OpenSpending

- analysis and visualisation of budget and spending data for

government

Anders PedersenKnowledge Development Lead

Open Knowledge @anpe, @OpenSpending

Open Knowledge

Open Knowledge is a worldwide non-profit network of people passionate about openness, using advocacy, technology and training to unlock information and enable people to work with it to create and share knowledge.

Why budget transparency

Why OpenSpending

OpenSpending - a critical component of the open data ecosystem.

Creating the opportunity for governments, civil-society organizations and communities on budgets, spending and procurements:● Providing easy-to-use tools to publish, analyse and visualise

budget and spending data ● Offer analytics and comparative dashboards that can help

governments to understand budgets and spending● Drive good data practises by endorsing simple budget data

specifications, which helps citizens to use and compare budget and spending data, with other data sources in the open data ecosystem

What is transparency good for?

Why governments need OpenSpending?

● Understand spending patterns: "Why is department of Education spending 50 pct. more in October than in September?

● Detect corruption in outliers: "Why is municipality X spending so differently than 500 other municipalities"?

● Predicts budget short falls

● Track compliance of budget reporting from agencies, regions or municipalities (most people really like dashboards!)

Making sense of budget information

Significant community uptake

OpenSpending in Japan (2012-2013)● Community of +100 volunteers● +130 local deployments of city-

based Daily Bread tax calculators

● Community events and bottom up impact

Coverage: http://www.futuregov.asia/articles/2013/aug/28/japanese-cities-adopts-open-spending-portal/

Impact

A few successes In Germany after the release of OffenerHaushalt, there were around 90 other offers to open up other data for visualisations; including model legislation based on OpenSpending

Breaking data silos and providing insight: OpenSpending was used to connect aid & budgets for the first time in Uganda - providing the government with important new insight;

Community driven sites already in over 50 locations globally, at international, national, local and institutional level;

Volunteer powered investigations into spending data at Spending Data Parties;

Used both by governments & civil society (Romania, Uruguay, UK).

OpenSpending and governments

UK spend browser

The UK Spend Browser developed for data.gov.uk. Key functions:● reconciles

unstructured spreadsheets from across departments

● makes government spending searchable across agencies

● Implemented in 2012

Spend browser: make spending searchable for government and public

How well do government agencies report?

The UK Spend Reporting Dashboard developer for data.gov.uk. Key functions:● reconciles unstructured

spreadsheets from across departments

● makes government spending searchable across agencies

● Customized browser

Reporting dashboard: benchmark agencies → drive reporting compliance

Why standardised release matters

The OpenSpending Budget Data Package project: ● Why: budget standards → improve data flows, enable

better analytics and visualisations● What we've done: six months in-depth research into best

practises around budget data● Next: budget specification → stress test with studies in

specific countries, develop new visualisation tools● budget standards → automatic loading of budget data =

better monitoring of compliance. ● Prevent releases without standards: PDFs releases =

minimal data re-use and analysis

Better budgetary standards → improved release monitoring and sharing

Pilot budget transparency

Government of Mexico (2013)● Visualisation of the

natural disaster fund● Customised bubble

chart with breakdown by aid type

● Tailored map of 32 provinces developed in-house

● Next step: OpenSpending / CKAN integration

OpenSpending - civil society use cases

cameroon.openspending.org

Created for the World Bank (2012):● local budget data loaded

by Open Knowledge and local agency

● Contract on second phase just signed

Cameroon: Creating a bespoke front end to display regional budgets

Bespoke local sites

budzeti.ba created for BiH CSO (2013):● highly customised

tax calculations● bespoke frontend

Bosnia: Local customization on tax information

Thank you!

anders.pedersen@okfn.org | @anpe