What’s the deal with the UK government’s new spending tool?

We were pleasantly surprised to learn that this morning the UK government launched a new tool to explore UK public spending. The ‘Government Interrogating Spending Tool’ (fear not – you the user are supposed to be the giver, not the receiver, of interrogation) or ‘GIST’ is, according to the Cabinet Office, “one of the first […]

Release of Whole of Government Accounts

The following guest post is by Dan Herbert, who works on our Where Does My Money Go and Open Spending projects. He is the Programme Manager for MSc Accounting at Oxford Brookes University. This week sees the publication of the first Whole of Government Accounts for the UK. WGA represents the end of a decade […]

New Visualisations for OpenSpending

This post is by Gregor Aisch, graphic designer and visualisation architect on the OpenSpending project. Today, at the OpenSpending worksop at OKCon2011 he gave a sneak preview of some of the work he has been doing to create new visualisations for OpenSpending, including a re-adaptation of David McCandless’ famous bubble visualisation from ‘Where Does My […]

Interview with OKF Co-Founder Rufus Pollock on Open Spending

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. OKF Co-Founder Rufus Pollock recently interviewed at Open Tech 2011 about WhereDoesMyMoneyGo.org and OpenSpending.org. You can watch the video on blip.tv or YouTube, or you can download it by right clicking here.

Workshops Preceding OKCon2011

OKCon2011 is glad to announce that registration has now opened for the pre-OKCon workshops. More details can be found below. Pre-OKCon2011 CKAN Workshop Tuesday, June 28, 2011 from 9:30 AM – 6:00 PM (GMT+0100) A chance to get hands-on with the technical side of working with CKAN. In each session, a core CKAN developer will […]

Where does Italy’s money go?

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Over the past 48 hours or so we’ve been busy loading 12 years of Italian spending data into Open Spending. Further details on the project and the data are below. This project was put together by Stefano Costa, Friedrich Lindenberg, Luca […]

Python Web Expert Jobs

This is a joint post by James Gardner, the lead developer on CKAN and Rufus Pollock, creator of CKAN and project lead for Where Does My Money Go. The Open Knowledge Foundation is looking for really good Python web developers to join our organisation to work on CKAN, our open source web-based catalogue system built […]

Where are the cuts in your country?

As you may have seen, last week the OKF launched a new mini project called WhereAreTheCuts.org. Created by by Jordan Hatch and Richard Pope, the site enables UK citizens to find and report spending cuts near them. It had a pretty enthusiastic reception, and was picked up by the Telegraph and several local news sources. […]

What was COINS missing? The mystery of the Government’s hidden spending data

The following article was originally published on the Guardian Datablog by Lisa Evans, the Lead Researcher on the OKF’s Where Does My Money Go? project. We thought we were getting everything with the COINS release. In fact we were missing the best part of all: the Whole of Government Accounts. Before he became chancellor George […]

A Big Part of COINS was not Published

This is a post by Lisa Evans, lead researcher on Where Does My Money Go?. When I saw the COINS data that was published at the beginning of June, I suspected there was something missing. I had been reading about the Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) — a project to provide a really good detailed overview of […]

The open spending data that isn’t

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. This is a cross-post — Chris’ original post here. When the coalition announced that councils would have […]

Emergency Budget, Deficit and Cuts: Visualized

Today in the UK the Conservatives/Liberal Democrat coalition presented their Emergency Budget. Collaborating with David McCandless, Where Does My Money Go? have created a simple visualization to help you understand and contextualise the budget, and answer some basic questions such as: How much impact will the emergency budget have on the £156bn budget deficit? And […]

Can You Close the Deficit Gap?

Where Does Your Money Go? challenges you to beat the Chancellor to it before tomorrow’s budget and close the UK’s financial deficit. Will you increase taxes, make cuts or a mix of both? No decision is going to be popular but are some more palatable than others, you decide. More information: Closing the Deficit Gap […]

Understanding COINS

Something amazing has happened since the government spending recorded in the COINS database was made openly available to everyone. I’m talking about the impressive range of free, and in many cases open source, products to display the COINS data. So far there are COINS search engines from The Guardian and The Open Knowledge Foundation, graphs […]

COINS: A Users Guide

At 0930 BST today the UK government released the COINS database, one of the biggest sources of information on UK public spending. Open Knowledge Foundation Director Rufus Pollock says: The release of this data marks another milestone in the opening up of public data – in which the UK leads the way. While this is […]

Opening up government finances

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 […]

UK Government commits to open up new spending data!

It’s exciting times right now for people in the UK interested in how public funds are being used. The new government has proposed to publish unprecedented amounts of spending data in unprecedented detail. In the new Coalition Programme for Government (PDF), the PM has committed to the following, which is very similar to the Conservative […]

In The Beginning There Were Mystery Boxes

JJ Abrams, the creator of Lost gave a great talk at TED 2007 themed around “Mystery Boxes”. A Mystery Box is a box of unspecified goods. When you buy a Mystery Box – from a magic shop, as Abrams describes doing with his grandfather as a child, or from a pet store, sweet shop, or […]

Greater London Authority Spending and Where Does My Money Go

We’ve done a quick-and-dirty import of the GLA spending data (ckan package) into a Where Does My Money Go Data Store: http://london.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/ For example, here is what they paid to Vodafone: http://london.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/account/c988ca22-214b-47ef-af19-5fd3cfdc781b/postings Big hat-tip to Donovan Hide and scraperwiki who scraped the data into a usable form. It’s running at a different URL from the […]

Putting the cuts into context: where is that £6 billion going to come from?

With the UK election over, reductions in public spending are currently at the top of the agenda. Whichever way you cut it, taxpayers and public service users look set to face big changes. The ‘Where Does My Money Go?’ dashboard – a free, interactive online tool from the Open Knowledge Foundation – will help to […]

The COINS database — what we know and how we know it

The following post is from Lisa Evans, who is doing research on UK public finance data sources as part of our Where Does My Money Go? project. Freedom of information: sharing our experiences I’ve been reading some debate on the extent to which Freedom of Information (FOI) requests are a drain on public resources. A […]

The Hunt For COINS

I’ve been investigating data for use in the project ‘Where Does My Money Go’. One of the first reports we looked at was the Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis (PESA) — it looks like this:

http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/prototype/

So an obvious question is where does the data in the PESA report come from, I mean, where is the PESA data stored?

Planning sessions for “Where Does My Money Go?”

Last week we had several planning sessions for our Where Does My Money Go? project – to discuss where to go next and what our priorities will be for the next major release. We had some excellent feedback from the launch of our prototype before Christmas – and the release was covered in the BBC […]

Opening up UK local spending data

Just before Christmas, the UK Government announced a new report on Making local public expenditure data public, and the development of Local Spending Reports. The report outlines government plans to publish lots more information on where UK public money is spent at local level: It is critical […] that information on public expenditure should be […]

Visualizar ’09

The project presentations from last month’s Visualizar seminar have now been posted online. This annual event brought together creative teams from a range of disciplines, with the objective of delivering workable presentations using freely available data resources. The theme for 2009 was Public Data – Data In Public. I was fortunate enough to attend on […]

Where Does My Money Go? Prototype Launched

We’re very pleased to announce the first full release of our Where Does My Money Go? prototype. This is now online at: http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/prototype Tom Watson MP, commented on the new release: Where Does My Money Go represents another milestone in the UK’s transparency movement. We know that transparency changes individual and institutional behaviour and this […]

Alpha Release of Where Does My Money Go? Prototype

We’ve pleased to announce the alpha release of our Where Does My Money Go prototype. This is a web application that allows you to explore UK public spending – and you can take a look here: http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/wdmmg-alpha/ Update: access underlying data here. This an “alpha” release and its still a way from finished – we’re […]

New mockups for “Where Does My Money Go?”

We recently blogged about some mockups for our Where Does My Money Go? project. We’ve now got some new mockups for the project which are show below (click through for full size). Again, we’d love to hear what you think of the designs! You can either leave a comment below, or pop a note to […]

First mockups for “Where Does My Money Go?”

We are currently building a prototype for the Where Does My Money Go? – and we’ve now got the first mockups of what the site will look like… For full size versions you can see: spending by region spending by function We’d love to hear what you think of the designs! You can either leave […]

Discovering Where My Money Goes I: PESA

This is the first of a series of post looking at the data challenges for the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Where Does My Money Go project, for which I’m helping to gather and analyze data. I got involved in the project because I wanted to know how much money the Department of Energy spends on different […]

New developments on ‘Where Does My Money Go?’

We’ve been doing some more work on Where Does My Money Go?. The project, will provide an interactive represention of UK public finance using maps, timelines, and best of breed visualisation technologies. We’ve now put together a basic visualisation based on data we’ve cleaned up from the Treasury: http://www.openeconomics.net/wdmmg/dept/ We’ve also had confirmation from the […]

BarCamp UKGovWeb 2009

Last Saturday was BarCamp UKGovWeb at the Ministry of Justice. There were plenty of new faces in addition to the usual suspects! Three sessions that we found particularly interesting: Directgov and Innovation: Directgov have launched a new innovate part of their site, and are keen on supporting innovation around government data (mashups, services, etc.) from […]

Open Economics: Recent Progress

Recently we made some substantial improvements/additions to our Open Economics project including: Improved javascript graphing. Extend Millenium Development Goals package and added web interface. First efforts at ‘Where Does My Money Go’ Aim: Dig up govt finance info and visualize the results (online) http://okfn.org/wiki/projects/Where_Does_My_Money_Go More details on each of these can be found below. Also […]

Vote for ‘Where Does My Money Go?’ at the Show Us A Better Way poll!

The Guardian’s Free Our Data campaign has set up a poll to help gather people’s opinions on the best entrants for the Show Us A Better Way competition run by the Power of Information Task Force. They also wrote about this in the Guardian a few days back. As we recently posted about, we entered […]

Where Does My Money Go?

Since early 2007 we’ve had a project dubbed ‘Where Does My Money Go?’ on the backburner. In a sentence, the project would be a web application that interactively represented UK government budgetary information using maps, timelines, and best of breed visualisation technologies. We recently submitted the project to the Show Us A Better Way and […]