Castillo de Lorca. Torre Alfonsina (Public Domain)
Lorca, a city located in the South of Spain with currently 92,000 inhabitants, launched its open data initiative on January 9th 2014. Initially it offered 23 datasets containing transport, mobility, statistical and economic information. From the very beginning, OpenSpending was the tool selected by Lorca City Council because of its capabilities and incredible visualization abilities.
The first upload of datasets was done in 2013, on the previous version of OpenSpending. With the OpenSpending relaunch last year, Lorca City Council continued to make use of the OpenSpending datastore, while the TreeMap view of the expenditure budget was embedded on the council’s open data website.
In December 2016, the council’s open data website was redesigned, including budget datasets built with the new version at next.openspending.org. The accounting management software of Lorca allows the automatic conversion of data files to csv. format, so these datasets are compatible with the requested formats established by OpenSpending.
Towards more transparency and becoming a smart city
In 2015, when the City of Lorca transparency website was launched, the council decided to continue with the same strategy focused on visualization tools to engage citizens with an intuitive approach to the budget data.
Lorca is a city pioneer in the Region of Murcia in terms of open data and transparency. So far, 125 datasets have been released and much information is available along with the raw data.
It deserves to be highlighted that there are pilot project initiatives to bring open data to schools, which was carried out during the past year. In 2017, we will resume to teach the culture of open data to school children with the main goal to demonstrate how to work with data by using open data.
In the close future the council plans to open more data directly from the sources, i.e. achieve policy of open data by default.
And of course Lorca intends to continue exploring other possibilities that Open Spending offers us to provide all this data to the citizenry. In addition, Lorca is working to become a smart city (article in Spanish only) – open data is a key element in this goal. Therefore, Lorca’s open data initiative will be a part of the Smart Social City strategy from the very beginning.
Diana is Project Manager for Fiscal Projects at Open Knowledge Foundation.
