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How and why have people used OpenSpending? Besides the technical aspects of the project, what work is going on in the area of spending information? Below are some of the projects that we have been involved with so far...
Where Does My Money Go? (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 Daily Bread app.
You can now build a site such as WDMMG for your own country using the OpenSpending API and the WDMMG Toolkit.
- Visit the Where Does My Money Go? project
- Follow Where Does My Money Go? on Twitter
- Read more about how to create your own Where Does My Money Go? site
OffenerHaushalt 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 tree maps, the user can easily see and explore the different departments and programmes and see how much is spent, proportion and statistics on changes between years.
The success of Offener Haushalt and the demand to roll it out on a local level was one of the prime motivations for the creation of OpenSpending.
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.
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.
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 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.
- Visit the Publish What You Fund Uganda Visualisation Project
- Visit Publish What You Fund's website
- Uganda Budget and Aid to Uganda, 2003-2006 dataset in OpenSpending
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.
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.
In 2011, the Open Knowledge Foundation was awarded a Knight News Challenge Grant to work on the Spending Stories 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 speed 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. A few examples of the activities we're engaged in can be seen below.
In early 2012, Privacy International recently 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 wanted to check which attendees also became customers of these companies.
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 are a few that are downright baffling, like the US Department of Commerce, the US Fish & 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.
We regularly conduct training sessions for journalists 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 via info [at] openspending.org.
Workshop on EU Spending, Utrecht EuroHack: One-day data journalism competition and workshop on EU spending
The spending data working group is a group of dedicated individuals working to create a community of best practice around opening up and using government financial data. With experts from fields ranging across the aid experts, participatory budgeting fields, governmental institutions and civic developer initiatives. Specifically, at the moment, the group is focussing in particular on:
- Making financial data discoverable, building the budget and spending commons e.g. by contributing to the OpenSpending data registry on the Data Hub
- Developing standards, to make financial datasets comparable and meaningful
- Identifying strategies by which technology could aid transparency around financial data
- Technical solutions for citizen participation in budgeting decisions and citizen-auditing, holding governments to account to make sure budgeting plans transform into realities
- Pinpointing key areas for future investigation, such as potential collaborations between diverse groups whose interests convert on financial transparency
The working group is open to all with an interest in improving Government Financial Transparency around the world. If you're interested in joining, please join the OpenSpending Mailing List and drop us a line on info [at] openspending.org
Wiki Page for Spending Data Working Group
A thriving community of spending enthusiasts is amassing online to share ideas, articles and participate in debates around consultations and best practice for spending data.
All are welcome to join join the OpenSpending mailing list and join the discussion!
Have some data? Have a Spending Story? Get in touch - we'd love to hear from you and are open to suggestions!