At the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT) and Open Knowledge International (OKI) we believe that governments’ budget and spending data should be made available to all, so that anyone can see how their tax money is spent,what priorities their governments make, and governments can be held accountable.
Increasingly governments make their budget data already openly available, and that is really great to see. Civil society organisations, but also individual researchers, journalists, and anyone who is interested, can use this data to generate insights and share those with the public. But still much of the information is only available in PDF and other non-open formats, and not published as data. As a result, scrutinising and putting the data to use is difficult and requires a lot of work.
GIFT and OKI have partnered to address this issue. Along with the BOOST World Bank initiative and a dedicated open data community, we developed the [Open] Fiscal Data Package. Its version 1.0 is now available! We built the OpenSpending portal on top of the [Open] Fiscal Data Package, to make it really easy to publish budget and spending data. Once it is up, a whole suite of tools are readily available to anyone to view, visualise and integrate the data.
How to get your budget and spending data in OpenSpending
There are two ways to make your data available via OpenSpending. The first is to manually upload the data using the OpenSpending Packager. If you have your fiscal data available as a CSV file, you can try it today. The packager will guide you through an intuitive process, which in a few easy steps means that your data can be accessed and visualised by anyone via the OpenSpending platform. If you have any questions about it, reach out on our forum or find us on our chatroom on Gitter.
If you want to publish your data more regularly and automatically, we can help you by setting up what we call a pipeline. This is fairly technical process that we have trialled with the Mexican government. Because this is an automated process, it makes it easier longer term for governments to adopt this process. If you are interested in this, we would love to hear from you via openspending-support@okfn.org. An example of what it could look like to have your data published, is on Mexican transparency portal as you can see below:
Want to learn more? Join our webinar!
If you are a local, regional or national government interested in learning how you can benefit from OpenSpending, please join our webinar on 12 September at 10am EST (3pm BST / 4pm CEST). OKI’s Fiscal Transparency lead Sander van der Waal will present the Fiscal Data Package specification version 1 and the OpenSpending toolset. This is a great opportunity for government representatives to learn how they can work with us to get their data into OpenSpending. The webinar can be accessed here. Bookmark your calendar now!
Do you have any questions? Please reach out to us via email on openspending-support@okfn.org. We would love to hear from you!
Sander is Programme Lead for Fiscal Transparency at Open Knowledge Foundation. Furthermore, he's responsible for the team at Open Knowledge Foundation that works in the areas of Research, Communications, and Community. Sander combines a background in Computer Science with Philosophy and has a passion for 'open' in all its form, ranging from open data to open access and open source software.
