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

examples/openspending/__tests__/os-data.test.ts

@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ import { expect, test } from 'vitest';
 import { getAllProjectsFromOrg, getProjectDataPackage } from '../lib/project';
 import { loadDataPackage } from '../lib/loader';
 import { getProjectMetadata } from '../lib/project';
-import { getCsv, parseCsv } from '../components/Table';
+import { validate } from 'datapackage';
 
 test(
   'Test OS-Data',
@@ -12,8 +12,24 @@ test(
       'main',
       process.env.VITE_GITHUB_PAT
     );
-    if (repos.failed.length > 0) console.log(repos.failed);
-    expect(repos.failed.length).toBe(0);
+    if (repos.failed.length > 0)
+      console.log('Failed to get datapackage on', repos.failed);
+    let failedDatapackages = await Promise.all(
+      repos.results.map(async (item) => {
+        try {
+          const { valid, errors } = await validate(item.datapackage);
+          return errors.length > 0 ? item.repo.name : null;
+        } catch {
+          return item.repo.name;
+        }
+      })
+    );
+    failedDatapackages = failedDatapackages.filter((item) => item !== null);
+    if (failedDatapackages.length > 0) {
+      console.log('Failed to validate datapackage on ', failedDatapackages);
+    } else {
+      console.log('No invalid packages');
+    }
   },
   { timeout: 100000 }
 );
@@ -27,7 +43,22 @@ test(
       process.env.VITE_GITHUB_PAT
     );
     if (repos.failed.length > 0) console.log(repos.failed);
-    expect(repos.failed.length).toBe(0);
+    let failedDatapackages = await Promise.all(
+      repos.results.map(async (item) => {
+        try {
+          const { valid, errors } = await validate(item.datapackage);
+          return errors.length > 0 ? item.repo.name : null;
+        } catch {
+          return item.repo.name;
+        }
+      })
+    );
+    failedDatapackages = failedDatapackages.filter((item) => item !== null);
+    if (failedDatapackages.length > 0) {
+      console.log('Failed to validate datapackage on ', failedDatapackages);
+    } else {
+      console.log('No invalid packages');
+    }
   },
   { timeout: 100000 }
 );
@@ -83,56 +114,3 @@ test(
   },
   { timeout: 100000 }
 );
-
-test(
-  'Test getting one section of csv from R2',
-  async () => {
-    const rawCsv = await getCsv(
-      'https://storage.openspending.org/state-of-minas-gerais-brazil-planned-budget/__os_imported__br-mg-ppagloc.csv'
-    );
-    const parsedCsv = await parseCsv(rawCsv);
-    expect(parsedCsv.errors.length).toBe(1);
-    expect(parsedCsv.data.length).toBe(10165);
-    expect(parsedCsv.meta.fields).toStrictEqual([
-      'function_name',
-      'function_label',
-      'product_name',
-      'product_label',
-      'area_name',
-      'area_label',
-      'subaction_name',
-      'subaction_label',
-      'region_label_map',
-      'region_reg_map',
-      'region_name',
-      'region_label',
-      'municipality_map_id',
-      'municipality_name',
-      'municipality_map_code',
-      'municipality_label',
-      'municipality_map_name_simple',
-      'municipality_map_name',
-      'cofog1_label_en',
-      'cofog1_name',
-      'cofog1_label',
-      'amount',
-      'subprogramme_name',
-      'subprogramme_label',
-      'time_name',
-      'time_year',
-      'time_month',
-      'time_day',
-      'time_week',
-      'time_yearmonth',
-      'time_quarter',
-      'time',
-      'action_name',
-      'action_label',
-      'subfunction_name',
-      'subfunction_label',
-      'programme_name',
-      'programme_label',
-    ]);
-  },
-  { timeout: 100000 }
-);

examples/openspending/components/DatasetsSearch.tsx

@@ -13,9 +13,13 @@ import { useState } from 'react';
 export default function DatasetsSearch({
   datasets,
   availableCountries,
+  minPeriod,
+  maxPeriod,
 }: {
   datasets: Project[];
   availableCountries;
+  minPeriod: string;
+  maxPeriod: string;
 }) {
   const itemsPerPage = 6;
   const [page, setPage] = useState(1);
@@ -132,7 +136,10 @@ export default function DatasetsSearch({
           <div className="relative">
             <input
               aria-label="Min. date"
-              type="date"
+              type="text"
+              placeholder={minPeriod}
+              onFocus={(e) => (e.target.type = 'date')}
+              onBlur={(e) => (e.target.type = 'text')}
               {...register('minDate', { onChange: () => setPage(1) })}
               className="h-[3em] w-full rounded-lg bg-white py-2 pl-3 pr-10 text-left shadow-md focus:outline-none focus-visible:border-emerald-500 focus-visible:ring-2 focus-visible:ring-white focus-visible:ring-opacity-75 focus-visible:ring-offset-2 focus-visible:ring-offset-emerald-400 sm:text-sm"
             />
@@ -145,7 +152,10 @@ export default function DatasetsSearch({
           <div className="relative">
             <input
               aria-label="Max. date"
-              type="date"
+              type="text"
+              placeholder={maxPeriod}
+              onFocus={(e) => (e.target.type = 'date')}
+              onBlur={(e) => (e.target.type = 'text')}
               {...register('maxDate', { onChange: () => setPage(1) })}
               className="h-[3em] w-full rounded-lg bg-white py-2 pl-3 pr-10 text-left shadow-md focus:outline-none focus-visible:border-emerald-500 focus-visible:ring-2 focus-visible:ring-white focus-visible:ring-opacity-75 focus-visible:ring-offset-2 focus-visible:ring-offset-emerald-400 sm:text-sm"
             />

examples/openspending/components/Header.tsx

@@ -5,6 +5,9 @@ import Link from 'next/link';
 import { useRouter } from 'next/router';
 import { Bars3Icon } from '@heroicons/react/24/outline';
 import { useState } from 'react';
+import { Fragment } from 'react';
+import { Menu, Transition } from '@headlessui/react';
+import { ChevronDownIcon } from '@heroicons/react/20/solid';
 
 export function Header() {
   const [menuOpen, setMenuOpen] = useState<boolean>(false);
@@ -16,42 +19,69 @@ export function Header() {
   };
 
   const navLinks = [
-    {
-      title: 'Home',
-      href: '/',
-    },
     {
       title: 'Datasets',
       href: '/#datasets',
     },
-    // {
-    //   title: "Community",
-    //   href: "https://community.openspending.org/"
-    // }
+    {
+      title: 'Blog',
+      href: '/blog',
+    },
+    {
+      title: 'About',
+      href: '/about',
+      children: [
+        {
+          title: 'Fiscal Data Package',
+          href: '/about/fiscaldatapackage/',
+        },
+        {
+          title: 'Tools',
+          href: '/about/tools/',
+        },
+        {
+          title: 'Funders',
+          href: '/about/funders/',
+        },
+        {
+          title: 'Presentations',
+          href: '/about/presentations/',
+        },
+      ],
+    },
+    {
+      title: 'Resources',
+      href: '/resources',
+      children: [
+        {
+          title: 'Follow the money',
+          href: '/resources/journo',
+        },
+        {
+          title: 'Map of Spending Projects',
+          href: '/resources/map-of-spending-projects/',
+        },
+        {
+          title: 'Working Group On Open Spending Data',
+          href: '/resources/wg/',
+        },
+      ],
+    },
   ];
 
   return (
     <header className="relative z-50 pb-11 lg:pt-11">
-      <Container className="flex flex-wrap items-center justify-between lg:flex-nowrap mt-10 lg:mt-0">
+      <Container className="flex flex-wrap justify-between lg:flex-nowrap mt-10 lg:mt-0">
         <Link href="/" className="lg:mt-0 lg:grow lg:basis-0 flex items-center">
           <Image src={logo} alt="OpenSpending" className="h-12 w-auto" />
         </Link>
         <ul className="hidden list-none sm:flex gap-x-5 text-base font-medium">
           {navLinks.map((link, i) => (
             <li key={`nav-link-${i}`}>
-              <Link
-                className={`text-emerald-900 hover:text-emerald-600 ${
-                  isActive(link) ? 'text-emerald-600' : ''
-                }`}
-                href={link.href}
-                scroll={false}
-              >
-                {link.title}
-              </Link>
+              <Dropdown navItem={link} />
             </li>
           ))}
         </ul>
-        <div className="hidden xl:block xl:grow"></div>
         <div className="sm:hidden sm:mt-10 lg:mt-0 lg:grow lg:basis-0 lg:justify-end">
           <button onClick={() => setMenuOpen(!menuOpen)}>
             <Bars3Icon className="w-8 h-8" />
@@ -80,3 +110,77 @@ export function Header() {
     </header>
   );
 }
+
+function classNames(...classes) {
+  return classes.filter(Boolean).join(' ');
+}
+
+function Dropdown({ navItem }: { navItem: any }) {
+  const [showDropDown, setShowDropDown] = useState(false);
+  return (
+    <Menu as="div" className="relative inline-block text-left">
+      {({ open }) => (
+        <>
+          <div>
+            <Menu.Button
+              onMouseEnter={() => setShowDropDown(true)}
+              onMouseLeave={() => setShowDropDown(false)}
+              className="text-emerald-900 hover:text-emerald-600 inline-flex w-full justify-center gap-x-1.5 px-3 py-2 text-sm font-semibold"
+            >
+              <Link href={navItem.href}>{navItem.title}</Link>
+              {navItem.children && (
+                <ChevronDownIcon
+                  className="-mr-1 h-5 w-5 text-gray-400"
+                  aria-hidden="true"
+                />
+              )}
+            </Menu.Button>
+          </div>
+
+          {navItem.children && (
+            <Transition
+              as={Fragment}
+              show={showDropDown}
+              enter="transition ease-out duration-100"
+              enterFrom="transform opacity-0 scale-95"
+              enterTo="transform opacity-100 scale-100"
+              leave="transition ease-in duration-75"
+              leaveFrom="transform opacity-100 scale-100"
+              leaveTo="transform opacity-0 scale-95"
+            >
+              <div>
+                <Menu.Items
+                  static
+                  onMouseEnter={() => setShowDropDown(true)}
+                  onMouseLeave={() => setShowDropDown(false)}
+                  className="absolute right-0 z-10 w-56 origin-top-right rounded-md bg-white shadow-lg ring-1 ring-black ring-opacity-5 focus:outline-none"
+                >
+                  <div className="py-1">
+                    {navItem.children.map((item) => (
+                      <Menu.Item>
+                        {({ active }) => (
+                          <a
+                            key={item.href}
+                            href={item.href}
+                            className={classNames(
+                              active
+                                ? 'bg-gray-100 text-emerald-900 hover:text-emerald-600'
+                                : 'text-gray-700',
+                              'block px-4 py-2 text-sm'
+                            )}
+                          >
+                            {item.title}
+                          </a>
+                        )}
+                      </Menu.Item>
+                    ))}
+                  </div>
+                </Menu.Items>
+              </div>
+            </Transition>
+          )}
+        </>
+      )}
+    </Menu>
+  );
+}

examples/openspending/components/Hero.tsx

@@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ export function Hero({ countriesCount, datasetsCount, filesCount }) {
           <Button href="#datasets" className="mt-10">
             Search datasets
           </Button>
-          <dl className="mt-10 grid grid-cols-2 gap-x-10 gap-y-6 sm:mt-16 sm:gap-x-16 sm:gap-y-10 sm:text-center lg:auto-cols-auto lg:grid-flow-col lg:grid-cols-none lg:justify-start lg:text-left">
+          <dl className="mt-10 grid grid-cols-1 sm:grid-cols-3 gap-x-10 gap-y-6 sm:mt-16 sm:gap-x-16 sm:gap-y-10 sm:text-center lg:auto-cols-auto lg:grid-flow-col lg:grid-cols-none lg:justify-start lg:text-left">
             {[
               //  Added the plus sign because some datasets do not
               //  contain defined countries
@@ -36,11 +36,19 @@ export function Hero({ countriesCount, datasetsCount, filesCount }) {
               ['Files', filesCount],
             ].map(([name, value]) => (
               <div key={name}>
+                <div className='flex gap-x-2 items-center sm:hidden' key={name}>
+                  <dd className="mt-0.5 text-2xl font-semibold tracking-tight text-emerald-900">
+                    {value}
+                  </dd>
+                  <dt className="font-mono text-sm text-emerald-600">{name}</dt>
+                </div>
+                <div className='hidden sm:block' key={name}>
                   <dt className="font-mono text-sm text-emerald-600">{name}</dt>
                   <dd className="mt-0.5 text-2xl font-semibold tracking-tight text-emerald-900">
                     {value}
                   </dd>
                 </div>
+              </div>
             ))}
           </dl>
         </div>

examples/openspending/components/_shared/Footer.tsx

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
+import Image from 'next/image';
+import Link from 'next/link';
+export default function Footer() {
+  return (
+    <footer>
+      <div className="mx-auto max-w-7xl px-4 sm:px-6 lg:px-8 flex flex-col items-center justify-between md:flex-row">
+        <div className="flex gap-x-2 items-center">
+          <p className="mt-8 text-base text-slate-500 md:mt-0">Maintained by</p>
+          <a href="https://www.datopian.com/">
+            <Image
+              alt="Datopian logo"
+              className="mb-2"
+              src="/datopian-logotype.png"
+              width={160}
+              height={40}
+            />
+          </a>
+        </div>
+        <p className="mt-6 text-base text-slate-500 md:mt-0">
+          Copyright © 2023 Datopian, LLC. All rights reserved.
+        </p>
+      </div>
+    </footer>
+  );
+}

examples/openspending/components/_shared/Layout.tsx

@@ -1,10 +1,12 @@
 import { Header } from '../Header';
+import Footer from './Footer';
 
 export default function Layout({ children }) {
   return (
-    <div className="bg-white min-h-screen pb-32">
+    <div className="bg-white min-h-screen pb-12">
       <Header />
       {children}
+      <Footer />
     </div>
   );
 }

examples/openspending/content/about/contact.md

@@ -0,0 +1,23 @@
+---
+lead: true
+section: about
+title: Contact
+authors:
+- Anders Pedersen
+redirect_from:
+- /contact/
+---
+
+Connect with the OpenSpending community.
+
+The best place for OpenSpending-related discussions is our [forum](https://discuss.okfn.org/c/openspending/), but you can interact with OpenSpending on your favorite social network by following the links below:
+
+* Open Knowledge Discussion Forum
+  * [English](https://discuss.okfn.org/c/openspending/none)
+  * [Portuguese](https://discuss.okfn.org/c/openspending/gastos-abertos)
+* <abbr title="Gitter">Gitter</abbr> chat: [OpenSpending Gitter chatroom](https://gitter.im/openspending)
+* GitHub: 
+  * [OpenSpending](https://github.com/openspending) (OpenSpending-related code)
+
+* Twitter: [&#64;openspending](https://twitter.com/openspending)
+* Facebook: [OpenSpending](https://www.facebook.com/openspending?_rdr=p)

examples/openspending/content/about/contributors.md

@@ -0,0 +1,172 @@
+---
+section: about
+lead: true
+title: Contributors
+authors:
+- Anders Pedersen
+---
+
+There are many contributors to OpenSpending. There are thousands of registered OpenSpending users contributing data and analysis.
+
+It is impossible to adequately acknowledge the many individuals and organizations who have contributed.
+
+This page then is necessarily partial and is focused (though not limited to) those who have made special efforts to contribute through their participation in specific teams, in donating data or in other significant ways.
+
+If you'd like to be added as a contributor to this page please [get in touch]({{ site.baseurl }}/about/contact/).
+
+## Teams
+
+### News and Website Team
+
+#### News Editors - Descriptions
+
+These guys run the blog and manage our social media presence. We are
+still recruiting News Editor volunteers so if you'd like to join the
+team <a
+href="http://community.openspending.org/contribute/web/#Sign_up">apply
+here</a>.
+
+<strong>Burite Joseph</strong>, <a href="https://twitter.com/BuriteJoseph">@BuriteJoseph</a>
+
+Independent media practitioner and entrepreneur with over five years
+of journalism and research experience, Burite runs ZHENOBIA, a media
+integration and multimedia content aggregation company. She also
+consults for <a href="http://www.smsmedia.ug">SMS Media Uganda</a>,
+Ultimate Media Uganda, <a href="http://www.busiweek.com">East African
+Business Week</a> and <a href="http://www.dailymonitor.co.ug">Daily
+Monitor</a>.
+
+<blockquote>
+Working with data is my new passion. I am a quick learner and teamwork is my steroid.
+</blockquote>
+
+<strong>Anna Flagg</strong>, <a href="http://www.annaflagg.com">www.annaflagg.com</a>
+
+Data journalist at the Center for Responsive Politics, Anna has a background in computer science, data visualization, design and data-storytelling.
+
+<blockquote>
+I like working on projects that create awareness of issues important to the public. I'm excited to work with and learn from the Open Spending community.
+
+</blockquote>
+<strong>Laura S. García</strong>,<a href="https://twitter.com/Laura_S_Garcia">@laura_s_garcia</a>
+
+An experienced journalist, Laura has worked for more than ten years as a multi-media journalist in Spain. She has also taught Geography and History to high-school students. Laura speaks Spanish, Galician, English and a little Swedish.
+
+<blockquote>
+I’m looking to improve my knowledge of open data, as I’ve always thought this to be the best way to offer a good journalism and a good education as well.
+
+</blockquote>
+<strong>Karen Brzezinska</strong>, <a href="https://twitter.com/westofwarsaw">@westofwarsaw</a>
+
+Also a professional journalist, Karen (Kati) worked for international news services specialising in equity, commodity and currency markets. Her background is in PoliSci (East European studies), and, while originally from midwestern US, her life experience lists Italy, Hungary (1989-1992) and The Netherlands (since 1992) as home-countries. Kati is fluent in English (US) and Dutch.
+
+<blockquote>
+I'm interested in learning how open data can be used to enhance governance and education.
+
+</blockquote>
+<strong>Dominic Kornu</strong>, <a href="https://twitter.com/Qaphui">@qaphui</a>
+
+An IT and Maths tutor from Ghana, with an interest in web and social media technologies, Dominic blogs at <a href="http://dominicmary.blogspot.com">Qaphui’s Cafe</a> and volunteers in his free time.
+
+<blockquote>
+I am interested in learning how open data can be used to enhance governance and education.
+
+</blockquote>
+<strong>Mehmet Koksal</strong>, <a href="https://twitter.com/mehmetkoksal">@mehmetkoksal</a>
+
+Freelance journalist based in Brussels (Belgium) and conference interpreter, Mehmet also works as a fixer for the international press, including the French weekly <a href="http://www.courrierinternational.com/">Courrier int.</a>. In his free time he volunteers for <a href="http://www.ajp.be/">AJP</a> and acts as a campaign manager for the <a href="http://europe.ifj.org/en/pages/turkey-campaign-set-journalists-free">EFJ</a>.
+
+<strong>Teodora Beleaga</strong>, <a href="https://twitter.com/t30d0ra">@t30d0ra</a>
+
+A digital analyst and freelance data journalist based in London, <a href="http://teodorabeleaga.com">Teodora </a>is an alumna of City University’s Interactive Journalism MA and has completed work experience with <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/profile/teodora-beleaga">The Guardian</a>.
+
+<blockquote>
+I joined the Open Spending project to share my data analysis skills and expand my understanding of fiscal transparency and government spending.
+
+</blockquote>
+<strong>Miriam Ruhenstroth</strong>
+
+A Science and technology freelance journalist based in Berlin (Germany), Miriam has a background in biological sciences. In 2011 she attended a summer school for data journalism (organized by Initiative Wissenschaftsjournalismus).
+
+<blockquote>
+I found the field of data storytelling thrilling and joined OpenSpending, to learn more about it and participate for good.
+
+</blockquote>
+
+### Data Team
+
+
+#### Data Wranglers - Descriptions
+
+The Data Wranglers work to add, clean and visualise data in OpenSpending. They help community members who need assistance. Some data wranglers focus on cleaning and analysing data whereas others work to visualise data using the OpenSpending API. We are still recruiting Data Wrangler volunteers so if you'd like to join the team <a href="http://community.openspending.org/contribute/data/#Official_sign_up">apply here</a>.
+
+<strong>Concha Catalan</strong>, <a href="https://twitter.com/conchacatalan">@conchacatalan</a>
+
+An English teacher and freelance journalist based in Barcelona (Spain), Concha is currently working on a project to open the autonomous government of Catalonia (opengov.cat). She also blogs at <a href="http://barcelonalittleshell.blogspot.com.es">http://barcelonalittleshell.blogspot.com.es</a>.
+
+<blockquote>
+I would like to add the data set of the autonomous government of Catalonia budget to OpenSpending. I am coming to terms with lots of new concepts.
+
+</blockquote>
+<strong>Prakash Neupane</strong>, <a href="https://twitter.com/nprkshn">@nprkshn</a>
+
+OKFN Ambassador in Nepal and FOSS Enthusiastic, Prakash is working in social development empowering individuals and communities by using technology. He is an Open Data Researcher and Nepali Wikimedian, responsible for Wikimedia Education Program in Nepal. Find out more  about him <a href="http://www.prakashneupane.com.np/about-me">here</a>.
+
+<strong>Pierre Chrzanowski</strong>, @piezanowski
+
+A member of the French OKFN working in the field of Open Government Data, Pierre says he is really interested to work on Tax Heaven, Public Procurement and Aid Data.
+
+<blockquote>
+I want to learn more about tools to analyse the data sets and how best to do storytelling.
+
+</blockquote>
+<strong>Samuel S. Lee</strong>, <a href="https://twitter.com/OpenNotion">@OpenNotion</a>
+
+Currently based in Washington DC, Samuel is a member of the <a href="https://finances.worldbank.org">World Bank Group Open Finances</a> team. He loves data, innovation, transparency, photography and college football.
+
+<blockquote>
+I am passionate about “open” and its potential to transform civic engagement, international development, and the world. I am particularly interested in realizing the potential of open financial information.
+
+</blockquote>
+<strong>Adriana Homolova</strong>
+
+A data journalism student with a passion for open culture, Adriana is a member of the <a href="http://soit.sk">Society for Open Information Technologies</a>.
+
+<strong>Sipos Zoltán</strong>
+
+A Hungarian journalist working for an Internet news portal in Romania, Sipos specializes in investigative reporting.  His background includes philosophy, sociology and public policies. Sipos has experience working with data, filing FOI requests, and tackling spreadsheets.
+
+<blockquote>
+I am trying to learn as much as I can about data journalism through online groups, MOOCs and books purchased from Amazon. My ultimate goal is to set up a small investigative / data journalism start-up in Romania.
+</blockquote>
+
+<strong>Gabe Sawhney</strong>
+
+A member of <a href="http://betterbudget.ca">Better Budget
+Toronto</a> Gabe joined the Team to bring transparency to his
+city’s <a
+href="http://spacing.ca/toronto/2012/12/10/lorinc-building-a-better-budget-at-city-hall/">budget</a>.
+
+<blockquote>
+I want to mobilize action (citizens, elected officials and policymakers) for better process, better clarity, better formats, and more transparency around city budgets.
+</blockquote>
+
+<strong>Elaine Ayo</strong>, <a href="https://twitter.com/eieayo">@eieayo</a>
+
+Statistician student based in Washington, DC Elaine has spent the last
+three years in Seoul, South Korea as a copy editor for an English news
+wire. Prior to that Elaine reported for her hometown paper, the San
+Antonio Express-News, in Texas.
+
+<strong>Hans Loos</strong>
+
+An IT and telecom freelance journalist based in Belgium, Hans studied
+sociology and has a passion for statistics.
+
+<blockquote>
+I have started to learn to program and study R but without big results up till now.
+</blockquote>
+
+## Data Donors
+
+In progress ...

examples/openspending/content/about/exemplars.md

@@ -0,0 +1,329 @@
+---
+section: about
+lead: true
+title: Project portfolio
+authors:
+- Neil Ashton
+---
+Here are some of the projects, past and present, that we have been involved with.
+
+* <a href="#current-development">Current OpenSpending projects</a>
+* <a href="#past-development">Past projects</a>
+* <a href="#gov-tools">Tools for governments</a>
+* <a href="#gov-use-cases">Government use cases</a>
+* <a href="#publications">Publications and reports</a>
+* <a href="#standards">Technical standards</a>
+* <a href="#stories">Stories and data journalism</a>
+* <a href="#your-project">Collaborate! Your project here...</a>
+
+<a name="current-development"></a>
+
+## Current projects
+
+We're working on [OpenSpending Next](/next/), the next version of OpenSpending.  Learn how to [get involved](/get-involved/)!
+
+<a name="past-development"></a>
+
+## Already unleashed
+
+#### Spending Stories
+
+In 2011, the Open Knowledge Foundation was awarded a Knight News Challenge Grant to work on the <a href="http://blog.okfn.org/2011/01/18/spending-stories/">Spending Stories</a> Project. Large numbers are often meaningless to the general public, and despite a wealth of information around government spending, the topic of government finance is often overlooked by journalists. The Spending Stories project aims to facilitate reporting by speeding up fact-checking around spending data as well as connecting news stories about public spending to relevant datasets and visualisations to put these stories into context.
+
+We're into our second year of the project now. <a href="http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2012/12/follow-the-money-a-spending-stories-guide-for-journalists345.html">See what we are up to by following our updates on the PBS Idea Lab blog.</a>
+
+#### budzeti.ba: Bosnian Budget Bubbles
+
+<img class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" title="Balkan Budgets" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8063/8219557569_cc12ebbdea_m.jpg" alt="" />
+
+In October 2013 OpenSpending launched the "Where Does My Money Go"-site <a href="http://budzeti.ba/">budzeti.ba</a> in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for Democracy, the OpenSpending team collaborated with the Centre for Public Interest Advocacy in Bosnia to produce interactive graphics of national and subnational budgets in Bosnia.
+
+As part of the project OpenSpending:
+
+<ul>
+<li>Created visualisations of national, entity-, cantonal- and district-level budgets for Bosnia.</li>
+<li>Conducted onsite trainings and capacity building workshops with organisations from other Balkan countries, on getting, wrangling and presenting financial data (with OpenSpending and other tools).</li>
+<li>Developed a tax calculator for Bosnia (similar to the <a href="http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/dailybread.html">Daily Bread</a>).</li>
+<li>Tested the <a href="http://openspending.org/resources/handbook/ch001_introduction.html">Spending Data Handbook</a> and added an <a href="http://community.openspending.org/help/guide/">OpenSpending guide</a> with a more technical guidance, for those organisations wishing to do more ambitious data work.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2012/09/26/balkan-budget-bubbles/">Read more about the project.</a> Read the full announcement from <a href="http://community.openspending.org/2013/10/budzeti-ba-follow-the-money-bosnia-herzegovina/">the launch</a>.
+
+#### OpenSpending Slovakia
+
+In early 2013, we launched <a href="http://slovakia.openspending.org">Slovakia Openspending</a>, prepared in collaboration with transparency and anti-corruption watchdog <a href="http://www.transparency.sk/">Transparency International Slovakia</a>. The site contains budget and expenditure information gathered from some 20 cities across Slovakia allowing users to examine current municipality budgets and compare them to expenditures going back to 2009. Based on the openspending.org source code, we have added several improvements such as:
+
+<ul>
+<li>Year-on-year comparison for spending categories.</li>
+<li>Improved listing and more contextual presentation of the data.</li>
+<li>Embedable graphic drilldowns with accompanying tables.</li>
+</ul>
+Transparency Slovakia hopes to promote the site as an example of how budgets could be made more accessible and comprehensible to the public once the site is localized and tested further. While not in its current plans, additional spending data and a feature to allow users to compare cities would improve opportunities for doing crowdsourced benchmarking.
+
+#### Where Does My Money Go?
+
+<img class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 3em;" title="WDMMG original" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7088/7315252358_7dae93b263.jpg" alt="" width="250" />
+
+<a href="http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/">Where Does My Money Go?</a> (WDMMG) is the project from which OpenSpending was born. Funded originally by 4IP, it allows UK citizens to examine where their taxes are being spent through an interactive 'bubble tree' visualisation. They can even find out how much they contribute on a daily basis through their taxes to various sectors of society through the <a href="http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/dailybread.html">Daily Bread</a> app.
+
+You can now build a site like WDMMG for your own country using the OpenSpending API and the WDMMG Toolkit:
+
+<ul>
+<li><a href="http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/">Visit the Where Does My Money Go? project</a></li>
+<li><a href="https://twitter.com/#!/wdmmg">Follow Where Does My Money Go? on Twitter</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2012/02/16/thekit/">Read more about how to create your own Where Does My Money Go?site</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+#### Cameroon Budget Inquirer
+
+<img class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 2em;" title="Cameroon Budget Inquirer" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8340/8287000485_4daf7d73da_n.jpg" alt="" />
+
+We collaborated with the World Bank to produce a citizen-friendly representation of <a href="http://cameroon.openspending.org/">Cameroon's budget</a>.
+
+The project incorporates the open-source 'bubble visualisations' first seen in Where Does My Money Go, as well as many new elements, such as a map based navigation and heatmaps. The project includes:
+
+<ul>
+<li>Visualisation of the National Investment Budget, the Northwest region's budget of Cameroon (including absolute and per-capita estimates, budgeted as well as actual figures) as well as a similar visualisation of the Tignere local council budget.</li>
+<li>A sub-national budget transparency index - similar to the work of the International Budget Partnership, but at sub-national levels. This highlights the availability of key budget documents and ranks regions on their availability.</li>
+<li>Explore the data: filter the data by categories such as amount, location, and activity.</li>
+</ul>
+
+#### OffenerHaushalt
+<img class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" title="Offener Haushalt" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7077/7315281352_2c00d928d8.jpg" alt="" width="250" />
+
+<a href="http://bund.offenerhaushalt.de/">OffenerHaushalt</a> allows users to explore and drill down through the various layers of Germany's federal budget, comparing data from as far back as 2006. Through the new TreeMap visualisation, the user can easily see and explore the different departments and programmes and see how much is spent, proportions and statistics on changes between years.
+
+The success of OffenerHaushalt and the demand to roll it out on a local level was one of the prime motivations for the creation of OpenSpending. To date, the OffenerHaushalt team have received around 90 requests for a similar site in their area.
+
+<ul>
+<li><a href="http://bund.offenerhaushalt.de/">Visit the OffenerHaushalt Project</a></li>
+<li><a href="https://twitter.com/#!/offenerhaushalt">Follow OffenerHaushalt on Twitter</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+#### Uganda Aid Visualisation
+
+Aid flows often do not pass through a recipient government’s conventional budget mechanisms. When this happens, recipient governments themselves may not have the complete overview of where aid money goes and how donor priorities align with their own. This information is vital for governments and aid donors to be able to make the best use of scarce resources.
+
+<img class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 1em;" title="Uganda Aid" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8159/7315314386_7940819de6.jpg" alt="" width="250" />
+
+Normally this overview is not available – leading to waste, overlap and inefficiency. The lack of comparable information means aid donors and recipient country governments can’t work together to coordinate their efforts or understand how donor priorities align with recipient priorities; it decreases developing country governments' ownership and undermines the potential for good governance and planning. Donors and governments need to know what others are doing - and crucially, what others are planning on doing - if they are to make sure that these resources are used most effectively. Otherwise, some sectors and areas will not receive enough funding, while others may have too many donors involved.
+
+The Uganda Aid visualisation project was a joint project between the OKFN and Publish What You Fund to combine two key types of fiscal data, revenues from aid together with spending information, and present them together in an informative way for the first time through an interactive visualisation.
+
+<ul>
+<li><a href="http://www.publishwhatyoufund.org/uganda/uganda-with-data.htm">Visit the Publish What You Fund Uganda Visualisation Project</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://www.publishwhatyoufund.org">Visit Publish What You Fund's website</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://openspending.org/ugandabudget">Uganda Budget and Aid to Uganda, 2003-2006 dataset in OpenSpending</a></li>
+<li>Coverage of the Uganda Visualisation: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/nov/25/uganda-aid-confusion-analyse-spending?newsfeed=true">Guardian Poverty Matters Blog</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+#### IATI
+
+The International Aid Transparency Initiative is a common format for publishing aid information. 29 signatories representing 75% of global Official Development Finance have committed to reporting timely information about their aid activities in this standard format. Already, 13 signatories representing 45% of ODF have published.
+
+<img class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" title="IATI" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8007/7315331330_4dafe5ea48.jpg" alt="" width="250" />
+
+IATI publishers release the data as open data feeds in a common XML format through their own websites. They then register their data with the IATI Registry - which runs on the Open Knowledge Foundation's CKAN software - making it easy for users to find this data.
+
+However, the nature of IATI as a distributed collection of raw data feeds also presents a challenge to non-technical users. The Open Knowledge Foundation worked with Publish What You Fund to transform the data into a format suitable for import into OpenSpending, where the data can be much more easily visualised and analysed.
+
+<a href="http://openspending.org/iati?_time=2011">View the IATI data on OpenSpending</a>
+
+<a name="gov-tools"></a>
+
+## Tools for governments
+
+#### Data.Gov.Uk Spend Browser
+
+<img class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 2em;" title="Reporting Tool" src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5523/9045231550_505140b175_n.jpg" alt="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5523/9045231550_505140b175_n.jpg" />
+
+The OpenSpending team worked with Data.Gov.Uk to build the <a href="http://data.gov.uk/data/openspending-browse">transaction explorer</a> which forms part of the Data.Gov.Uk website.
+
+The transaction explorer allows any user to directly search the OpenSpending database for companies, departments or projects of interest and investigate how much money was spent on them.
+
+#### UK Government Spend Reporting Dashboard
+
+<img class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 2em;" title="Reporting Tool" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8443/7980196066_d4aa29eb0d_z.jpg" alt="" />
+
+The OpenSpending team worked with Data.Gov.Uk to produce an automatic reporting tool to demonstrate which government departments were complying with their transparency obligations.
+
+The <a href="http://data.gov.uk/data/openspending-report/index">tool</a> lists departments registered as data publishers on data.gov.uk and details how precisely they have followed the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-for-publishing-spend-over-25000">HM Treasury reporting guidelines</a>. It will also make the whole of the reported data available for search and analysis both on <a href="http://data.gov.uk/openspending">data.gov.uk</a> and on the OpenSpending site.
+
+<a name="gov-use-cases"></a>
+
+## Government use cases
+
+#### City of Bologna
+
+<img class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 2em;" title="Open Dati Bologna Tool" src="http://dati.comune.bologna.it/file/field/image/open_spending_pic_bologna.png" alt="http://dati.comune.bologna.it/file/field/image/open_spending_pic_bologna.png" />
+
+The open data team at the City of Bologna uses OpenSpending to visualise several years of <a href="http://openspending.org/bp_2012_entrate/views/table-of-aggregates-bilancio-di-previsione-2012-entrate">the city budget</a>.
+
+#### City of Berlin
+<img class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 2em;" title="The budget for Berlin city" src="http://stefanwehrmeyer.com/img/blog/2013/02/budget-berlin.png" alt="http://stefanwehrmeyer.com/img/blog/2013/02/budget-berlin.png" />
+
+The City of Berlin asked Open Knowledge Foundation Germany to visualise the budget for the city using OpenSpending. The result is featured on the <a href="https://imperia9.berlinonline.de/sen/finanzen/haushalt/haushaltsplan/artikel.5697.php">site for the city finances</a>.
+
+<a name="publications"></a>
+
+## Publications and Reports
+
+#### Technology for Transparent &amp; Accountable Public Finance
+<img class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 2em;" title="TTAPF" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8031/8002530046_fe4354f76a_m.jpg" alt="" />
+
+The report, <a href="../../resources/gift/">“Technology for Transparent and Accountable Public Finance”</a>, was commissioned by the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT) in February 2012 in order to assist GIFT in assessing the potential of technology to aid transparency and accountability in relation to governments’ fiscal activities.
+
+Read the <a href="../../resources/gift/chapter9-intro/#governments">recommendations</a>.
+
+<a href="http://content.openspending.org/resources/gift/pdf/ttapf_report_20120530.pdf">Download as PDF</a>
+
+#### Mapping the Open Spending Data Community
+<img class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 2em;" title="Spend Report" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7414/8881834696_4176e6d2ea_m.jpg" alt="" />
+
+In early 2012, we set out on a mission. Our aim was to establish how CSO's currently work with spending data, how they would like to use it, and what they would like to achieve - including:
+
+<ul>
+<li>what existing tools are being used</li>
+<li>what current technical needs are unmet</li>
+<li>what would be required to meet these needs and how feasible is it to tackle them</li>
+</ul>
+This <a href="../../resources/mappingcommunity/">report</a> is the output of that research. Here, we bring together key case studies from organisations who have done pioneering work in using technology to put government data to best use.
+
+In this report we:
+
+<ul>
+<li>outline how the data could be improved in order to make it more usable</li>
+<li>examine some key case studies of how organisations are using technology to do groundbreaking research, citizen engagement, visualisation and tracking of accountability.</li>
+<li>talk about the training needs for CSO's to help them better use the data available, and to demand better data.</li>
+</ul>
+Read the <a href="../../resources/mappingcommunity/conclusions/">conclusions</a>.
+
+<a href="../../resources/mappingcommunity/introduction/videos/">Athens to Berlin research trip: Watch the video interviews</a>
+
+#### The Spending Data Handbook
+<img class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 2em;" title="Spending Handbook" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7449/8754377372_77aed9107e_m.jpg" alt="" />
+
+The <a href="../../resources/handbook/">Spending Data Handbook</a> is addressed to people and organisations who want to use and understand government budgets and spending data in their work.
+
+The book covers:
+
+<ul>
+<li>Collaborating with other organizations to pool resources and strengthen your advocacy effort</li>
+<li>If you're just starting out, what data to look for and what to ask for (nay, demand!) from your government</li>
+<li>The 'Data Pipeline': Tricks and tips for finding, wrangling and systematically processing your data</li>
+<li>Getting ambitious, running a technology project</li>
+<li>Presenting your findings to engage the public, media and government</li>
+<li>Lists and appendices of technical and non-technical resources</li>
+</ul>
+
+<a name="standards"></a>
+
+## Standards
+
+#### [Draft] Standard for Transaction-level Spending Data
+The release of transaction-level data (i.e. information about individual disbursements or contract spending) is a relatively new idea, compared to the release of higher-level accounting information or budget overviews. The availability of such data allows for fine-grained analysis and oversight of activities and will, in the future, enable anyone inside or outside of government to reconstruct key reports from raw data. In order to perform these types of analysis, it is often necessary to combine spending information from several sources - either for completeness or comparison.
+
+Too often, standardization in this context appears to be supply-driven: every publisher wants to express the full range of data they hold and are willing to release. Necessarily, such an approach leads to a standard that is the superset of all the systems that feed into it.
+
+Such designs tend to be of little use to the intended consumers, as they raise the barriers to understanding the information considerably. Our approach therefore is to generate demand-side use cases first, ensuring that everything that is done will generate value for data users.
+
+Read our <a href="../../resources/standard/">proposed standard</a>.
+
+<a name="stories"></a>
+
+## Stories and Data Journalism
+
+#### The Guardian (UK)
+
+<h4>The Real Price of the London Olympics</h4>
+<a title="olympic-guardian by anderspedersenOKF, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/94746900@N06/8915659698/"><img src="http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2806/8915659698_60f3b70eed_o.png" alt="olympic-guardian" /></a>
+
+The Guardian used OpenSpending's bubbletree visualisations to answer the questions: Where is the Olympics money coming from - and where's it being spent? How much is coming from sponsorship - and how much does the Olympic stadium cost?
+
+<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/datablog/interactive/2012/jul/26/london-2012-price-olympic-games-visualised">See the interactive visualisation on the Guardian Datablog</a>.
+
+<h4>The Daily Bread</h4>
+<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/datablog/interactive/2013/mar/20/budget-2013-how-taxes-spent-interactive">The Daily Bread</a> from Where Does My Money Go? Has made regular appearances on the Guardian Datablog around budget time in the UK.
+
+#### Le Monde (France)
+We experienced an extremely high traffic spike when a visualisation based on French data was featured in Le Monde in October 2012.
+The article <a href="http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2012/10/16/plf-des-avions-au-bouclier-fiscal-la-java-des-amendements_1776093_823448.html?xtmc=depenses&amp;xtcr=52">PLF : des avions au bouclier fiscal, la java des amendements</a>, (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.
+
+#### Politiken (Denmark)
+<a title="politiken" href="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5339/9044797934_366b1d8914_m.jpg"><img class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 2em;" src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5339/9044797934_366b1d8914_m.jpg" alt="politiken" /></a>
+
+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. Even in a year with local elections, however, they do not attract much public attention. The open data web agency Buhl-Rasmussen developed a site of all 98 Danish municipalities for one of the biggest Danish news sites, Politiken.
+
+#### Sumy News, Ukraine
+<a title="politiken" href="http://sumynews.com/data-journalism2/budget-economy/item/4726-byudzhet-m-sumy-na-2013-rik-openspending.html&lt;br /&gt;
+"><img class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 1em;" src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5459/9045133060_9dbb04b97c_m.jpg" alt="" /></a>
+
+On December 26, 2012, Sumy City Council approved the city budget for 2013, but there were big concerns about how it would be executed.
+
+The expected revenues for the coming year did not appear to match the planned output, as Sumy would have to have generated 15.7% more than the expected revenues in 2012....
+
+<a href="http://sumynews.com/data-journalism2/budget-economy/item/4726-byudzhet-m-sumy-na-2013-rik-openspending.html">Read the article</a>.
+
+#### Privacy International
+
+In early 2012, 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 held in OpenSpending. They had a list of companies which exhibited at the famous surveillance technology conferences in the US, the so-called Wiretappers' Ball, as well as a list of attendees of the conference, and they wanted to check which attendees also became customers of these companies.
+
+<img class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" title="Caelainn Barr" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7213/7315271184_921d9ed606.jpg" alt="" width="250" />
+
+Some attendees posed no surprises – the FBI, the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the UK Serious Organized Crime Agency and Interpol to name a few – but there were a few that are downright baffling, like the US Department of Commerce, the US Fish &amp; Wildlife Service and the Clark County School District Police Department.
+
+As more datasets are loaded into OpenSpending, this universal search will get increasingly more powerful, and we look forward to hearing what other people use the search for.
+
+<ul>
+<li><a href="http://opendatalabs.org/spendbrowser">Try out the search for yourself in the spendbrowser</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2012/02/24/how-spending-stories-fact-checks-big-brother-the-wiretappers-ball/">Read more about the story</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+#### Italian Regional Accounts Data
+<img class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 1em;" title="Caelainn Barr" src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5224/5639223572_5451048271.jpg" alt="" width="250" />
+
+During the International Journalism Festival in Perugia in 2011, the OpenSpending team loaded and visualised the Italian regional accounts for 2008. The project received wide coverage in the Italian and International Press and was one of the earliest success stories for OpenSpending after Where Does My Money Go? went international.
+
+<a href="http://openspending.org/it-regional-accounts">Visit the Italian Regional Accounts</a> on OpenSpending.org.
+
+Coverage of the Italian Regional Accounts Data:
+
+<ul>
+<li><a href="http://www3.lastampa.it/economia/sezioni/articolo/lstp/398705/">La Stampa</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/apr/19/italy-public-spending-visualisation">The Guardian</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://daily.wired.it/news/economia/2011/04/19/open-spending.html">Daily Wired</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+## Training
+
+<img class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 3em;" title="Caelainn Barr" src="http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6166/6151919267_897ccfbd1c.jpg" alt="" width="250" />
+
+We regularly conduct training sessions for journalists and NGOs on how to locate, extract, work with and visualise spending and other types of data. If you are interested in exploring these possibilities, please [get in touch](/about/contact/).
+
+<ul>
+<li><a href="http://blog.okfn.org/2011/08/09/data-driven-journalism-workshop-on-eu-spending-tools-techniques-utrecht-8th-9th-september/">Workshop on EU Spending, Utrecht</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://blog.okfn.org/2011/09/27/eurohack-one-day-data-journalism-competition-and-workshop-on-eu-spending/">EuroHack: One-day data journalism competition and workshop on EU spending</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2012/11/26/day-1-openspending-cso-workshop-sarajevo/">Budget and Spending Visualisation Workshop, Sarajevo</a></li>
+</ul>
+You can find more of our training materials on the <a href="http://schoolofdata.org/handbook/courses/">School of Data website</a>.
+
+## Community
+
+<img class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" title="Kaitlin Lee presents Sunlight's Analysis OGDCamp" src="http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6166/6270108254_5875c8a7ed.jpg" alt="" width="250" />
+
+The OpenSpending community includes engaged citizens, dedicated journalists and members of civil society organisations working on developing best practices around opening up and using government financial data with experts from fields ranging from aid experts, participatory budgeting fields, governmental institutions and civic developer initiatives.
+
+We showcase and display some of the most interesting projects from all over the world on [the OpenSpending blog](/blog/).
+
+The working group is open to everyone with an interest in improving Government Financial Transparency around the world. If you're interested in joining, please join the <a href="https://discuss.okfn.org/c/openspending">forums</a>.
+
+<a name="your-project"></a>
+
+## Contribute
+
+#### Your project here
+Have some data? Have a Spending Story? Get in touch - we'd love to hear from you and are open to suggestions!
+
+

examples/openspending/content/about/faq.md

@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+---
+section: about
+lead: true
+title: Frequently Asked Questions
+authors:
+- Neil Ashton
+---
+#### What is OpenSpending?
+
+OpenSpending is about Mapping the Money.
+
+The aim is to help track every (public) government and corporate financial transaction across the world and present it in useful and engaging forms for everyone from a schoolchild to a data geek.
+
+What [OpenStreetMap](http://www.openstreetmap.org/) does for geography, OpenSpending does for money. OpenStreetMap has mapped the world in unprecedented levels of detail, harnessing the power of thousands of volunteers who each contribute data for their little corner of the world. However, as far as we know, there is no 'global atlas' of spending, no integrated, searchable database which would be a valuable resource for policy-makers and civil society alike. We want anyone to be able to go to their local council or national government, request the data, upload, understand and visualize it and contribute to this 'spending commons', which anyone can benefit from.
+
+#### What is the relationship to Where Does My Money Go?
+
+Simply put, OpenSpending is the international version of [Where Does My Money Go?](http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/) (WDMMG). WDMMG used interactive 'bubble trees' to show the UK Taxpayer which spending sectors their tax money is put towards as well as having an interactive tax calculator to let users see for their level of income, how much they contribute to various spending areas through their taxes.
+
+##### Platform vs. project
+
+After the success of [the original project](http://jonathangray.org/2007/04/02/where-does-my-money-go-project-proposal/), it became clear that there was need for an international platform to allow people to build such sites at scale. Where Does My Money Go? was remodelled to become an instance of OpenSpending: the data is stored in the central OpenSpending database, and a custom frontend was developed using the OpenSpending API. Anyone can create one just like it, with their own branding at their own URL.
+
+#### Can anyone contribute?
+
+Yes!  Whether you are interested in international, national or local data, you can contribute, work with and visualize it. See [How can I get involved?](../../help/development/volunteer) for the various ways you can get involved.
+
+#### How can I get involved?
+
+The team has worked hard to make it possible to load and visualize your own data, translate the software and even build your own custom front-end sites like [Where Does My Money Go?](http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/)
+
+Whether you are technical or non-technical, whether your aims are advocacy, journalism, better policy-making or just making pretty bubbles to help people understand your country's budget, there are plenty of ways to get involved. And don't be shy - if you spot a way to get involved that we haven't thought of, please don't hesitate to let us know.
+
+See the [get involved](../../help/development/volunteer) page for more information.
+
+#### What kind of language support do you offer?
+
+We currently provide language versions of the OpenSpending platform in Greek, Indonesian and Italian. We expect to enable French as well as other languages in the near future.
+You can help translate OpenSpending into another language at our [Transifex page](https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/openspending/).
+
+#### How are you funded?
+
+OpenSpending is a community-run project, but it would not be able to exist without the generous support of many organizations. See [this page](../funders/) for more information.

examples/openspending/content/about/fiscaldatapackage.md

@@ -0,0 +1,23 @@
+---
+title: The Fiscal Data Package
+redirect_from:
+  - "/about/governance/"
+---
+
+The Fiscal Data Package is a lightweight and user-oriented format for publishing and consuming fiscal data. Fiscal data packages are made of simple and universal components. They can be produced from ordinary spreadsheet software and used in any environment.
+
+The motivation behind the fiscal data package was to create a specification which is open by nature - based on other open standards, supported by open tools and software, modular, extensible and promoted transparently by a large community.
+
+It is designed to be simple to use - providing a small but flexible set of features, based on real-world requirements and not theoretical ones. All the while, the built-in extensibility allows this spec to adapt to many different use cases and domains. It is also possible to gradually use more and more part of this specification - thus making it easier to implement this spec with existing data while slowly improving the data quality.
+
+A main concern of this specification is the ability to work with data as it is currently exists, without forcing publishers to modify the contents or structure of their current data files in order to "adapt" them to the specification.
+
+#### The Open Fiscal Data Package serves two main purposes:
+Standardizing the structure and the content of fiscal data so that tools and services can be built over it for visualization, analysis or comparison;
+Driving data quality by providing a solid framework of publication.
+
+So the Open Fiscal Data Package specifies the form for fiscal data and offers a standardized framework for the content.
+
+- Read the [Fiscal Data Package specification](https://frictionlessdata.io/specs/fiscal-data-package/) on the Frictionless Data website
+- Meet the [OpenSpending tools](/about/tools)
+- Read about 

examples/openspending/content/about/funders.md

@@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
+---
+section: about
+lead: true
+title: Our funders
+authors:
+- Neil Ashton
+---
+OpenSpending is a community-driven project, but we would not be able to run it without the generous support of these organizations:
+
+#### 4IP
+
+<img src="http://blog.openspending.org/files/2013/09/4ip-300x79.jpg" alt="4ip" width="300" height="79" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-1056" />
+
+It was thanks to Channel 4's Information Program that [Where Does My Money Go?](http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/) was born. 'Where Does My Money Go?' was the original version of OpenSpending for the United Kingdom and has inspired many international versions of the site.
+
+#### Open Society Foundations
+
+<img src="http://blog.openspending.org/files/2013/09/osf-300x70.jpg" alt="Basic CMYK" width="300" height="70" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-1057" />
+
+The Open Society Foundations support community building work around Open Spending Data. With this project we aim 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.
+
+Read [the announce post]( http://blog.openspending.org/2012/01/12/civil-society-and-spending-data-who-is-mapping-the-money/) for more information.
+
+#### Knight Foundation
+
+<img src="http://blog.openspending.org/files/2013/09/kf-300x71.png" alt="kf" width="300" height="71" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-1058" />
+
+The Knight Foundation support the development of the [Spending Stories](http://blog.okfn.org/2011/06/22/spending-stories-is-a-winner-of-the-knight-news-challenge/) project. Spending Stories is a tool designed to speed up fact checking around spending data, helping journalists to connect raw data with their stories and build context around data with visualisations and auxilliary information.
+
+#### Omidyar Network
+
+<img src="http://blog.openspending.org/files/2013/09/on-300x100.jpg" alt="on" width="300" height="100" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-1059" />
+
+The Omidyar Network funded the research behind the report 'Technology for Transparent and Accountable Public Finance', which was presented at the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency meeting in Brasilia in April 2012.

examples/openspending/content/about/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,19 @@
+---
+title: About OpenSpending
+redirect_from:
+  - "/about/governance/"
+---
+### What is OpenSpending?
+OpenSpending is a free, open and global platform to search, visualise and analyse fiscal data in the public sphere. With OpenSpending, Open Knowledge Foundation created the opportunity for governments, civil society organizations and communities to publish and visualize their revenue, budgets, spending and procurements data in an open source platform.
+
+The OpenSpending platform consists of a core platform with a large, centralised database that allows for deep analysis across a range of datasets. It is designed, developed and maintained by Open Knowledge Foundation. At the same time, OpenSpending offers tools that enable to establish an ecosystem around fiscal data, which is tailored to the specific aspects and local contexts the data is embedded in.
+
+As an open source and a community-driven project, also reflects the valuable contributions of an active, passionate and committed community.
+
+### Got it, what now?
+
+- Meet the [OpenSpending tools](/about/tools)
+- Learn about the [Fiscal Data Package](/about/fiscaldatapackage)
+- Read other resources about Fiscal Transparency on the [GIFT website](http://www.fiscaltransparency.net/resources/)
+- Read the [OpenSpending documentation](https://docs.openspending.org/en/latest/)
+- Learn more about [this website](/about/meta)

examples/openspending/content/about/meta/changes/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
+---
+title: Recent Changes
+githubactivity: true
+section: meta
+---
+
+A list of the most recent changes or issues raised on the site as
+documented on the site's
+[GitHub repository](https://github.com/openspending/community.openspending.org/).
+
+
+
+<div id="github-activity" style="width: 100%"></div>

examples/openspending/content/about/meta/contribute/add-resource.html

@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+---
+title: Adding a resource to the library
+authors:
+ - Mor Rubinstein
+lang: en
+section: meta
+---
+
+<p>Our resource library is a curated collection open data reosurces from across the community. Everyone can add a resource to the library. This is how to do so.</p>
+
+<h2>1. Add a folder</h2>
+
+<p>Log in to github and head to the following <a href=https://github.com https://github.com/{{ site.github_username }}/tree/gh-pages/resources> link: </a></p>
+
+Every resource has a slug number. To add your resource, you need to give it a number. Look at the list and give you resource the number that follows  the current last number in the list (e.g - if the number is 056, your resource should be named 057).
+Click on the + sign in the directory line and add the number and a “/”. For example: 060/.
+
+<h2>2. Add an index file</h2>
+
+<p>Click on the + sign again. Add a file named index.md to your new folder.</p>
+
+<h2>3. Add the resource</h2>
+
+<p>In the text editor, add the front matter fields in this pattern:</p>
+<pre>
+---
+section: resources
+lang: //Two first letters of the language, according to language code in this table.//
+Author: //The name(s) of the person(s) who wrote the text//
+Country: //One or more country by full name  separated with a comma:  “,”. If there is no specific country, write ‘global’//
+Description: //1-5 lines that summarizes the text. //
+Keywords: //Important descriptors of the text, separated with a comma, “,”.//
+Link: //The link to the resource online//
+MediaType: // List one out of these four types: Presentation, Article,  / Publication, Video//
+Notes: //Any notes or comments.//'
+Publishing_date: //The year the resource was published, e.g. 2015.//
+Publishing_entity: //The organisation(s) which publish the resource//
+Region: North America,Latin America,Asia,Europe,Africa,Mena,Global
+Title: //The name of the resource//
+Topic: //Choose one out of these nine : The Basics,Advocacy,Privacy,civic engagement,Right for information,Data training,PolicyStandards.
+---
+</pre>
+
+<h2>4. Make a pull request</h2>
+
+<p>Click on “Create a new branch for this commit and start a pull request.” This will allow us to review your changes.</p>
+
+Thank you! All done!

examples/openspending/content/about/meta/contribute/adding-terms.html

@@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
+---
+lang: en
+title: Adding a term to the glossary
+authors:
+ - Mor Rubinstein
+section: meta
+---
+<p>Each glossary (meaning, each translated instance of the glossary), has three components:
+<ul>
+<li> A layout template for the glossary homepage: 'glossary.html'</li>
+<li> A layout template for the glossary in each language: 'glossary/{lang}/index.md'</li>
+<li> A directory of the glossary terms. Each term in the directory is listed as the url slug (In English, all lower case letters, and hyphens instead of white spaces).</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p></p>Currently, the English glossary has been updated and organized. Other languages please follow these <a href=http://new.opendatahandbook.org/contribute/translate-glossary/>instructions</a>
+To add a new term, all you need is to have a Github account.</p>
+
+<h3>1: Create a folder for the term</h3>
+
+<p>Log - in to Github and go to this <a href="https://github.com/{{ site.github_repo }}tree/gh-pages/glossary/en/terms">link</a></p>
+
+<p>You will see a the branch name (“gh-pages”) and a directory. You will also see the breadcrumb <code>{{ site.github_repo }} / glossary / en / terms / + </code>. Click on the "+" to create a new folder.<p/>
+
+<p>  Write the name of the term that you want to add in a new slug (In English, all lower case letters, and hyphens instead of white spaces) and add a “/” at the end of the terms name. This will create a new folder name. </p>
+
+<h3>2: Create a file for your term</h3>
+
+<p> Now you will see the breadcrumb - <code>{{ site.github_repo }} / glossary / en / terms / your-new-term / +  </code> Click on the “+” sign again. Now write in the path “index.md”. This will save the whole file as a markdown file.  </p>
+
+<h3>3: Write the term definition </h3>
+<p> In  the text editor below, add the front matter (Jekyll way to mark the page) - </p>
+<pre>
+---
+section: terms
+lang: en
+title: // the term name //
+---
+</pre>
+
+Write the term definition after the front matter as usual.
+
+
+<h3>4: Make a pull request</h3>
+
+<p> Click on “Create a new branch for this commit and start a pull request.” This will allow us to review your changes. <p/>
+
+<p>Thank you! All done! If the handbook editors are happy with your term, it will be added to the glossary. </p>

examples/openspending/content/about/meta/contribute/adding.html

@@ -0,0 +1,126 @@
+---
+lang: en
+title: Adding a page
+authors:
+ - Sam Smith
+section: meta
+---
+
+<p class="lead">Most of what you need to know to add a new page is covered under ‘<a href="{{ "/meta/contribute/editing/" | prepend: site.baseurl }}">Editing a page</a>’, so make sure you have first read through that section.</p>
+
+<p>Adding a page follows a similar process to editing. Instead of locating your page, your first step is to locate your new page’s parent directory.</p>
+
+<h2>1: Create the page</h2>
+
+<p>First locate the parent directory, or folder, in which your file will live. If you are adding a page to the "Get Involved" section, for example, you should be in the '<strong>get-involved</strong>' directory, where you’ll see a list of all the pages related to contributions.</p>
+
+<p>Above the list of pages is a breadcrumb trail <code>{{ site.github_repo }} / get-involved / </code>, to the right of which is a plus symbol <code><strong>+</strong></code>. Click the plus symbol to create your new page.</p>
+
+<h2>2: Name your file</h2>
+
+<p>You should now have a new file editor page open. The first editable section you are presented with is the ‘<em>Name your file</em>’ field. As we touched upon when looking at <a href="{{ "/meta/contribute/editing/" | prepend: site.baseurl }}">editing files</a>, the file name corresponds to the URL of the page on the site. There are a few of rules to follow here:</p>
+
+<ul>
+  <li>The file name should reflect the title of the new page</li>
+  <li>Must be unique</li>
+  <li>Should be all lowercase</li>
+  <li>Words should be separated by hyphens (-)</li>
+  <li>File name should end with the extension '<em>.md</em>' (the .md extension indicates a markdown file)</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p>As an example, if you were creating a page titled '<em>My Cool Page</em>', you would use a file name of:</p>
+
+<pre>
+<code>my-cool-page.md</code>
+</pre>
+
+<p>Assuming you are creating this in the '<em>get-involved</em>' directory, this would result in a URL of <em>{{ site.url }}/get-involved/my-cool-page</em></p>
+
+<div class="note">
+  <h6>Note</h6>
+  <p>The actual words used in your file name are not crucial. It’s fine to use a more succinct version of your page title, for example.</p>
+</div>
+
+<h2>3: Formatting your content</h2>
+
+<p>This step is the same as when editing a page. You need to start your file with the Front Matter, then add your content, formatting it using Markdown. Here is a template to get you started:</p>
+
+<pre>
+<code>---
+title: My Cool Page
+authors:
+ - Fred Bloggs
+---
+
+##A large introductory paragraph.
+
+Regular paragraphs, separated by empty lines.
+
+###A heading
+
+Another paragraph.
+
+ * Maybe
+ * a
+ * list</code>
+</pre>
+
+<p>When you’re done, click ‘<em>Propose new file</em>’.</p>
+
+<h2>4: Make a pull request</h2>
+
+<p>Once you have created your page(s) and updated the contents document, you're ready to make your pull request. Click the pull request icon to the right of the screen <code class="icon-git-pull-request"><span>[git pull-request icon]</span></code>, then click ‘<em>New pull request</em>’.</p>
+
+<p>At the top of the resulting comparison screen, you’ll see a row of select boxes. You want to make sure these are configured like so:</p>
+
+</article>
+
+<div class="github panel">
+  <div class="range-editor">
+    <span class="icon-git-compare range-editor-icon"></span>
+    <div class="range">
+
+      <div class="range-cross-repo-pair">
+        <div class="select-menu js-menu-container js-select-menu fork-suggester">
+          <span class="minibutton select-menu-button js-menu-target" role="button" aria-label="Choose a Base Repository" aria-haspopup="true">
+            <i>base fork:</i>
+            <span class="js-select-button css-truncate css-truncate-target" title="base: ckan/ckan">{{ site.github_username }}/{{ site.github_repo }}</span>
+          </span>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="select-menu js-menu-container js-select-menu commitish-suggester">
+          <span class="minibutton select-menu-button js-menu-target branch" role="button" aria-label="Choose a base branch" aria-haspopup="true">
+            <i>base:</i>
+            <span class="js-select-button css-truncate css-truncate-target" title="base: master">gh-pages</span>
+          </span>
+        </div>
+      </div>
+
+      <span class="dots">...</span>
+
+      <div class="range-cross-repo-pair">
+        <div class="select-menu js-menu-container js-select-menu fork-suggester">
+          <span class="minibutton select-menu-button js-menu-target" role="button" aria-label="Choose a Head Repository" aria-haspopup="true">
+            <i>head fork:</i>
+            <span class="js-select-button css-truncate css-truncate-target" title="head: mintcanary/ckan"><em>username</em>/{{ site.github_repo }}</span>
+          </span>
+        </div>
+
+        <div class="select-menu js-menu-container js-select-menu commitish-suggester">
+          <span class="minibutton select-menu-button js-menu-target branch" role="button" aria-label="Choose a head branch" aria-haspopup="true">
+            <i>compare:</i>
+            <span class="js-select-button css-truncate css-truncate-target" title="compare: master"><em>branch</em></span>
+          </span>
+        </div>
+
+      </div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<article class="post-content">
+<p><em><strong>username</strong> being your github username, <strong>branch</strong> being the branch you have been working on.</em></p>
+
+<p>You should now be able to see listed below, all the changes that you wish to contribute. If everything looks as it should, click ‘<em>Create pull request</em>’.</p>
+
+<p>Give your pull request a title and description, then click ‘<em>Create pul request</em>’. You have now contributed your pages to the OpenSpending Community site :)</p>

examples/openspending/content/about/meta/contribute/editing.html

@@ -0,0 +1,103 @@
+---
+lang: en
+title: Editing a page
+authors:
+ - Sam Smith
+section: meta
+---
+
+<p class="lead">If you haven’t done so already, the first thing you need to do is head over to <a href="https://github.com/" rel="external">Github</a> and create your free account.</p>
+
+<p>There are three steps to editing a page. First you need to locate the page you wish to edit. There are a couple of ways to do this. <strong>Method A</strong> is probably the simplest, and most likely way you’ll do it. <strong>Method B</strong> will serve as a primer for the next section: <em>Adding a page</em>.</p>
+
+<h2>1: Locate the page</h2>
+
+<h4>Method A: Browse the website</h4>
+
+<p>While reading any section of the Handbook you’ll see an '<em>Edit this page</em>' link in the bottom left of the page. Following this link will take you directly to an editable version of that page. Easy huh?</p>
+
+<div class="note">
+  <h6>Note</h6>
+  <p>When the editable page opens it will (most likely) contain a message saying <em>“You're editing a file in a project you don't have write access to”</em>. If this is your first edit to The Open Data Handbook it will say <em>“We've created a fork of this project for you to commit your proposed changes to”</em>. This is normal and part of the workflow.</p>
+</div>
+
+<h4>Method B: Browse the Github repository</h4>
+
+<p>The entire file structure of this site can be browsed on Github. For example, the root of the site is <a href="https://github.com/{{ site.github_username }}/{{ site.github_repo }}" rel="external">here</a>, and the English language handbook section is <a href="https://github.com/{{ site.github_username }}/{{ site.github_repo }}/tree/gh-pages/en" rel="external">here</a>. It’s helpful to understand that the page URLs correspond to the file structure you see here. So, if you wanted to edit the Handbook introduction page, given that it’s URL is <code>{{ site.url }}/<strong>en</strong>/<strong>introduction</strong>/</code> we know this file can be found in the <code><strong>en</strong></code> directory with the filename <code><strong>introduction</strong>.md</code> <em>Note: the extension (.md) is stripped from the URL.</em> Following these links you should see a preview of the page you wish to edit. From here click the edit icon <code class="icon-pencil"><span>[pencil icon]</span></code> to start editing.</p>
+
+<div class="note">
+  <h6>Pro Tip!</h6>
+  <p>Press <code>t</code> on any tree or blob page to launch the file finder.</p>
+</div>
+
+<h2>2: Make your changes</h2>
+
+With the editable content in front of you, you’re probably either thinking “great, let’s get editing”, or “hang on, this looks a bit weird”. In case it’s the latter, let’s have a closer look.
+
+The first thing to recognise is the ‘Front Matter’, which will look like this:
+
+<pre>
+<code>---
+title: Introduction
+---</code>
+</pre>
+
+<p>The front matter must be the first thing in the file, must adhere to the above syntax, and must be set between triple-dashed lines. Numerous variables can be set here, but you’ll usually just need <code>title</code>. The title set here will be used as the main heading for the page, as well as in the browser tab.</p>
+
+<p>The other important thing to recognise is the Markdown syntax. For example, where you see a line commencing with two hash marks:</p>
+
+<pre>
+<code>##Do you know exactly how much of your tax money is spent on street lights?</code>
+</pre>
+
+<p>This is the Markdown way of creating a level two heading. On the site it will be outputted like so:</p>
+
+<h2>Do you know exactly how much of your tax money is spent on street lights?</h2>
+
+<p>Another common formatting requirement is bullet points, or lists. These are achieved in Markdown by using asterisks, like so:</p>
+
+<pre>
+<code>* civil servants
+* journalists
+* politicians</code>
+</pre>
+
+<p>giving you:</p>
+
+<ul>
+  <li>civil servants</li>
+  <li>journalists</li>
+  <li>politicians</li>
+</ul>
+<br>
+<p>Links are created like so:</p>
+
+<pre>
+<code>Give your data a home at the [Datahub](http://datahub.io/).</code>
+</pre>
+
+<p>result:</p>
+
+<p>Give your data a home at the <a href="http://datahub.io/">Datahub</a>.</p>
+
+<div class="note">
+  <h6>Pro Tip!</h6>
+  <p>To get a link to a specific heading on this site, hover over it then click the section icon <code class="icon-section"><span>[section icon]</span></code>. This will put the URL into your address bar.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>More Markdown examples can be found <a href="{{ "/meta/contribute/markdown-examples/" | prepend: site.baseurl }}">here</a>, and a more detailed overview <a href="http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax" rel="external">here</a>.</p>
+
+<p>If you are unsure of your markup while editing, you can switch to the preview tab <code class="icon-eye"><span>[eye icon]</span> Preview changes</code> to see how it will be rendered.</p>
+
+<div class="note">
+  <h6>Note</h6>
+  <p>The Github previews will look stylistically different from the live site. A different font will be used for example.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Once you are happy with your changes, add a summary of what you've changed in the field below the editable text. Then click ‘<em>Propose file change</em>’.</p>
+
+<h2>3: Make a pull request</h2>
+
+<p>You will now be presented with a ‘pull request’ form. So far, the changes you have made are to your own copy, or fork of the handbook. A pull request simply sends a request to the authors/maintainers of the live handbook, asking them to include your changes - and put them live! Add any comments you have for the handbook team, then press ‘<em>Create pull request</em>’.</p>
+
+<p>Your work here is done :) If you need to make related changes though, any new commits pushed to your branch will automatically be added to the pull request.</p>

examples/openspending/content/about/meta/contribute/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,76 @@
+---
+title: Contributing to this site
+authors:
+ - Sam Smith
+lang: en
+section: meta
+---
+
+Thank you for your interest in in helping to build the OpenSpending
+community site. We warmly welcome comments, corrections and additions,
+as well as suggestions for additional sections and areas to
+examine. For general discussion about
+[OpenSpending](https://openspending.org/), please visit
+[our forums](https://discuss.okfn.org/c/openspending). To jump in with
+improvements and additions, read on.
+
+## How this site works
+
+In order to contribute, you need a little insight of how things work
+under the hood. We’re not going to go into too much detail here, but
+these are the three components you need some understanding of:
+
+- GitHub
+- Jekyll
+- Markdown
+
+### GitHub
+
+#### What is it?
+
+GitHub is a web-based repository hosting service, which amongst other
+things offers revision control and source code management via a
+web-based graphical interface.
+
+#### Why should I care?
+
+Any changes you wish to make, whether they be edits to an existing
+page, or creating a new one, will most likely be done via the GitHub
+website (it is also possible to download and edit the files on your
+local machine, instructions for this method will be added in the
+future). All the files for this site can be browsed and edited the
+GitHub website. You will need to [sign up](https://github.com/) for a
+(free) GitHub account. For full instructions, see
+[Editing a page](./editing/).
+
+### Jekyll
+
+#### What is it?
+
+Jekyll is a static site generator, which allows us to host websites
+based on our GitHub repositories. Jekyll takes the content, renders
+Markdown, and produces a complete, static website ready to be viewed
+on the web.
+
+#### Why should I care?
+
+All you really need to know about Jekyll is the method it uses to
+include metadata (ie. page title). Each page needs to start with a
+section it calls Front Matter, containing the page title. An example
+is provided in the [Adding a page](./adding/) section.
+
+### Markdown
+
+#### What is it?
+
+Markdown is a markup language with plain text formatting, designed so
+that it can be converted to HTML. Markdown can be used to create rich
+text using a plain text editor.
+
+#### Why should I care?
+
+Markdown is your key to formatting the text your provide for this
+site. By learning a few intuitive rules you’ll be able to ensure your
+text is formatted with headings, list, quotes etc, without writing any
+HTML. For examples, head to the
+[Markdown]({{site.baseurl}}/meta/contribute/markdown-examples/) section.

examples/openspending/content/about/meta/contribute/markdown-examples.md

@@ -0,0 +1,213 @@
+---
+lang: en
+title: Markdown Examples
+section: meta
+---
+
+* TOC
+{:toc}
+
+    * TOC
+    {:toc}
+
+This is a paragraph.
+
+    This is a paragraph.
+
+
+
+Header 1
+========
+
+Header 2
+--------
+
+    Header 1
+    ========
+
+    Header 2
+    --------
+
+
+
+# Header 1
+
+## Header 2
+
+### Header 3
+
+#### Header 4
+
+##### Header 5
+
+###### Header 6
+
+    # Header 1
+
+    ## Header 2
+
+    ### Header 3
+
+    #### Header 4
+
+    ##### Header 5
+
+    ###### Header 6
+
+
+
+
+
+
+> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aliquam hendrerit mi posuere lectus. Vestibulum enim wisi, viverra nec, fringilla in, laoreet vitae, risus.
+
+    > Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aliquam hendrerit mi posuere lectus. Vestibulum enim wisi, viverra nec, fringilla in, laoreet vitae, risus.
+
+
+
+> ## This is a header.
+> 1. This is the first list item.
+> 2. This is the second list item.
+>
+> Here's some example code:
+>
+>     Markdown.generate();
+
+    > ## This is a header.
+    > 1. This is the first list item.
+    > 2. This is the second list item.
+    >
+    > Here's some example code:
+    >
+    >     Markdown.generate();
+
+
+
+
+
+
+* Red
+* Green
+* Blue
+
+~~~
+* Red
+* Green
+* Blue
+~~~
+
+
+
+1. Buy flour and salt
+1. Mix together with water
+1. Bake
+
+~~~
+1. Buy flour and salt
+1. Mix together with water
+1. Bake
+~~~
+
+
+
+Paragraph:
+
+    Code
+
+<!-- -->
+
+    Paragraph:
+
+        Code
+
+
+
+* * *
+
+***
+
+*****
+
+- - -
+
+---------------------------------------
+
+    * * *
+
+    ***
+
+    *****
+
+    - - -
+
+    ---------------------------------------
+
+
+
+This is [an example](http://datahub.io/) link.
+
+[This link](/about/) is internal.
+
+This is [an example] [ok] reference-style link.
+
+[ok]: https://okfn.org/
+
+    This is [an example](http://datahub.io/) link.
+
+    [This link](/about/) is internal.
+
+    This is [an example] [ok] reference-style link.
+
+    [ok]: https://okfn.org/
+
+
+
+*single asterisks*
+
+_single underscores_
+
+**double asterisks**
+
+__double underscores__
+
+    *single asterisks*
+
+    _single underscores_
+
+    **double asterisks**
+
+    __double underscores__
+
+
+
+This paragraph has some `code` in it.
+
+    This paragraph has some `code` in it.
+
+
+
+![Alt Text](http://placehold.it/200x50 "Image Title")
+
+    ![Alt Text](http://placehold.it/200x50 "Image Title")
+
+
+| Tables        | Are           | Cool  |
+| ------------- |:-------------:| -----:|
+| col 3 is      | right-aligned | $1600 |
+| col 2 is      | centered      |   $12 |
+| zebra stripes | are neat      |    $1 |
+
+    | Tables        | Are           | Cool  |
+    | ------------- |:-------------:| -----:|
+    | col 3 is      | right-aligned | $1600 |
+    | col 2 is      | centered      |   $12 |
+    | zebra stripes | are neat      |    $1 |
+
+I bet you'd like more information about this sentence [^1].
+
+[^1]: Well lucky for you, I've included more information in a footnote.
+
+~~~
+    I bet you'd like more information about this sentence [^1].
+    [^1]: Well lucky for you, I've included more information in a footnote.
+~~~

examples/openspending/content/about/meta/contribute/translate-glossary.html

@@ -0,0 +1,65 @@
+---
+lang: en
+title: Translating the glossary
+authors:
+ - Mor Rubinstein
+section: meta
+---
+
+<h2> What's new in the glossary</h2>
+<p>In the old version of the handbook, the glossary was one page with all of the term in it. In the new version, we gave each glossary a webpage for better referencing and linking.<\p>
+Glossaries that were translated in the old version of the handbook have been transfered to the new site. Please checkCheck if your language has an old version of the glossary -
+. You can find them <a href=https://github.com https://github.com/{{ site.github_username }}/tree/gh-pages/glossary> here </a>
+
+<h3><b>If you do have an old version translated, follow these steps:</b></h3>
+<p> The old glossary format does not allow linking from the new version of the guide, and you will need to transfer the term to the new format.</p>
+
+<h3> 1. Create a new folder for the term</h3>
+
+<p>Under your language folder, Follow the breadcrumb trail <code>{{ site.github_repo }} / glossary / es /</code>, to the right of which is a plus symbol <code><strong>+</strong></code>. create a folder for each term by pressing on the '+' sign and type the term name in English. The folder names should be in lower-case letters with dashes ‘-’ instead of white spaces. Add a ‘/’ in the end of the name to create a new folder.</p>
+
+<h3> 2. Translate the term</h3>
+<p> open a new index.md file by clicking on the '+'. </p>
+
+In the text editor below add the front matter:
+<pre>
+---
+section: terms
+lang: en
+title: Bulk
+---
+</pre>
+
+<p> Change the 'lang' field to your language code. Change the title to the term title in YOUR language.</p>
+<p>Below the front matter copy the term from the old glossary.</p>
+
+<h3> 3. Make a pull request.</h3>
+
+<p>All done! Keep doing this until all terms got their own folder and page.</p>
+
+<h2><b>If you have never translated the glossary before, follow the these steps:</b></h2>
+
+<h3> Copy the English Glossary</h3>
+
+<p> Copy the English terms directory into your target language directory in the glossary folder. This step can not be done through the Github website and you will have to fork the handbook for you machine. Information about forking and cloning can be find <a href=https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo/>here</a> . Notice, some languages have already been moved and translated. Check the folder to make sure you are not overwriting someone’s work.</p>
+
+<h3>Edit the term</h3>
+
+<p>Choose a term and open the index.md file.</p>
+<p>The front matter looks as follows:</p>
+
+<pre>
+---
+section: terms
+lang: en
+title: Bulk
+---
+</pre>
+
+<p>Change the lang field to your language code.</p>
+<p>Change the title to the term title in YOUR language.</p>
+<p>In the text editor, below the front matter, enter your translation to the term.</p>
+
+<h3>3. Submit changes through a pull request.</h3>
+
+<p> All done! Thank you for your help! </p>

examples/openspending/content/about/meta/contribute/translate-guide.html

@@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
+---
+lang: en
+title: Translating the guide
+authors:
+ - Mor Rubinstein
+section: meta
+---
+
+Translating the guide is easy, no need to any other software, all you need is a github account!
+Some languages already have translated version of the guide. If you don't have a version in your language, here is how to do it.
+
+<h3> 1. Create a new language folder </h3>
+
+In github, under the breadcrumb - <code>{{ site.github_repo }} / guide/</code>  there will be a '+' sign. Click on it and enter your <a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes >your two letter languages code</a>. Add a dash ('/') after the two letter to create a folder.
+
+<h3> 2. Create a page folder</h3>
+
+Now you will see you languages code and a '+' sign on the breadcrumb. Add a the page name that you want to translate in __English__ and add a dash at the end.
+
+<h3> 3. translate the content</h3>
+
+You will now see a new '+' sign. Add the file name 'index.md'.
+In the text editor add the following front matter:
+<pre>
+---
+section: guide
+lang: Your language two letter code
+title: The title in your language
+---
+</pre>
+
+Translate as usual.
+
+<h3> 4. Create a pull request</h3>
+If all good, we will add it to the site.
+
+Repeat for other parts of the guide if needed.
+
+That's it, you are all done!
+
+Thank you for helping us to make the guide accessiable to others!

examples/openspending/content/about/meta/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+---
+title: About This Site
+---
+
+If you are a member of the OpenSpending community---whether you
+are a data publisher, work on building or testing code, or develop
+stories and visualizations using OpenSpending data---this site belongs
+to you.
+
+This site is a place to showcase the OpenSpending community's work and
+to share its resources. It includes:
+
+* information about community [events][3b]
+* a collection of [resources][2] on spending data
+* guidance on [how to get involved][3] with the community
+
+[This site](https://github.com/openspending/community.openspending.org/)
+is hosted on [GitHub Pages](https://pages.github.com/) and built using
+[Jekyll](http://jekyllrb.com/), a static site generator.  Interested
+readers are encouraged to contribute changes, fixes, corrections by
+[raising an issue](https://github.com/openspending/community.openspending.org/issues/new?title=Bug&body=I%27m%20having%20an%20issue%20with...)
+on the site's
+[issue tracker](https://github.com/openspending/community.openspending.org/issues).
+For more detail on how to contribute, see the Contribution Guide
+below.
+
+- [Contribution Guide](./contribute/): Detailed information on how to contribute changes to the site
+- [Recent Changes](./changes/): A list of recent changes to the site
+- [Media](./media/): Downloadable OpenSpending images and other media
+
+[1]:	{{ site.baseurl }}/blog/
+[2]:	{{ site.baseurl }}/resources/
+[3]:	{{ site.baseurl }}/get-involved/
+[3b]:   {{ site.baseurl }}/events/
+[4]:	{{ site.baseurl }}/help/

examples/openspending/content/about/meta/media/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@
+---
+title: Media
+section: meta
+---
+
+## OpenSpending Square Logo
+
+![OpenSpending Square](/img/OpenSpending_400x400.jpg)
+
+## OpenSpending Text Logo
+
+### Normal
+
+![Normal](http://assets.okfn.org/p/openspending/img/openspending-logo.png)
+
+### Small
+
+![Small](http://assets.okfn.org/p/openspending/img/openspending-logo-s.png)
+
+### Large
+
+![Large](http://assets.okfn.org/p/openspending/img/openspending-logo-l.png)

examples/openspending/content/about/openspending-first-steps.md

@@ -0,0 +1,102 @@
+---
+section: about
+lead: true
+title: 'OpenSpending: first steps'
+authors:
+- Neil Ashton
+redirect_from:
+- "/openspending-first-steps"
+---
+<section class="slide shout">
+<div>
+<h2>Welcome to OpenSpending</h2>
+</div>
+</section>
+<div id="content">
+<section class="slide osimage">
+<div class="well">
+<div class="row-fluid">
+<div class="span4">
+<a title="00-visualize by okfn, on Flickr" href="http://openspending.org/datasets/new"><img src="//farm4.staticflickr.com/3669/9575045401_5a752545b0_n.jpg" class="img-rounded" alt="00-visualize"/></a>
+</div>
+<div class="span8">
+<h2>Upload and visualize data</h2>
+<a href="http://openspending.org/datasets/new">Upload</a> any kind of financial data to OpenSpending and explore it with our built-in interactive visualizations. Users publish <a href="http://openspending.org/budgetmarocain">budgets</a>, <a href="http://openspending.org/marches-publics-senegal/views/liste-des-attributaires">procurements</a>, <a href="http://openspending.org/ukgov-25k-spending">spending data</a> and even <a href="http://openspending.org/senadofederal/entries">public employee salaries</a>.
+
+Use our <a href="http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2013/03/how-to-embed-open-spending-visualizations-in-your-own-website078">widgets</a> to embed your visualization on your own website.
+
+<a href="http://openspending.org/datasets/new" class="btn btn-success btn-large" title="Create a dataset">Upload a dataset</a>
+
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</section>
+<section class="slide osimage">
+<div class="well">
+<div class="row-fluid">
+<div class="span4">
+<a title="01-explore by okfn, on Flickr" href="http://openspending.org/search"><img src="//farm4.staticflickr.com/3670/9575044337_71d0e520ae_n.jpg" class="img-rounded" alt="01-explore"/></a>
+</div>
+<div class="span8">
+<h2>Explore the database</h2>
+OpenSpending holds nearly 16 mio. transactions from more than 300 datasets across more than 70 countries.
+
+Browse the <a href="http://openspending.org/datasets">list of datasets</a> and learn about public finances from around the world, or browse <a href="http://apps.openspending.org/maps/">our map of cities</a> on OpenSpending.
+
+<a href="http://openspending.org/search" class="btn btn-success btn-large" title="Search the datasets">Search transactions</a> <small>or <a href="http://openspending.org/datasets/" title="List of datasets">look at the datasets</a></small>
+
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</section>
+<section class="slide osimage">
+<div class="well">
+<div class="row-fluid">
+<div class="span4">
+<a title="02-extend by okfn, on Flickr" href="http://blog.openspending.org/help/api/"><img src="//farm6.staticflickr.com/5549/9577836924_378752d5f3_n.jpg" class="img-rounded" alt="02-extend"/></a>
+</div>
+<div class="span8">
+<h2>Create your own dataviz with our API</h2>
+Create your own visualizations with the <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/help/api/aggregate/">OpenSpending API</a> using libraries like <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/08/20/okfb-inesc/">D3.js</a>, jit and Raphael.
+
+You can even create a satellite site while still using OpenSpending as a backend.
+
+<a href="http://blog.openspending.org/help/api/" class="btn btn-success btn-large" title="API documentation">Look at the API</a>
+
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</section>
+<section class="slide osimage">
+<div class="well">
+<div class="row-fluid">
+<div class="span4">
+<a title="03-community by okfn, on Flickr" href="http://blog.openspending.org/get-involved/community/"><img src="//farm6.staticflickr.com/5475/9575044189_f4de292c78_n.jpg" class="img-rounded" alt="03-community"/></a>
+</div>
+<div class="span8">
+<h2>Join the community!</h2>
+OpenSpending is <a href="https://github.com/openspending">open source software</a> built and run by a community of volunteers.
+
+<a href="http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending">Join our mailing list</a> and share what you are creating with OpenSpending!
+
+<a href="http://blog.openspending.org/get-involved/community/" class="btn btn-success" title="Community introduction">Join the spending community</a> <small>or</small> <a href="http://openspending.org/help/hacking.html" class="btn btn-success" title="Howto hack">Become a developer</a>
+
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</section>
+</div>
+<style>
+    .osimage img {
+      width: 100%;
+      margin: auto auto auto auto;
+    }
+    .row-fluid .span4 {
+       display:inline-block;
+       width: 31.914893614%;
+    }
+    .row-fluid .span8 {
+       display:inline-block;
+       width: 65.95744680199999%;
+    }
+</style>

examples/openspending/content/about/presentation-introduction.md

@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
+---
+section: about
+lead: true
+title: "Introduction to OpenSpending: Mapping the Money"
+presentation: true
+authors:
+- Anders Pedersen
+redirect_from: /about/community-site/slide-deck-introduction/
+---
+
+<center>
+<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1IPtNzO5nu16SrSgtgxQ8L2jmeK0ILtsIMi8rj6KxUUk/embed?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000" frameborder="0" width="640" height="480" allowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" webkitallowfullscreen="true"></iframe>
+</center>

examples/openspending/content/about/presentations.md

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+---
+title: Presentations
+section: about
+---
+
+<div class="author">Written by
+<ul>
+<p><a href="/about/presentation-introduction/">Introduction to OpenSpending: Mapping the Money</a></p>
+<li>Anders Pedersen</li>
+
+</ul>
+</div

examples/openspending/content/about/steering-group/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,126 @@
+---
+section: about
+lead: true
+title: Steering Group
+redirect_from:
+  - "/about/governance/members-of-the-steering-group/index.html"
+  - "/about/governance/members-of-the-steering-group/"
+---
+
+The steering group oversees the project and represents its major stakeholders. This group takes responsibility for maintaining the integrity of the project, setting project policies, representing the project in relation to third parties etc.
+
+The steering group's specific responsibilities include:
+
+* **Finances**: overseeing and managing (where relevant) any project finances and resources.
+* **Branding**. Overseeing Twitter account, website, etc.
+* **Recognition** of satellite sites as part of the OpenSpending community and use of the OpenSpending name.
+* **Partnerships** and collaborations with other communities and projects.
+* **Setting policy** for data licensing and other matters, as necessary.
+* **Advocacy guidelines**, as appropriate.
+* **Legal matters**: for example, removal of datasets
+
+## Meetings
+
+The Steering Group meets approximately once a quarter via an online conference call.
+
+The [living minutes of the OpenSpending Steering Group are online](https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/document/d/1jCB-RquGYeW9mm466ViucMRjggbCxa0pGZDH5JThcRc/edit).
+
+## Appointment of the Steering Group
+
+Anyone who has contributed to the OpenSpending project (whether in code, data, or content) may put themselves forward for membership in the steering group. The existing steering group members will consider the application and decide whether or not to accept. In the future, once the concept of OpenSpending membership is better established, this decision may be made by a vote among OpenSpending members.
+
+Membership in the steering group is for a term of two years. Multiple consecutive terms are permitted. If members resign during their two-year term, nominations for a replacement will be solicited from the community.
+
+## Members
+
+### Anna Alberts, Open Knowledge Germany, Chair
+
+Based in Berlin, Anna Alberts works as a Project Manager for the EU
+research project OpenBudgets.eu at Open Knowledge Foundation Germany.
+
+Anna studied International Development and International Relations,
+and worked as a policy officer for the Strategy Unit at the Ministry
+of Foreign Affairs in the Netherlands, focusing on geopolitics and
+(open) data.
+
+### Justin Arenstein, International Center for Journalists
+{: .person-name}
+
+![Justin Arenstein](http://www.icfj.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/medium/JustinWebsite_0.JPG)
+{: .person-photo}
+
+Justin Arenstein is a Knight International Journalism Fellow who is
+helping the African Media Initiative (AMI) to establish a digital
+innovation program that supports experimentation in newsrooms across
+Africa. AMI, the continent's largest association of media owners and
+executives, is working with more than 600 of the most influential
+media companies in both northern and sub-Saharan Africa.
+
+### Júlia Keserű, Sunlight Foundation
+{: .person-name}
+
+Júlia Keserű is the International Policy Manager at the Sunlight
+Foundation and oversees its international work. Coming from the
+Hungarian transparency community, Júlia has been an advocate for open
+government and an expert on open data issues with a special focus on
+political finance and corruption. She has spoken internationally on
+technology and transparency and regularly writes about the challenges
+and the potential of the global open government movement. Júlia holds
+a Masters degree from International Studies and studied political
+sciences, international law, sociology and philosophy at Corvinus
+University Budapest, Free University Berlin and the College for Social
+Theories in Budapest.
+
+### Elena Mondo, International Budget Partnership
+{: .person-name}
+
+![Elena Mondo, IBP]({{ site.baseurl }}/img/blog/2014/04/Elena-pic-223x300.jpg)
+{: .person-photo}
+
+Elena joined the International Budget Partnership (IBP) in 2007. She
+manages the Open Budget Survey, the only independent, comparative, and
+regular measure of budget transparency and accountability around the
+world. Prior to joining the IBP, she worked as a consultant for the
+Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD),
+coordinating research on budget practices and procedures in the OECD
+and Latin American countries. Mondo holds a BA in international
+economics and management from Bocconi University, and an MPA in public
+and economic policy from the London School of Economics.
+
+### Oluseun Onigbinde, BudgIT
+{: .person-name}
+
+![Oluseun Onigbinde](http://under40preneur.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Seun-Onigbinde.jpg)
+{: .person-photo}
+
+Oluseun Onigbinde is the Co-Founder of BudgIT, a Nigerian public data
+visualisation startup. He is an Ashoka Fellow and Open Knowledge
+Ambassador for Nigeria.
+
+### Anders Pedersen, Natural Resource Governance Institute
+{: .person-name}
+
+Anders Pedersen is Open Data Program Officer at the Natural Resource Governance
+Institute. He holds an MA degree in Political Science from University of
+Copenhagen, and has worked in development and financial data journalism.
+
+### Federico Ramírez, Fundar
+{: .person-name}
+
+[bio coming here]
+
+### Adam Stiles, Open Budget Oakland
+{: .person-name}
+
+Adam is co-creator of <a
+href="http://openbudgetoakland.org/">openbudgetoakland.org</a> and a
+member of the City of Oakland's budget advisory committee. He's also a
+news editor, builder, and outdoor preschool founder.
+
+### Mark Brough, Publish What You Fund
+{: .person-name}
+
+### Cecile Le Guen, Open Knowledge
+{: .person-name}
+
+Cecile Le Guen is Project Manager at Open Knowledge, involved in different fiscal open data projects.

examples/openspending/content/about/tools.md

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@
+---
+title: OpenSpending tools
+redirect_from:
+  - "/about/governance/"
+---
+
+### [OpenSpending Viewer](https://openspending.org/s/)
+
+The OpenSpending Viewer is a Javascript app that provides views over data uploaded to OpenSpending. It offers 8 different visualisations and a pivot table for analyzing the data
+
+### [OpenSpending Packager](https://openspending.org/packager/)
+Via OpenSpending Packager fiscal data can be uploaded from alternate sources (csv, Excel, Google Sheets and Fiscal Data Package). Data and metadata can be uploaded in 4 simple steps.
+
+### [OpenSpending Admin](https://openspending.org/admin/)
+OpenSpending Admin offers the possibility to administer a user account and the associated data packages that have been loaded to the platform. You can access it from the main Packager or Viewer once you create an account.
+
+### OpenSpending DataMine
+The OpenSpending DataMine is an experimental feature for investigative analysis of data with direct access to read any part of the database. This feature can be used (and it is encouraged!), but currently it is not subject to further customisation.
+
+## What kind of data can I upload to OpenSpending?
+
+OpenSpending is designed to work with any dataset in CSV format containing government budget, spending information or any other fiscal data. To upload this data, we use data pipelines and the Fiscal Data Package. We recommend learning a bit more about it, even if you're not part of the technical team uploading the data.

examples/openspending/content/blog/2011-03-01-where-does-my-money-go-goes-international-welcome-to-openspending.md

@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@
+--- 
+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.

examples/openspending/content/blog/2011-03-20-uploading-data-to-openspending.md

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+--- 
+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&key=t8rduOMdinCo0smZjQvQUow&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!

examples/openspending/content/blog/2011-10-27-thoughts-from-the-global-investigative-journalism-conference.md

@@ -0,0 +1,69 @@
+---
+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). 
+

examples/openspending/content/blog/2011-11-11-new-translation-documentation-for-openspending.md

@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+--- 
+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).**

examples/openspending/content/blog/2011-11-16-openspending-v0-11-released.md

@@ -0,0 +1,23 @@
+--- 
+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). 

examples/openspending/content/blog/2011-11-28-openspending-visualisations-featured-in-the-guardian.md

@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
+--- 
+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).**

examples/openspending/content/blog/2011-12-05-how-spending-stories-spots-errors-in-public-spending.md

@@ -0,0 +1,62 @@
+--- 
+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.*

examples/openspending/content/blog/2011-12-12-data-seized-sanitised-and-sanity-checked-open-data-day-2011.md

@@ -0,0 +1,89 @@
+--- 
+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)

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-01-12-civil-society-and-spending-data-who-is-mapping-the-money.md

@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
+--- 
+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.
+ 
+* **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. **

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-01-17-open-bookkeeping-what-role-can-accountants-play-in-open-spending-budget-projects.md

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@
+--- 
+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). 

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-01-23-transparency-and-technology-in-brazil-linking-politicians-to-bad-entrepreneurs.md

@@ -0,0 +1,60 @@
+--- 
+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)

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-01-23-updates-from-the-openspending-dev-team.md

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+--- 
+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. 
+

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-01-30-hakuna-my-data-nbo-data-bootcamp.md

@@ -0,0 +1,34 @@
+--- 
+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.

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-02-15-the-czech-budget-on-line-the-half-success-story.md

@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+--- 
+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...

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-02-16-thekit.md

@@ -0,0 +1,26 @@
+--- 
+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)

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-02-24-how-spending-stories-fact-checks-big-brother-the-wiretappers-ball.md

@@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
+--- 
+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)

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-02-29-open-meeting-software-for-participatory-budgeting.md

@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+--- 
+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). 

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-03-06-calculating-portugal's-taxes.md

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+--- 
+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). 

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-03-06-participatory-budgeting-and-technology.md

@@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
+--- 
+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

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-03-08-uk-25k-spending-data.md

@@ -0,0 +1,89 @@
+--- 
+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

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-03-12-technology-for-fiscal-transparency-where-next.md

@@ -0,0 +1,38 @@
+--- 
+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.

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-03-13-voting-systems-for-e-participatory-budgeting-upcoming-call.md

@@ -0,0 +1,34 @@
+--- 
+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. 

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-05-29-GIFT-report-released.md

@@ -0,0 +1,60 @@
+--- 
+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!

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-06-05-IATI-on-OpenSpending.md

@@ -0,0 +1,87 @@
+--- 
+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). 

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-06-11-opendata-ch-workshop.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+--- 
+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.

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-06-11-upload-videos.md

@@ -0,0 +1,42 @@
+---
+authors:
+- lucy
+redirect_from: /2012/06/upload-videos/
+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).
+

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-06-28-OKFest-announce.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+---
+authors:
+- lucy
+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!
+

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-07-02-tester.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,9 @@
+---
+author: $authornamehere
+redirect_from: /2012/07/tester/
+title: Test
+---
+
+Tester
+=======
+Tester

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-07-05-OSI.md

@@ -0,0 +1,44 @@
+---
+authors:
+- lucy
+redirect_from: /2012/07/OSI/
+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/)*
+

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-07-11-Greece.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
+---
+authors:
+- lucy
+redirect_from: /2012/07/Greece/
+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/).*

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-07-16-Greece-2.md

@@ -0,0 +1,68 @@
+---
+authors:
+- lucy
+redirect_from: /2012/07/Greece-2/
+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).

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-07-16-Greece-3.md

@@ -0,0 +1,42 @@
+---
+authors:
+- lucy
+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). 
+

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-07-19-Caring-for-your-neighbourhood.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+---
+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>
+

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-07-20-Romania.md

@@ -0,0 +1,110 @@
+---
+authors:
+- lucy
+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.

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-07-27-budapest-institute.md

@@ -0,0 +1,94 @@
+---
+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).*
+
+
+
+
+
+
+

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-08-05-introduction-to-the-taxman.md

@@ -0,0 +1,125 @@
+---
+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/

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-08-15-Lost-Money.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,98 @@
+---
+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).*

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-09-11-Spending-Data-Handbook.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,79 @@
+---
+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.* 
+
+

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-09-13-uk25k-reporting.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+---
+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).*

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-09-17-participatory-budgeting-finland.md

@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+---
+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.* 

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-09-24-OKFest-Followup.md

@@ -0,0 +1,60 @@
+---
+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'!*

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-09-26-Balkan-Budgets.md

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+---
+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).*
+

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-10-02-publicidad-oficial.md

@@ -0,0 +1,138 @@
+---
+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).*

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-10-03-spending-standard.md

@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@
+---
+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).

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-10-20-openspending-lemonde.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,19 @@
+---
+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).*

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-10-22-open-interests.md

@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+---
+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/).* 

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-11-13-handbook-spring-day-1.md

@@ -0,0 +1,26 @@
+---
+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" />
+

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-11-15-handbook-draft.md

@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+---
+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! 
+
+ 
+
+ 

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-11-26-Sarajevo-Workshop-Writeup.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
+---
+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" />

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-11-27-Sarajevo-Workshop-Writeup-2.md

@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+---
+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...
+

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-11-28-Sarajevo-Workshop-Writeup-3.md

@@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
+---
+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!*.

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-11-30-Bosnia-Budget-Classification.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+---
+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.

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-12-18-Jobs-OS.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
+---
+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.

examples/openspending/content/blog/2012-12-24-Roundup.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,76 @@
+---
+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 ;)**

examples/openspending/content/blog/2013-01-07-Welcome.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,8 @@
+---
+author: $authornamehere
+redirect_from: /2013/01/Welcome/
+title: Welcome Anders
+---
+
+Welcome, Anders!
+

examples/openspending/content/blog/2013-01-08-open-spending-calendar.md

@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
+---
+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>

examples/openspending/content/blog/2013-01-09-privacy.md

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+---
+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.

examples/openspending/content/blog/2013-01-22-How-to-decrypt-a-budget.md

@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@
+---
+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).  

examples/openspending/content/blog/2013-01-24-obi-post.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,23 @@
+---
+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). 
+

examples/openspending/content/blog/2013-01-24-open-budget-survey.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@
+---
+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). 
+

examples/openspending/content/blog/2013-01-29-worldbank-guest-post.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,110 @@
+---
+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>

examples/openspending/content/blog/2013-02-12-open-spending-in-morocco.md

@@ -0,0 +1,105 @@
+---
+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. 
+
+
+
+

examples/openspending/content/blog/2013-02-14-Join-hangout-on-the-EU-budget.md

@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@
+---
+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>
+

examples/openspending/content/blog/2013-02-22-OpenSpending-around-the-world.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+---
+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). 

examples/openspending/content/blog/2013-02-28-Budget-Stories.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,19 @@
+---
+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/).

examples/openspending/content/blog/2013-03-01-OpenSpending-around-the-world-Week-9.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,38 @@
+---
+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). 

examples/openspending/content/blog/2013-03-05-spending-stories-open-spending-are-moving-beyond-visualizations.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
+---
+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.

examples/openspending/content/blog/2013-03-13-Launching-the-Aid-Transparency-Tracker.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,106 @@
+---
+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)

examples/openspending/content/blog/2013-03-15-OpenSpending-around-the-world-Week-11.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,45 @@
+---
+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). 

examples/openspending/content/blog/2013-03-19-AfricanSpending-Knight-News-Challenge.mdown

@@ -0,0 +1,94 @@
+---
+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