Opening up government finances
June 3rd, 2010
The following guest post is from Chris Taggart of OpenlyLocal, who advises the Where Does My Money Go? project on local spending data, and is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data.
With a string of announcements this week and the COINS database (the UK’s biggest source of information on public spending) about to be released tomorrow, it’s an exciting time for open data in the UK at the moment! When I first played around with the idea of opening up the basics of local government data (which turned into OpenlyLocal), I never imagined I was entering an area that little more than a year later would become such an exciting area, combining two of the hottest online trends, open government data and local data.
But still, there’s a hell of a long way to go, and one of the areas where there’s furthest to travel, and most to do is finance, specifically where the money’s being spent, who it’s being spent with, and also where it comes from. As the old journo saw goes: follow the money.
I had my first taste of the problems when I took a pretty much unused (and locked) spreadsheet, the 2006-07 Local Spending Report, and over the course of a weekend,unlocked it cleaned it up, imported it into a database and allowed people to do what the spreadsheet didn’t — make comparisons on local spending across councils and in areas.
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