead to several proposals for technical changes to the reporting standards.
|
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|
||||
|
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|
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## About the project
|
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|
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In Greece, the most important piece of legislation in recent years
|
||||
regarding the transparency of government action is the [Cl@rity](http://diavgeia.gov.gr/) (Diavgeia)
|
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program, which introduced the obligation to publish all the decisions of
|
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government and all administrative entities on the Internet.
|
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Cl@rity aims to generate maximum
|
||||
accessibility of government policy and administrative actions. Since the
|
||||
programme was launched in October 2010, almost 6 million administrative
|
||||
decisions have been uploaded to the Cl@rity website, with a daily
|
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average of 14,000 decisions.
|
||||
|
||||
With the Cl@rity program, the enforceability of any administrative act
|
||||
presupposes a previous announcement on the Internet. Furthermore,
|
||||
Cl@rity provides an open data API in XML and JSON formats through which
|
||||
everyone can have structured access to all decisions, along with their
|
||||
metadata, ensuring openness and further dissemination of public
|
||||
information.
|
||||
|
||||
The Cl@rity initiative has already had a quiet but significant
|
||||
effect on the way authorities handle their executive power. It leaves
|
||||
considerably less room for corruption and exposes it much more easily
|
||||
when it takes place, since any citizen or interested party can openly
|
||||
access any questionable acts. This is a scheme of “collective scrutiny”
|
||||
that can be effective, since it allows citizens directly involved or
|
||||
concerned with an issue to scrutinize it in depth rather than leaving
|
||||
it to the traditional media, whose choice of issues often is restricted
|
||||
and oriented towards “safe” topics.
|
||||
|
||||
## Challenges
|
||||
|
||||
Although Cl@rity was not designed with financial monitoring in mind, it
|
||||
includes various decision types that includes financial metadata
|
||||
(such as expenditure, budget, and contract data). From the onset, however,
|
||||
the Cl@rity programme has suffered from issues of poor data quality, including:
|
||||
|
||||
* Failure to provide a hierarchy of entities
|
||||
* Lack of validation rules for metadata fields and non-mandatory
|
||||
requirements
|
||||
|
||||
In reality, these issues have prevented citizens and journalists from
|
||||
utilizing the full potential of the Cl@rity program as a platform for
|
||||
public financial data.
|
||||
|
||||
## Project results
|
||||
|
||||
Open Knowledge Foundation Greece highlights two major achievements from their data quality review and proposals:
|
||||
|
||||
1. For the Cl@rity programme, substantial improvements have been
|
||||
implemented by the end of 2012. These corrections included changes
|
||||
of significant importance to journalists and CSOs, such as improving
|
||||
the quality of transactional spending data.
|
||||
2. For a supplementary information system to support the Cl@rity
|
||||
program, several suggestions brought forward by Open Knowledge Foundation Greece have been
|
||||
admitted to the data architecture. The new system will for this
|
||||
reason be more responsive and accurate and will provide a more detailed
|
||||
data model with many more metadata fields. The new system is
|
||||
expected to be delivered by the end of 2013. The owner of the system
|
||||
the [Greek Ministry of Administrative Reform and
|
||||
e-Governance](http://www.ydmed.gov.gr/) has undertaken to provide
|
||||
the source code of the system through the [European Open Source
|
||||
Observatory and
|
||||
Repository](http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/description) under
|
||||
a [EUPL](http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/page/eupl) licence.
|
||||
|
||||
### Links about reuse of this data
|
||||
|
||||
* A [short video]((https://vimeo.com/46543472)) about researchers at the National Technical University
|
||||
of Athens and Students of WebScience and active members of OKFN
|
||||
Greece from the University of Thessaloniki
|
||||
* PublicSpending.gr (currently unavailable due to maintenance), also
|
||||
documented in [this academic
|
||||
article](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2193600)
|
||||
* [http://greekspending.com/](http://greekspending.com/)
|
||||
|
||||
**Next**: [EU Spending Data](../eu-spending-data/)
|
||||
|
||||
**Up**: [Case Studies: Spending](../)
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
lead: true
|
||||
title: Supervizor, Slovenia
|
||||
authors:
|
||||
- Neil Ashton
|
||||
---
|
||||
In Slovenia, the anti-corruption agency has published the financial transparency site [Supervizor](http://supervizor.kpk-rs.si/) since 2011.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
The Supervizor application:
|
||||
|
||||
- contains over 50 mio. transactions from both government and local agencies to government contractors from 2003 to 2013
|
||||
- matches such transactions to company records, including director lists and corporate leadership
|
||||
- use the actual bank transactions from public bank accounts at the Slovenian National Bank as source data, making the records highly reliable
|
||||
|
||||
According to the developer behind the platform, the granularity of the data has enabled statisticians and anaylysts to make statistical models available, including a [Hidden Markov model](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Markov_model) of the data.
|
||||
|
||||
Over the years, the platform has helped identify shifts in contractor purchases around changes in the political leadership.
|
||||
|
||||
## Lack of impact?
|
||||
|
||||
Despite its comprehensive content and site visualisations, however, the site has not received any significant response from journalists or CSOs. While it is not reasonable to speculate based on the available interview, we find it worth considering how one of the most transparent spending platforms should suffer from limited use.
|
||||
|
||||
Links:
|
||||
|
||||
* [Feature in Techcrunch](http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/23/slovenia-launches-supervizor-an-official-public-web-app-for-monitoring-public-spending/) from 2011
|
||||
|
||||
**Next**: [Case Studies: Procurements](../../case-studies-procurements/)
|
||||
|
||||
**Up**: [Case Studies: Spending](../)
|
||||
Reference in New Issue
Block a user